Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism 0823277550, 9780823277551

Citation preview

ATOPIAS

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to the work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely, anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and abroad. At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism. Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this capacious sense of romanticism. In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars of romanticism, team- taught a course called Literature Z that aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language and rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the bewildering variety of ways such texts could be read.” The series’ conceptual resonances with that class register the importance of recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism. Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness and history’s enigmatic force.

ATOPIAS

Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism

Frédéric Neyrat Translated by Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner

Fordham University Press New York

2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book was originally published in French as Frédéric Neyrat, Atopies: Manifeste pour la philosophie, Copyright © Nous, 2014. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at http://catalog .loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

For Monique

Contents

Foreword by Steven Shaviro

ix

Critique of Pure Madness Book I: Toposophy The Undamaged and the Contagious, 13 • Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x, 18 • Socratic Divergence, 22 Book II: Theory of the Trans- ject Being- Outside, 28 • Coalitions, 33 • Ab- solved Freedom, 37 • Language and Disjoining, 42 • On the Subject of Animals, 47 Book III: The Metaphysical Proposition The Transgression of the Principle of the Excluded Middle, 52 • The Leap and the Loop, 56 • The Unlocatable, 60 • The Madwoman of the Outof- Place, 65 • Science(s), Art, Politics, 70 What Cries Out

3 13

Notes Index

28

52

77 83 95

Foreword Steven Shaviro

Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias is an important book. The contribution it makes to critical thought today is evident in its subtitle: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. A manifesto is a short declaration of principles and a program, rather than a fully extended analysis. Neyrat characterizes the present work as “a worried intervention in the field of theory,” rather than a declaration of eternal truths. There have been other philosophical manifestos published over the past several decades: most notably, two “Manifestos for Philosophy” by Alain Badiou. Within the context of contemporary French thought, Frédéric Neyrat’s position and perspective are strikingly different from those of Badiou; but both thinkers are motivated by the conviction that a renewal of philosophical thought is especially urgent today, at a time when the sciences seem to present themselves as the only reputable sources of knowledge, and when the economic and ideological constraints of our society cast doubt upon philosophical reflection, as upon anything that is not of immediate profit and utility. Atopias offers us a deep analysis and critique of our current political and intellectual situation. It seeks to develop a new way of thinking that will be adequate to the predicament in which we find ourselves today. We live in an era of advanced computing and communications technologies, which are revolutionizing every aspect of our daily lives. We face the mode of governance and control that has come to be known as neoliberalism: a condition in which market competition is promoted as the sole possible solution to all difficulties, and in which corporations seem to have “human rights” while human beings themselves do not. In addition, we face an ecological crisis. Global warming is already changing the very shape of life on our planet; in the years to come, we are likely to witness the flooding of coastal regions, the continuing extinction of large numbers of living species, and the destruction of millions of people’s livelihoods and modes of survival. Frédéric Neyrat does not address any of these conditions directly in the present work. But although Atopias is the first of his works to be translated into English, he has published quite prolifically in French. All these issues are developed at greater length in his other books. He has written at length

x

Steven Shaviro

about our obligations to the Earth and to other species, as well as about the suffocating conditions produced by our drive to dominate the planet, our restless consumerism, and our “auto- immune” drive to ignore our own vulnerabilities, and our willful blindness to our nihilistic tendencies. In Atopias, he seeks to establish a philosophical basis—or perhaps I should rather say, a non- basis—that might allow us to address these issues, and to be equal to the challenges we face. Neyrat is clearly indebted to his philosophical forebears, including Badiou and, above all, Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless, he proposes a new sort of philosophical project, one that is strikingly different from those of his predecessors. Deleuze, following Nietzsche, belongs to the great tradition of post- Enlightenment demystification. He mounts an attack upon the idea of transcendence and the belief in absolutes. The major effort of Western philosophy, from Plato onwards, has arguably been to judge human life from a standpoint superior to life, to abolish all vestiges of chance and contingency, and to establish norms for correct behavior. In all of these cases, Deleuze says—following Nietzsche—that the forces of life are deformed and repressed. Every entity is subjected to arbitrary, external constraints, and “separated from what it can do” (to use a famous phrase of Deleuze’s that Neyrat directly quotes). Against all this, Deleuze proposes a philosophy of radical immanence, one in which there is no Beyond. Things and processes of this world must be valued (or not) for their own sakes, rather than judged in accordance with externally imposed criteria. But perhaps the struggle against transcendence has been all too successful. Today, when I ask my students to read Nietzsche, they are neither scandalized nor exalted. Instead, they find him banal. They take it for granted that everyone has their own opinion, and that no particular opinion is better than any other. And they cannot see that anything more is at stake. Of course this is a poor misreading of Nietzsche, but that is beside the point. Relativism is no longer shocking, subversive, or transgressive, as its was in earlier centuries. Rather it is something that we take for granted, with a blasé shrug. Or, as Neyrat puts it, in more rigorous language than mine: “immanence, as a category necessary for contesting the spiritualties that negate life,” has instead “come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences, a mill for grinding out a sort of ontological flour, an ontology spread flat.” Nietzsche and Deleuze must be spinning in their graves at this degradation of their ideas. In effect, Neyrat says, Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s battles against transcendence have been won. But the result is a situation that both of those thinkers would have detested: one in which radical change has become im-

Foreword

xi

possible, and in which thought has been thoroughly instrumentalized, made nothing more than a tool for the efficient fulfillment of pre- given utilitarian goals. We live in a world “where every trajectory seems geo- localizable, where every knowledge must be situated and efficient, every obscurity cleared up, every real singularity suspect.” Neyrat calls this condition “saturated immanence.” Everything is caught up in the flows of capitalist monetary equivalence; there is no outside any longer, no separation between one thing and another; there is no sense of otherness whatsoever. Everything is in flux, as we are told over and over again. And yet, these are fluxes in which nothing ever really changes. When flux is the sole characteristic of everything and anything, when everything is flexible and everything is interchangeable, then nothing is really different from anything else, nothing ever makes a difference. Other thinkers have characterized globalized and financialized capitalism in this way; Neyrat sees it as a dilemma for critical thought as well. Saturated immanence is the condition against which Neyrat seeks to mobilize philosophy. In a world where anything can be anyplace, and anything can switch places with anything else, philosophy must insist on its power to be, not everyplace, but noplace. It must never fit in, but always disturb its context. Neyrat uses the word atopia for this condition, in order to avoid the undesirable connotations—perfection and changelessness—of the etymologically similar utopia. In Neyrat’s account, philosophy works by avoiding any sort of fixity or rootedness, and by maintaining a relation with the very Outside (dehors) that our dominant social, economic, and intellectual conditions seek to deny or suppress. An atopic philosophy does not reinstate the old forms of capital- T Transcendence, the claims to an Absolute, that thinkers like Nietzsche and Deleuze so successfully attacked; but nonetheless, by maintaining a link with otherness, with outsideness, and with displacement, it offers us a (small- t) transcendence as an alternative to saturated immanence. It seeks to dig holes, and open up gaps, in what is otherwise a suffocating (and even totalitarian) world of hyper- presence. For Neyrat, philosophy does not itself create the Outside. What it does is give us a route of access to this Outside. It opens the doors that our current social system has closed. “Thought does not define the outside,” Neyrat says, “but prolongs it, draws it out.” Outsideness is not a transcendent condition; indeed, it is “nothing more than the simple fact of existence.” To exist is to stand out; the “ex- ” etymologically indicates emergence, outsideness, or coming- forth. Any living thing, or anything that exists, is singular in some way: It differs from everything else, or it deviates from all that came before.

xii

Steven Shaviro

This means that the internal being of any existing entity is also its external relation with all the things that it is not. Philosophy is a way of exploring “the divergence or dis- joining attested to by all existence.” In Atopias, Neyrat develops these ideas carefully and generously. In the first chapter, he proposes them in relation both to the history of philosophy, and to the contemporary situation of absolute flux or saturated immanence. In the second chapter, he explores the existential dimension of “beingoutside” and of radical contingency and radical finitude. Finally, in the third chapter, he places his argument in relation to the meta- question of what sort of role philosophy—and especially the much- denounced branch of philosophy known as metaphysics—can have today. Atopias is a short book, but a rich one, dense with ideas and suggestions. There is much exuberant invention here, in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s maxim that philosophy should be the “creation of concepts.” But above all, Atopias is a work of ethics, exhorting us to recognize and find room for the many forms of existence with which we share our planet.

If you do not hope for the unhoped for, you will not find it. It is hard to find, and inaccessible. —Heraclitus

Envoy.—In a world declared to be without an outside, where every trajectory seems geo- localizable, where every knowledge must be situated and efficient, every obscurity cleared up, every real singularity suspect, philosophy can only appear as heresy. This is because philosophy is dangerously atopian: bizarre, haunted by something like a non- place, which enables its improbable displacements. Philosophy is only possible on the basis of a disjunction, an exile, a madness commensurate with the extra- vagance of being. Without this dis- joining, there would be no thought, speech, or existence. To exist means to experience atopia—to be destined to the outside, in the manner of every living thing. Without atopia, no world, no being- in- common, no political coalition is possible: This is what philosophy must declare today. Philosophy must declare atopia against everything that would prevent us from existing: All the persistent beliefs in the absolute, in substance, and in immortality that have in no way disappeared but have proliferated, having been realized by technological and social means. Philosophy must declare itself in favor of the living [le vivant], the fragile and singular living, versus the fantasy of the intact. In favor of trans- jects versus objects. Of imagination versus the logic of identity. Of the excluded middle versus noncontradiction. Of translation versus information. Of unpredictable spirals versus controlled flux. Of transcendence ≈ x versus saturated immanence. Of existence versus being. Of eccentricity versus norms and their exceptions. For societies today are dying of two principal evils: a belief in an immunity that enables human beings to destroy everything, and the programming of behaviors, which prevents existence from expressing its abyssal freedom. To remedy this, philosophy must summon a radicalized existentialism.

Critique of Pure Madness O my body, always make me a man who questions! —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Minerva at bay.—Philosophy borders madness. It lingers there, sometimes, extracting itself more or less successfully. But the successes that are too successful cancel out philosophy, as the Principle of reason that ought to guide it becomes a pure Principle of identity. If philosophy is “the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness,”1 this assurance is always put into question, perpetually destabilized. Like existence. Like life, love, and the universe: Barely contained chaos, indistinct among the quarks, the universe is a system that is far from an equilibrium; it thwarts attempts by contemporary physics to explain not only its origin but also its persistence. To think totality is only the splendid excess that must be measured by thought itself. Still, we have tried to integrate this excess into a system, a pure logic, ordered propositions, and a program of equivalences. But nothing remains integrated for very long: Disorder returns; an unexpected world; already another form of thought announces itself— and fortunately. For as long as everything holds too well together, nothing happens. No life, no existence, no love: the flat equilibrium of death, inertia, Lucretius’s straight lines, the rain of atoms but without clinamen, with neither deviation nor encounter. Look at our world. We talk about flux, about flexible subjectivities, and about becomings where everything changes and anything can happen. And if this were only a superficial diagnosis that the reactionaries and the progressives share? Or what if the flux of information, capital, and affects were—just the opposite—regimented, channeled, secretly immobile, as absolute flux, wherein ultimately nothing truly or deeply changes? For there are two kinds of flux. On the one hand, there is flux in straight lines, or lines that form

4

Critique of Pure Madness

circles that close back in on themselves; on the other, there is turbulent flux, spirals that never meet back up, dis- archic tops. Our world tends to produce flux at a constant speed, like a treadmill, where one advances without taking a step. The treadmill versus the top. Becoming without ever undergoing the test of loss, loving without venturing outside oneself: This is what is proposed as a “way of life.” We say that our epoch is one of changeability, of relativity, and of finitude. Never so much as today, however, have we been in inertia and absolute facade; never have we believed so much in immortality, be it cryogenic or the result of the uploading of a brain to a computer (technofinancial questions worked over hard by Silicon Valley).2 We would have to proceed “after finitude” (Quentin Meillassoux) even though we have never known how to think a society in which relations between human beings and between humans and non- humans would be truly commensurate with existence and its biological fragility. Alas we continue to feel and to experience, with the assistance of techno- sciences and cemented Ideas, believing that we are eternal—even as the conditions of possibility for the living are ecologically and psychically compromised. We believe ourselves immortal, unaffected by existence. And so we are able conscientiously to destroy the world on the basis of an intact humanism no critique can displace. Fettered existence, diminished life: This is the double condition that forces me not to write a sort of timeless “What is philosophy?” but rather a manifesto, a worried intervention in the field of theory. To bend the timeless, and the philosophical tradition, to the requirements of time, so as to introduce into these concepts and philosophical formulas that which our age demands. To wager that philosophy is engaged with what today concerns the fate of the psyche as well as of life itself. The owl of Minerva symbolizes in vain while owls in flesh and blood are dying.

The situation of contemporary thought.—The world of absolute flux corresponds to a certain ontological regime, that of saturated immanence, in which everything remains perpetually inside, without any hope of exit. “There is no more outside,” Hardt and Negri assert in 2000. Bruno Latour, for his part, argues in 2001 that there are no longer “externalities.”3 This repudiation or foreclosure, to use Lacan’s concept, of the outside has stunted contemporary thought to the point that all separation, all radical interruption of the regime of saturated immanence, appears at best as an impossibility, at worst as a crime. Separate oneself? Madness. A first step toward terrorism. Even as we talk of globalization, networks, flux, and hybridization, it appears necessary that everything have a place, an identity, a temporal location, a

Critique of Pure Madness

5

portable substance, and a strict territory that reinforces the idea of saturated immanence to the detriment of all existential disjunction. And here is what is truly strange: Are we not living in a time when we come to question the Great Divides, between inside and outside, other and self, nature and culture, human and non- human? Are we not living the end of identity? According to Latour,4 the Moderns have never stopped producing hybrids, even as their system of representation rests on Great Divides (nature/ culture, nature/society, and so on). The Moderns, Latour argues, have never ceased to “translate,” even as they have believed that they are “purifying” the ontological domains (on the one hand science; on the other, politics). But, in fact, we live something entirely different, something that seems far from what Latour argues: Even as we “translate” ceaselessly, we keep recreating pure domains, undamaged entities. This apparent paradox is resolved if we understand that hybridization and identity are in no way incompatible: The more difference is erased, the more identity is reinforced. It is one thing to maintain that there is no substantial Other, no transcendent Outside, no super- Nature or wilderness other than that which is socially constructed;5 it is another to affirm that there is no Other at all, no outside, and that nature—as concept and as substance—must be eliminated. The first wave of poststructuralism (Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, and so on) fought the disastrous splits [clivages] (between human and non- human, masculine and feminine, “nature” and “technology,” and so on) in the name of differences. The second wave—the one that currently dominates the field of theory— wrongly concluded that all deep difference is a split. Writers as diverse as Latour, Slavoj Žižek, and Timothy Morton can thus maintain that nature does not exist, is nothing but a chimerical order, a product of ideology, or a Romantic transcendental principle.6 This position leads them to privilege a constructivist ontological7 option by which the exteriority of nature no longer has any meaning. For them, as for the majority of contemporary thinkers, everything is inside.8 Object- oriented ontology, or speculative realism, sometimes risks reinforcing this exophobic situation, at least in part. Yet the fundamental intention of this protean group was good: to be wary of a relational mode of thought that would admit no way of thinking that which escapes relations; to contest the primacy of the human subject; to reject the thesis that being is only conceivable as a corollary of the human psyche, in the form of a cultural or linguistic construction. But one does not escape the anthropological cage simply by affirming that there is something—an object, or the “ancestral” (Meillassoux)—exterior to the human brain and the relations it makes with the world. To claim that matter existed before human subjec-

6

Critique of Pure Madness

tivity, and that this matter can be mathematized, is a proposition that leaves the split between inside and outside intact.9 This split traps the human being inside, letting her dream of an Outside that could be contemplated and, through reason, made to obey a reassuring mathematics. Graham Harman, who forged an object- oriented philosophy, also seeks the outside out there, in a “substantial form” that escapes relations—but should we not argue that relations themselves are what lead us to the outside? This is, in fact, the real problem: What does it mean to live as out- siders, caught in the time and the history of an existential plane? That the outside is rapping on the window of a poorly deconstructed subjectivity in no way indicates the essential: the manner in which this outside resonates in each existing being. The outside is not the extinction of the sensible, a dead, glacial land beyond all experience. On the contrary, it is experience as such, burning and alive. When everything is inside, when each real distance is considered a sacrilege, when everything is re- thought beginning from substance, when the anthropological hierarchy that stems from a privileged “access” to being disappears, everything can equally be said to be an “object.” Differences would thus be held to be identical: “ ‘Object- Oriented Ontology’ contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone.”10 Harman, furthermore, puts “cars, subways, canoe varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists” all on the same “metaphysical footing.”11 How has ontology gotten to this point? How has immanence, as a category necessary for contesting the spiritualities that negate life, come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences, a mill for grinding out a sort of ontological flour, an ontology spread flat? We might say that this way of thinking immanence has only pushed the Deleuzian stance regarding the univocity of being to its limits: The being of God must be said as we say any other living being. But Deleuze, in fact, was very clear on this point: The most important thing is not that there is only one way of saying being, but that “it is said in a single and same sense of all its individuating differences.”12 The preposition in italics is here fundamental, indicating a way to read this as the priority of differences over being. Thus “the words ‘Everything is equal’ may therefore resound joyfully on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal univocal Being.” For Deleuze, there is indeed a hierarchy, from the point of each existent and its own power (puissance), from its capacity to express what it is, from its special individuation. As soon as an existent is “separated from what it can do,” there is no meaning in speaking of ontological equality. To continue to speak of the equality of “objects”—while ontology, reduced to

Critique of Pure Madness

7

its economical and technological form, leads to the irreversible damaging of the world—fuels the production of a general discourse founded on the denial of the only tenable objectivity under such circumstances: that which would refuse the temptation of pure speculation while it is subjected to the programmed forgetting of politics. This is the forgetting of the economic, ecological, and political conditions of the process of singularization that drives some proponents of object- oriented ontology to their passion for lists without hierarchy—a toaster, a quasar, a book, a bonobo—an inventory in the style of Prévert, but missing the repeated “raccoon,” without differential repetition (the thing Deleuze insists we hold simultaneously with “nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy”).13 Yet a political and ecological consideration of the conditions of singularization drives us to realize to what extent the living is today cut off from what it can do, to what point its precarity requires us not to reduce it to the world of objective equivalences. The raccoon is resolutely not an object; but it objects to that which prevents it from being. The critique of the Great Divide was undoubtedly beneficial: It was necessary to deconstruct the repressive binary oppositions that always sacrificed one term (the feminine, passivity, the animal, the non- Western, etc.). This task is still not fully achieved, neither politically nor juridically. But without at the same time re- making non- repressive differences, without a positive and creative trans- valuation of values, the result ends up like a kind of bland soup, in which each notable singularization must be preventively sentenced to having its head cut off, sometimes in the name of an ontology of general equivalence thoroughly consistent with capitalism. The concept of the object does not permit us to feel the wind of the outside and to lay to rest an intact humanism. Today, the task of thought is to re- think difference starting from existences, and not identity starting from objects.

Atopia, existence, and relation.—This book begins by analyzing the theoretical and practical conditions of saturated immanence, which is nothing other than a world immunized against the outside, a paradoxical world which turns the undamaged—the untouchable, the exception, the substantive object, the monad set behind impermeable immunological barriers—into a contagious substance, susceptible to being found in anything and anyone. To use Benjamin’s famous formula, the exception has become the rule, spread throughout the body of theory as throughout that of society. Against this immanence, we make recourse to a special form of transcendence that takes as its own the virtues of an iconoclastic immanence—what Deleuze, after Nietzsche, exemplifies—without falling into the traps of the immanence- object:

8

Critique of Pure Madness

transcendence ≈ x. This is not a monotheistic Transcendence removed from the world (God, the Absolute, or Infinite Substance), but rather a form of being- in- the- world as being- in- the- outside (see the sections “The Undamaged and the Contagious” and “Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x” in Book I). Philosophy is conditioned by such a link to the outside. Socrates’s “atopian” remarks—strange, unplaceable, almost queer—were held against him. Atopia is first of all a non- place, and it is thanks to its relation to this nonplace that philosophy poses one of the most vital challenges to the cognitive regime of saturated immanence. Fundamentally, philosophy recoils from the untouchable as from a contagious process. Certainly it would be possible to find counter- examples, and it might be argued that there are numerous philosophers inclined towards the exception: an exit from the world, a retreat from tumult. Others, on the other hand, aspire to be advisors to the Prince, experts commissioned by some Secretary of State, heralds of the “democratic” causes of the West. It is the profoundly atopian character of philosophy that can lead those who embody it either outside the world, or—on the contrary—fully into it, all the way to the most shameful worldliness. In these two cases, philosophy denies itself in the form of a wisdom (a spirituality, a dogmatic mastery) or an enterprise of advertisement (usually a selfpromotion). The wager of this book—the nature of its Manifesto—is that philosophy, through its atopian character, attests to transcendence ≈ x, to the outside as a relation between thought and the world, and not as an object or a substance that escapes it (see the section “Socratic Divergence” in Book I). After framing this disagreement as one between the powers of the undamaged that construct a flat immanence, and the thought that carves out its singular atopia, we will be able to unfold the meaning of being- outside. For thought does not define the outside, but prolongs it, draws it out. Thought experiences the outside around which it is formed; this formation is nothing more than the simple fact of existence. Existing is being- outside. This is the novel existentialism that thought needs today, radicalized beyond Sartre and his separation between being in- itself and for- itself, beyond Heidegger and the privilege he accords to Dasein.14 Taken at the root, existence designates a spacing, a deviation, a diversion, the ek- that emerges without predetermined ontological basis, as an individuation having neither the pole of the subject, nor that of the object, as materia prima. Then life appears in all its precarity—but also everything that emerges from an Earth whose roots are suspended, as well as the physics of the universe in which we wander. Each existence—but without equivalence. Each existence obliged to be eccentric in order to be. Neither the replication of a norm, nor the position of un-

Critique of Pure Madness

9

touchable exception. Eccentric, the existents inhabit an existential field (see the section “Being- Outside” in Book II). This is one of the delicate points of this project: how to think each existence—one by one—without juxtaposing it with other singular existences, in the manner of object- oriented ontology? By thinking existence before all ontology. It is because each manner of existing is primary and special that it disallows any ontological equivalent. In other words, nothing can be individuated except what slips free from that which might relate existence to a norm, or a pre- determined common discourse. This freedom is dangerous; it exposes individuation to the risk of pure individuality, to an immunological atomization that would both feed into the dominant neoliberalism and be to its profit. But it is at this price that it becomes again possible to think the common as something other than the product of human work, either material or immaterial. Thus the concepts of freedom, of the subject, and of community must simultaneously be rethought, starting from the concept of existence: what does it mean to be a subject outside? 1. It means to individuate oneself starting from an outside—an empty case, a fissure, a dis- joining, a madness; 2. For each subject, this outside comes first; it is not constructed but is the spacing that appears at the heart of all construction, the unconstructible spacing; 3. This fissure of individuation is the ek- that relates existing beings to the world. This cannot be overstated: We are in the world thanks to the diversion of existence. Thus it will not be a matter of getting rid of the category of the subject, but of thinking it as derived from the category of the trans-ject. This concept is to be developed alongside forms of animal subjectivation, not to impose human subjectivity onto them, but in order to show that a subject is not set in opposition to animality: A subject is that which situates itself at the edge of an existential trans- ject. A trans- ject is not a trajectory, something flexible, to be modified at will, but persistence, marked by a history that characterizes each existence in its own way. We will call this form of community created by those who are subject to the trans- jects of existence an adventurous coalition (see the sections “Coalitions” and “On the Subject of Animals” in Book II). World and outside, relation and atopia: this book seeks to map the encounter between these terms. To favor relation in order to undo anthropocentrism, and to undo the position of exception characteristic of metaphysical humanism—but simultaneously to leave a determining place for atopia in order to avoid transforming relation into an exophobic system of interconnection. Existence is always experienced in separation, in the irremediable tragedy of existential difference (no one may live or die in my place). This separation is, however, not a split, nor the guarantee of identity

10

Critique of Pure Madness

or of substance: It is that which relates me to others. This relation is interior before being an exchange between distinct individuals: It designates an interior disjunction by which existence is towards- the- world. It is by this disjunction lived as precarious relation, fragile being- together, tragic consciousness of the irremediable fact- of- being, that a certain type of existence experiences its condition of being alive—a condition that is not that of a quasar or a toaster. Our era requires a new philosophy of existence capable of specially making way for the living against all the forms of ontological immunization, those which flow with capital or which seek to exempt themselves from it entirely. As long as the absolute encounters flux, the non- place is necessary to rediscover relation.

To think, to leap, to imagine.—What is the place of philosophical activity in this process? To think thought requires tools, or what we call concepts, and Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that philosophy consists in creating them. We must put this hypothesis to the test. A concept, Nietzsche says, is a certain type of metaphor—or precisely that which remains of it. The more this metaphorical origin is forgotten behind this remainder, the more we believe ourselves able to extract a pure logic from it. In 1931, Carnap proposed that “originally every word [. . .] had a meaning”15; metaphysics would stem from a certain degradation of the strict original meaning. To escape this delirium of metaphysics would mean to rectify language. This rectification is at work in the existing forms of translation, which, following Naoki Sakai, we will call “homo- lingual”: an immunological conception of language that splits some languages from others, and thus from themselves—that is to say from their metaphorical powers as well as their radiating imaginations.16 But language is not a code, even if it is to the code that the logic of identity and automatized translation refer. Language is initially the game of the child who plays with his tongue, who tries, and stumbles, and tries again—experience and imagination that require the excess of the signifier over the signified that Lévi- Strauss points out.17 There is something uncodifiable in language that incites us to speak, and which always surprises the addressee and addressor. It is one thing to identify the logical function of empty signifiers, capable of being tied to any kind of signifieds; it is another to enclose this function within a crystal of logic, protected from imagination and experience. As soon as we perceive the imagined part of concepts, we understand that philosophy has the task of developing metaphysical propositions. A proposition is an advance that can be revoked—it is to the concept what the raw is to the cooked. Of course, a metaphysical proposition can come to be fixed as a

Critique of Pure Madness

11

concept. But here again, a more exact understanding of the nature of philosophical creation is missing. All philosophical creation is a transgression of the principle of the excluded middle. Neither A, nor not- A, then both A, and not- A. All transgression of this principle implies a leap into the unknown. Hic Rhodus, hic Salta—as Marx as well as Badiou would say at their decisive philosophical moments. And we will see Bergson and Heidegger leap, too (see the sections “The Transgression of the Principle of the Excluded Middle” and “The Unlocatable” in Book III). These leaps and metaphysical transgressions have a precise goal, which involves the function of philosophy. Intellectual inclined toward universality (Sartre), or “specific” intellectual (Foucault)?18 Neither one nor the other, both the one and the other: a sort of peripheral medium working through the madness of its out- of- place. This experimentation prompts philosophy to escape itself in order to experience the relation that it maintains with its others: science, art, politics, and love, those “conditions” of philosophy, its “truth procedures.”19 For Badiou, to whom we owe these last expressions, philosophy is the “pincers” of truth. I would say that each time a truth is seized it cries out—it is hurt or tickled, according to its disposition. When philosophy seizes its truth, it muffles its meaning, which is to say the incalculable, and not the guaranteed and immutable result of a truth. As if the ultimate limits of philosophical questioning must return at each event of meaning. Extra- vagant questions, for the one who faces them. Questions that lead the imagination to the point at which it falters before the enigma of existence (see the sections “The Madwoman of the Out- of- Place” and “Science(s), Art, Politics” in Book III).

Book I. Toposophy For the periphery of science has an infinite number of points. Every noble and gifted man has, before reaching the midpoint of his career, come up against some point of the periphery that defied his understanding, quite apart from the fact that we have no way of knowing how the area of the circle is ever to be fully charted. When the inquirer, having pushed the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself, and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception, a tragic perception, which requires, to make it tolerable, the remedy of art. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

The Undamaged and the Contagious “Where am I?” asks the sleeper who wakes with difficulty. He doesn’t recognize the room, the furniture. It is too dark; lingering parts of the dream slip into the surroundings, giving them a strangely worrying air. But are we not living the inverse situation today? Prolonged awakening, work without the limit of time, excessive light, surplus of information, electronic links, mechanized solicitations, attentional capture: This is the reality that, penetrating the virtual dimensions, transfuses them with a suddenly flattened aspect—so poor, so slow, quasi- immobile. We no longer know “where” we are, starting from the moment we seek to know it. We consult the sky, the stars, the compass; we wish we had a GPS. What is the significance of this “where”? We say that we are in a space. But what might this mean, to be in, depending on whether we are in transit (and why?), in motion (at what speed?), waiting (but for what?), or sleeping (under what sedative?). If we are inside, there must be one, two, or several outsides—but which? Are they other forms of the outside, or do they foretell other worlds, other forms of life? Who knows? But this is exactly what we must know: how to be oriented in thought itself.

Where are we?—“Where” always designates a thought- world. We travel, we live, we work, or we entertain ourselves, and space is divided into places, functional localizations that are symbolized, constructed, arranged by living beings with a more or less open imagination. Always connected, these

14

Book I

places form networks of communication and representation. These have now attained a level of density unparalleled in history, both in the history of humanity and of the entire planet. When we speak of networks and of communication, we think first of the processes of informational and technological globalization. We also refer to the circulation of goods and to transnational capitalism. We must additionally take into consideration the network of natural cycles, the ecosphere and its equilibria, homeostases and at least partially autonomous processes. The existing global network is defined by this triple globality, entangled to the point that it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between the financial, the technological, and the ecological planes. The problem of climate change is perfect evidence of the reality of this fusion between the bio- sphere and techno- capitalism. The cloud of Chernobyl was composed of the technological and the natural, inextricably, just as the repercussions of Fukushima are today. This global entanglement is so dense that forms of being bleed into each other: GMOs contaminate the spaces that surround them, nanoparticles promise infiltrations we cannot yet apprehend, images produced in one part of the globe are transformed into affects on the other side of the world, all at such speed, without mediation, approaching a vertiginous instantaneity. The sleeper or the one who awakens—we no longer really know which—asks again, even more anxiously: “where am I”?

ImmunoGlobulin—Density, entanglement, fusion, epidemic communication: To define the ontological regime of such saturation in terms of its ultimate consequences, we must speak of saturated immanence. Immanence in the proper sense of the term, in manere: what remains in itself, always inside, without an outside, without exteriority. The globe is stifling; it has been made by swallowing all that it was not. Imperialism and colonialism have decimated all Others (“Exterminate all the brutes!”); capitalism has subsumed the economy; tele- technologies have locked down the planet at the same time the planet has revealed—thanks to Humboldt, Leopold, Lovelock, and every environmental thinker—its internal connections. A fusion of the tele- technological globe and of the ecosphere has occurred—but to the detriment of the latter, as any real political ecology must remind us. This asymmetrical fusion has placed humanity, the human form, in the position of a gigantic mechanical mouth, a “major geological force” keeping a giant eye on the disasters of the Anthropocene.1 Here is what we always forget to problematize: a Great Divide never collapses in the same way for both sides of the dividing line. With the end of the division “nature/culture,” nature

Toposophy

15

is collapsing all the way into landfills of non- recyclables, subjected to the deadening effects of the wholesale substitution of the tele- technological. The problem of entanglement—of humans and non- humans, of the natural and the anthropogenic environments—wraps itself around our necks. Globally, God is dead, or at least a certain relation to Transcendence is, and the atmospheric pressure of the Anthropocene is felt equally on the shoulders of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Globally, no superman is on the horizon. This is the reign of the Man of conquering humanism, for whom nothing can remain alien—for whom nature must disappear, even if this means taking culture with it, as collateral damage. We must understand these two movements, which will be explained shortly, as a secret complicity: 1. The human being constructed himself in a position of radical exteriority vis- à- vis nature; 2. This exteriorization was the first step—and the concrete condition of possibility—of the engulfment of nature. Instead of endlessly asking ourselves about the relation between hybrids and the end of the Great Divides, we must understand that the plan of humanist transcendence has fused into immanence. But through its swallowing, its chewing- up of the outdoors, the humanist globe has also ended by rendering the spacing of the inside impossible. Speaking of saturated immanence is not only a matter of describing extreme speed, vertiginous acceleration, or the conditions of panicked contiguity of psychic and political phenomena, but also a tendency towards the immobilization of phenomena at the horizon of their movement. Saturation describes the phase transition in which the varieties of flux that compose the global network end in a sort of inertial movement, which, without exterior perturbation, would remain the same. This seems counter- intuitive because we are told that our world is fluid, as are the subjectivities that inhabit it.2 However, a radical change in society would require a break with what today is the dominant form of change: inertial change. To understand the meaning of this expression, we must proceed by the following social genealogy: 1. The disciplinary societies described by Foucault aimed to re- do the wrongs of the past (undo the old traditions through the school, put the inmate back on the “right path” by the intervention of the prison, and so on). 2. Control societies, Deleuze continues, abandon the idea of a mold capable of giving the past a new form in favor of regulating the present in real time, and controlling behaviors continuously (from the prison to the ankle monitor). 3. But our clairvoyance societies take the future as their point of application: to predict the future in order to avoid it, to create a preventative police that would stop crimes before they happen by anticipating risk, by detecting the

16

Book I

“precocious” signs of delinquency in children.3 The prison becomes temporal. Preventive immunization is the goal of clairvoyance societies: to prevent anything truly new from happening, to ward off all alterity, all alteration.4 This frightening form of anticipation cannot be solely explained by political hypotheses having to do with repression or the propensity for state police control. We must rethink these analyses within a psycho- biological, or even psycho- ontological framework. Saturated immanence is the result of an immunological drive that is not unique to our society but that has found a new form of expression thanks to technological development. The immunological drive is a fundamental tendency to immunize the self. It is the basis—adroitly hidden by the exegetes—of Spinoza’s conatus, or the “effort to persevere in its being” (Ethics, III, prop. VI and VII). The “drive to remain unscathed,” to take up Derrida’s expression, enlists the death drive to destroy all that might stand in the way of its ultimate goal: to be and to remain intact, sheltered from all harm, from all damage; to defend itself against the fragility of the living; to act as if death, mourning, loss, and nothingness did not exist.5 The immunological drive uses the powers of negativity to thwart the essential function of negativity: the untethering (déliaison) without which no expression of the living, no singularity, and no existence would be possible. As an extreme hypothesis, we might thus consider the globe, the hydroglobe of absolute flux, as the monumental result of this drive.6

A secret complicity.—This extreme hypothesis must, however, be qualified: certain zones of the globe are more immunized than others, more invested with the drives to remain undamaged. In fact, the saturated immanence of the hydroglobe is guaranteed by putting into relation the two processes that lead to the production of the undamaged and the contagious. In order to understand the secret complicity that unites these two processes, let us first consider two examples: 1. We know that a financial crisis has no boundaries and can spread everywhere, catching fire in every country; but the financial sphere and its rating agencies seem untouchable, sheltered from every attack, beyond the possibility of being called into question. 2. According to the central dogma of molecular biology, it is possible to predict the behavior of an organism using its genetic program. DNA is considered the heart of life, immaterial and immortal, a “digital river” (Richard Dawkins) capable of converting itself indefinitely into multiple forms of life7; but GMOs, the by- products of this theory, are liable to proliferate and to mutate beyond any expectations that could be established at a molecular level.

Toposophy

17

We can now propose the two following theses. Thesis 1: The more concentrated the zones of the undamaged, the stronger the contagion. Thesis 2: The denser the contagion, the more the zones of immunity seem impregnable. Everything happens as if the formation of the undamaged had a tendency to take away—to capture, to privatize—the separation between individuals, jealously keeping this separation only for itself, in the form of a split; by contrast, the web of contagion strains to eject those zones from itself so that they might escape the hold of continuity. Finally, a global absolute, which has integrated all difference, as well as a local residue that remains nondifferentiated, seems to be formed. But the divide itself is not absolute. There is no re- creation of radical Transcendence to the extent that transcendence is always and indefinitely re- injectable into the world. The web of contagion seeks to immunize itself, to set itself as untouchable, and the undamaged seeks to diffuse itself across the globe. If the saturated immanence of the hydroglobe describes a limit- state in which the undamaged and the contagious converge, this limit- state does not exactly cover the entirety of the situations that make up the world. In each case, it remains to be described how (for example) finance invests consciousness, and economic and social practices, or the way in which individuals swept up in the flux of capital seek to expel part of themselves in order not to be submerged.

Philosophy today.—Hence the task of contemporary philosophy: 1. To analyze the immuno- political processes that have led to the formation of saturated immanence, and to desaturate it, to dis- integrate all the thinking and the modes of production that lead to the formation of the space- time of the undamaged. 2. This involves bringing to light the secret complicity of the undamaged and the contagious, between which the flows of the hydroglobe circulate. Against the formations of the undamaged, it is not primarily a matter of creating continuity: the psycho- political stakes consist of re- appropriating separation. But against contagion, it is not a matter—a reactionary hypothesis—of appealing to radical Transcendence, but to the creation of relation. To oppose continuity to the undamaged and Transcendence to the contagious will only keep the machine of immuno- contagion going. 3. The objective is not to prolong the assessment of the dissolution of subjectivity and presence but, on the contrary, to further the possibility of presence in itself. This is why our task is not a deconstructive one. In fact, the “pure” presence that Derrida analyzed is not presence at all, as he thought, but absence, which is to say a presence purified of existence. The problem is

18

Book I

that, in the hydroglobe, existence is literally impossible, if we understand existence as a singular metabolism of relation and separation. In company with the “new materialists,” we must think anew the materiality of our presence towards- the- world—but we must insist on the fact that matter is not continuous, but broken, definitely lacerated. 4. In this sense, we must indeed carry out Nietzsche’s program: the aristocracy of singularity and the fight against all absolute Transcendence. But this program must be established on the basis of a spiral- contingency. The eternal return is not that which comes back to the same, but that which breaks, each time, into a new existence. That which repeats is not a substance, or an identity, but the failure of identity, the terrible and fascinating return of the groundless. This last term must be identified as that from which existence begins: empty field, atopia, spacing, deviation, clinamen. Existence is an originary clinamen. 5. Such a program of philosophy makes way for the imagination—that essential, forgotten, hidden element of philosophy. For the imagination is as dangerous as chaos, which is its source. If there is an alternative world to propose, then, it must be specified that this other world is not the other of that which is, but the other of that which is not. We must invoke the alterity of non- being—an alterity without which metaphysical propositions are reduced to mere operating concepts. 6. This alterity of non- being should set philosophy before its truth: its task is to give an explanation of the madness of the out- of- place, by loading existential trans- jects with a meaning. It cannot and must not seek more than this activity of transferring charge, but it must assure this in order to liberate time. The philosophical liberation of time must find ways of resonating with the only resistance possible to the saturated immanence of the hydroglobe: a chronological dis- joining, a new occupation of time.8

Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x Over the course of the preceding section, the terms “transcendence” and “immanence” were used many times. If saturated immanence is the principal ontological enemy, does this mean that philosophy today must assert a form of transcendence? We have already indicated the danger of Transcendence, with a capital T, in the process of describing the secret complicity between the undamaged and the contagious. Must we refuse at once both immanence and transcendence? To reply immediately to such a question would only add to the confusion that reigns over the theoretical fights about the concepts of immanence and transcendence. It would be a major error to believe that

Toposophy

19

these concepts are immediately univocal and that it would be enough simply to use them in order to understand what they mean. Instead, it is necessary, at least methodologically, to distinguish between three types of transcendence and immanence.

Ontological plurality.—It is necessary to distinguish between various types of transcendence. First of all, the monotheistic transcendence that we might call the concentrated transcendence of the One that posits a supreme being— the most originary and the most high—in its radical alterity. Next, the divided transcendence of the Two: we might think here of Schelling’s God in Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), a non- total and divided God who contains the internal exteriority of an Abgrund, an Ungrund (a Nature). And finally the pluralized transcendence of existences that is nothing other than the being- outside- of- oneself, which is to say the being- towards- the- world- in- multiplicity. Philosophy, except to deny itself, has always fought against the first transcendence (of the One); it is for this reason that Deleuze can assert that there is no philosophy except for immanence. To be opposed to the transcendence of the One means to refuse giving a different ontological status to the multiplicity of forms of being—or in other words, to assert the univocity of being: that which Deleuze sums up by saying “the tick is God,” it is such as God is, in opposition to all simple analogy. But if our world is that of a compact and static immanence, would it not be perilous still to insist on immanence, at the risk of opening up a “flat ontology,” indifferent to primary existential differences? Before answering this question, let us note that immanence, too, is triple: the saturated immanence of the One, the divided immanence of the Two, and the pluralized immanence of in- sistence [insistences]. Concerning the divided immanence of the Two, we might take as a key example the subject of the Freudian unconscious, an unconscious that Lacan reduces to a simple “distortion” without depth, without back- world, in the prolongation of the blow of the Nietzschean hammer. The pluralized form of immanence also inherits the “twilight of the idols,” but it abolishes the dimension of God to produce a radical immanence. Deleuze and Guattari carry on the project of constructing pluralized immanence as a dimension that is not static or immune, but open to “lines of flight,” to becomings as well as to differences. For Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza represents the theoretician par excellence of this sort of immanence; for me, Spinoza is the thinker of the saturated immanence of the One—in other words, of absolute immanence. For Deleuze and Guattari (as well as Negri), absolute immanence is the marvel of marvels; for me, it is

20

Book I

a horror, describing the abolition of all outside and the sempiternal return to the inside, to the same place, over and over again. I do not believe that Deleuze is, in the final instance, Spinozist. By getting rid of the first chapter of The Ethics, its head, its “substance,” Deleuze makes something entirely different appear: an immanence that has nothing to do with Spinoza’s. When Spinoza says that “we do not even know what a body is capable of,” this is not stated out of enthusiasm or excitement. Instead, Spinoza points explicitly to an ignorance that must be dispelled. But when Deleuze and Guattari take up this pronouncement, unlike Spinoza, they make it into a call for experience, and the knowledge to which this might lead requires a risky and contingent construction:9 We cannot know what might happen before it becomes. Existence is certainly not a Deleuzo- Guattarian term, and it is for this reason that I speak of in- sistence: intensive becoming that is prolonged in an unexpected way. It remains interior, perhaps, but this interior changes radically according to becomings. What, then, is the problem with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ontological orientation?

Transcendence ≈ x.—The problem is one of history, understood as an ontological history, that has affected immanence and transcendence: The saturated immanence of the One is the effect of a total transfusion of the concentrated transcendence of the One. “God, or nature,” Spinoza said, and he was right, unfortunately: It is practically the same thing whether God or Nature—or today’s tele- technological Capital—designates the Total Infinite Substance that makes impossible the self- consistence of finitude, which is always multiple and in this sense worldly. In this respect, we agree with Hegel when he states that Spinoza’s philosophy is “acosmical” (without world) and not pantheistic.10 In order that there might be a world, there must be existences, plural—which is to say, we might risk a mode of relation that goes through loss, the despair that comes from the definitive lack of the One and the irrevocable dis- joining that generates each singularity. From the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism of 1795 through the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809, Schelling had to confront Spinoza in order to make way for finitude, and this could only have been possible by leaving a conceptual place for freedom, Evil, and the groundlessness of God. For this reason, the defeat of saturated immanence requires the refusal of concentrated transcendence. It must, however, be said that a Deleuzo- Guattarian immanence is fully able to bring about this de- saturation, and we cannot reproach these proponents of schizo- analysis, geo- philosophy, and world- literature with being a- cosmic:

Toposophy

21

Indeed, their philosophy is anti- Spinozist! It seems to me, however, that our world does need caesurae, ruptures, and movements of exteriorization, and it is for this reason that I opt for the model of a finite transcendence. The idea of radical change by strictly immanent transformation is certainly seductive, and it is not for nothing that it is accompanied—for Negri, for example—by the idea of necessity: Communism, for Negri, is unavoidable because it expresses the historical movement of history itself such as it is made by men, or the “multitude.” But this is precisely the transcendencemade- immanent of the One: the immanent over- power that shapes everything from the inside and that only stands in for a transcendent over- power (the substitution of the positive over- power of the multitude for the negative power of parasitic capital [that which, we might add, bears power only after having received it from God], substitution of constituent power for sovereignty, substitution of a “democratic living god” for a Hobbesian god of terror11). The hypothesis of a radical interruption would be preferable, one that engages the uncertain multiplicity of liberated existences. Liberated for nothing, perhaps: to play, to live and die, at the risk of vanishing into the limbo that separates each from the other and from itself. The plural transcendence of existences, finite transcendence, having finitized infinity, being ab- solved of the Absolute—irremediably defenseless, exposed, without precaution, precarious—is poor in world, as much as an animal can be, because it must always imagine passageways or bridges, or take already existing natural canals with care.12 Against saturated immanence, transcendence ≈ x, where x does not mean an overhang; rather, via the sign ≈, it cracks or waves the pluralized world of beings to the outside.

The problem of problems.—But a doubt arises. Freedom, nothingness, Evil, limbo, transcendence ≈ x— in a general project called Atopias—do we not reinforce the humanism we critique? The non- place might, in fact, designate one of the possible consequences of the thesis that sees human beings as beings without essence, indeterminate, free and specifically capable of relation to non- being (néant), and so legitimated in their project of enframing Nature—Nature that reminds human beings a little too much of the unbearable existence of their living bodies. This problem must not be ignored, at the risk of canceling out my entire project. There is indeed a tremor in my work: I am not free of that which I confront. The drive to remain undamaged is inside me. But to face up to this problem requires time. We must go from the extreme end of our age, as we have just done, to the very

22

Book I

origins of philosophy in order to come back to a modern lexicon, spiraling, patiently shaping the conceptual formula of atopia.

Socratic Divergence Socrates does not speak. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth

To speak of a philosopher always entails philosophical interpretation. But to speak of Socrates entails an interpretation of philosophical interpretation itself. Here the difficulties multiply and would not cease were it not for some ultimate metalanguage. In the same way, every possible interpretation of a philosopher or a concept, no matter how minor, calls upon philosophy as a whole. There are no—and this is again Socrates speaking—objects unworthy of philosophy. Hair, mud, dirt should be examined in themselves13 as valuable for their relation to a certain Idea of the totality of being and the hierarchy of meaning: A hair is not the heart, and mud does not change to gold without some skillful operation. To speak of Socrates requires not only an Idea of everything, but also an Idea that destabilizes the Idea of everything, as well as a counter- Idea that fractures the hope of an Idea of saying being adequately, and the fracture of this counter- Idea, and—but what happens to us, with Socrates? And what happens again, with philosophy? Precisely an antidote to saturated immanence.

Socrates divides Plato.—Something started with Socrates, but it is hard to say exactly what. This is without a doubt because this beginning is also a collapse: the beginning of philosophy proper on the basis of the destruction of wisdom—after Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides. As Socrates says to Theaetetus, “I am, then, not at all a wise person myself, nor have I any invention, the offspring born of my own soul.”14 It is well known that philosophy establishes itself upon non- knowledge: “I only know one thing, and that is that I know nothing,” Socrates said. This detonation spans the history of philosophy, giving rise to noise- canceling headphones, attempts to snuff out fires or to deactivate bombs that seem to reactivate themselves automatically in places where they are not expected. But we might recall Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker (2009): In order to avoid deadly explosions, aphasias—and still to hope to salvage a scrap of knowledge—the minesweeper- philosopher must remove her protections, leaving herself exposed. This exposure is danger itself: the danger of cognitive accidents and

Toposophy

23

abrupt changes of direction. The integral safety of philosophy would lead to its loss. With philosophy, at first, we do not know; we cannot understand; we interrogate; we question. This is the famous wonder of which Socrates (Theaetetus, 155d) and Aristotle spoke: “it is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize” (Metaphysics, A § 982b15). We wonder, says Aristotle, “that things should be as they are” (§ 983a), this way and not otherwise. But, he adds, once we have “examined the cause,” this affect should disappear, for its persistence denotes a bounded intellectual nature on the order of stupidity. It is the opposite wonder that must emerge: It would be incredible that things, once illuminated by Reason, could be understood differently than the way they are. For Reason, according to Aristotle, must lead to Identity; each contradiction must be dispelled. As if a tautology must finally appear, A=A, at the end of the philosophical investigation—like a pre- Socratic wisdom that would have successfully excluded its enigma. But a language that would exactly say being, without any enigmatic part, would extinguish in itself the detonation, the origin of philosophy. Science without a blind spot is certainly a myth, a fantasy specific to philosophy, but Socrates is the name of that which maintains the necessity, whatever the cost, of recurrently traversing this fantasy, using whatever comes to hand, intellectual or physical, with the help of Owls and other philosophical animals. The initial interrogation should remain at the heart of the response, stopping it from closing up, as a wound—the opening of death—or as a womb that prepares for childbirth—the opening of life. Aristotle adds, speaking of the surprise and the recognition of ignorance, “thus the myth- lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders.” Instead of radically rejecting mythic discourse, thus assuring its return at the last moment—as the repressed always comes back in the cardinal form of Absolute Knowledge—it is preferable to show that philosophy and myth have to do with the same thing: the wonder of the world, of being which is never what it is or what it might have been, of chaos that always organizes itself just enough not to be able to be called outright chaos.16 Socrates, minesweeper of minesweepers, analyst of philosophical fantasy, warding off frozen utterances—but isn’t our myth precisely there? For it is, in fact, Plato we are reading, and not Socrates. And Plato, in The Republic, does everything except apologize for non- knowledge; for him, philosophy aims at constituting knowledge in its proper form, i.e. as idea. We will thus pose the hypothesis that what begins with Socrates is an internal tension that makes up the Socrates- Plato couple, an actual division in philosophy. To use my own terms, I will say: Socrates divides Plato. Inside philosophy, anti-

24

Book I

philosophy will always have been the only philosophy. The danger would, in fact, be to pose Socrates as a simple “elucidating fiction” of Plato—as Badiou does in 1991—to whom all of the destabilizing truths we would attribute to Socrates would have to be given back.17 Crucial here is our interpretation of the Good in chapter VI of the Republic. Like Badiou, I maintain that the Good is an interruption that escapes the chain of Ideas. But this is the very name of truth, not in terms of contents but in the way truth deposes any sort of stabilized knowledge. Truth is only anarchic—or, rather, dis- archic, refusing to turn anarchy into a substitute arche. This sort of truth can in no way fall to some individual or party: As anarchist French singer Léo Ferré reminded us, “the black flag is still a flag.” In the Republic, the Good as an anti- categorical category marks the insistent presence of Socrates, yet in a text that tries to dismiss him. To want to make Socrates into a fiction always risks closing up the gap of philosophy, the enemy of which is not so much the sophist or opinion as it is itself, when philosophy comes down to an antianti- philosophy. And it is not only that the truth is “not- all,” as Lacan argues, nor is it the location of a mystical point, that matters. Instead, it is essential to see how this point orients thought, how the not- all of truth ravages all truth, how the dementia—de- mens, literally “without spirit” or “out of one’s mind”—of being exceeds all frame. To ward off this extra- vagance, Socrates has to be neutralized; then reigns the dreadful myth of a pure science without a blind spot. It is true that Socrates, as Sarah Kofman writes, “literally drove people crazy.” In the last paragraph of Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher, she writes: If the problem of Socrates has caused so much ink to flow, in the final analysis, is it not because behind the “case” of this atopical and atypical monster, each interpreter is trying as best he can to “settle” his own “case,” to carry out his reading in such a way that all of his own certitudes will not collapse with Socrates, that his own equilibrium and that of his “system”—even if there is nothing obviously systematic about it—will not be too seriously threatened?

The problem is that Socrates is “neither knowing nor ignorant, neither tragic nor comic, neither grotesque nor sublime, neither feminine nor masculine”: like Eros, Socrates is “atopian, outside of all common places.”18 Neither- nor, both- and, between the two, participating and not participating; we become lost each time we try to locate Socrates; he escapes localization. Is he the lover? He is, rather, the loved—ask Alcibiades (The Banquet). Greek? Jewish, rather, according to Nietzsche (The Gay Science, § 340) because he is a dialectician, and the dialectic is a sign of ressentiment toward life (“The Problem of

Toposophy

25

Socrates,” Twilight of the Idols). Kierkegaard compares him to Samson because he knows how to pull down the pillars of the temple of knowledge. Again according to Nietzsche—Plato would even be Christian . . . tragic Socrates? Too ironic! Besides, this is what Hegel cannot stand: An immoderately ironic Socrates is not recoverable in the Odyssey of the Spirit. Socrates, skeptic? Too negative! He wrote nothing—if not several Letters. And there is that strange postcard, in Derrida’s commentary, in which we see Socrates writing and Plato “behind him, smaller” (The Post Card). He speaks—but seems in spite of this to remain silent—“Socrates does not speak” (Foucault). Socrates? No, Plato (Badiou).19 Plato? No, Socrates. Male? No, midwife, and those who associate with me are in this matter also like women in childbirth; they’re in pain and are full of trouble night and day, much more than are the women. (Theaetetus, 151a)

Socrates or the “most suspect character of Antiquity” (Nietzsche). Definitive atopia: all attempts to ward off atopia mean the death of philosophy. Two Divide into One.—Let us summarize: Socrates = Philosophy; Philosophy => Atopia.

Dangerous summary. We affirmed that “Socrates divides Plato,” but now the division is lost, to the prejudicial benefit of the undivided state of philosophy: S=P; P=>A. But everybody knows that philosophy is divided into two camps, materialists against spiritualists (or idealists), and we have heard that philosophy began with a disagreement between the atomists and the Platonists. The problem is that every time a philosopher places herself unilaterally either on one side or on the other, she loses philosophy, whether this is because, as a materialist or an empiricist, she lets go of so- called vain speculations for “Science” (economics, sociology); or because, as a spiritualist, religion, sometimes hidden beneath the name of ethics, is there to supplant philosophy. In the final analysis, the matter subject to science or the Other subject to respect will evacuate the question of the existence of being. In this way, knowledge will become situated or truth incarnated. I do not want to contest the existence of fundamentally opposed tendencies at the heart of philosophy, but rather to understand what underlies the meaning of this internal divergence. If Foucault, in his last seminar, can differentiate between the two grand possibilities for Western philosophy—on the one hand philosophy as “knowledge of the soul” and “ontology of the self ” and on the other philosophy “as a test of life, of bios, which is the ethical

26

Book I

material and object of the art of oneself ”—it is starting from the double line that he finds in Socrates, in the confrontation of the Alcibiades and the Laches. One line toward the “metaphysics of the soul”; the other toward a “stylistics of existence.” For Foucault, it is the cynics who will incarnate this second line, and it is this becoming which interests him, since it makes the “form of existence” into “the living scandal of the truth.”20 But let us look closer. For the conditions of possibility for cynicism are Socratic: the fact of being free of all ties, that exile which leaves the cynic without a homeland. It was not for nothing that Antisthenes—the first Cynic philosopher—was Socrates’s disciple.21 The cynics take Socrates to the limit, taking philosophy head- on at its word. Diogenes is not, as Plato claims, “a Socrates gone mad,” but the madness of Socrates incarnated. Thus Foucault understands Socrates’s atopia in showing his mode of enunciating the truth to be profoundly multiple. For the truth, Foucault tells us, can be said in four ways: polemically (like the parrhesiast, he who has the courage of outspokenness), apodictically (like a prophet), demonstratively (like an expert of the transmission of knowledge) and enigmatically (like a sage). In fact, 1. Socrates has the courage necessary as far as the knowledge of the soul is concerned; 2. what is more, he has a mission from a God, of Delphi (Apology 21 a–e); 3. we must add that he knows not only the art of demonstration, but also that he does not totally repudiate the possibility of teaching virtue and the art of good governance; 4. finally, he maintains a relation to wisdom, on the model of that collapse mentioned above. We must insist for a moment on this last point. As Foucault writes, the sage is structurally silent,22 always in a sort of reserve, speaking as little as possible. If I keep quiet, Heraclitus will say to the Ephesians, “it is in order to let you speak.” And this restraint, this withdrawal (mise à l’écart) (the famous misanthropy of Heraclitus), this discursive atopia dwells in the speech of philosophy. Solitary Democritus, it is said, lived sometimes in the tombs. Zeno of Citium, founder of stoicism, “spoke little,” “briefly and without excess, as from far away.”23 As for the cynics, if they make so much of their bodies, their bios, their forms of life, the very showing of the truth, this is precisely because they know that speech—logos—is not and must not be reducible to the reasoned exposition of a science. To make speech into an act, to show more than to demonstrate, is a manner of remaining loudly silent. Once again, Socrates plays a pivotal historical role. While a prophet is an enigmatic spokesperson, the enigma of the sage reveals her status as a silence- person. It is this silence that Socrates still carries into his speech, but he has displaced it: Where the sage—the Pre- Socratic thinker—remains quiet because he knows, Socrates makes silence in his speech in order to listen to the other speak. This is what

Toposophy

27

we must account for further on: Philosophical speech is in tune with the very fact of speaking.

Ectopia.—Atopia is not utopia, another place; it is the other of place. For Plato, there were never two split worlds, as it is wrongly said, but a chorismos—a separation—at the heart of the world, a tear in immanence.24 The biggest mistake would be to believe that this tear is a straight and timeless line, stemming from a divine norm, justified by a symbolic order that could not be unfixed. In fact, the chorismos must be understood in a Lucretian manner: It is the clinamen internal to the world. And philosophical divergence is none other than perpetual relaunching, the oblique throw of dice offered by each thought—whether materialist or idealist—that dares to diverge from straight lines. In the other of place, where the thought occurs, Socrates meets Epicurus. It is not a fictitious encounter, but the confirmation that the deviation is originary, that the straight line of the world was already a deviation, a curve. Everything is deviation from deviation, disruptive spray, geysers. The world is not compact. It is not the saturated immanence that contemporary societies endeavor to produce by way of inertial flux: The world is outside- of- itself, atopia remaining in the hyphens that link these three words. All in all, metaphysics is only a conceptual incursion into the territories of dis- joining without which no relation would exist, but only compactness. Along with André Breton, each philosopher declares: “I seek the outside of time.”25 All difficulty henceforth consists in the definition of this outside, which makes atopia not the mark of an immunization in terms of place (a not- being- there) but, on the contrary, the condition of possibility for existence as ectopia. With Socrates haloed by a clinamen, let us resume.

Book II. Theory of the Trans- ject

Being-Outside Philosophy’s call is to find itself, in Emerson’s image, on a stair, meditating a direction. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America The Great Outside begins “by oneself.” Deborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveros de Castro, “L’arrêt du monde”

There is no philosophy except that of existence—even if there has always been an opposing tendency, consisting in simultaneously offering philosophy another object, as a piece split from the first: pure Idea, First Immobile Mover, God, Being, In- Itself, and so on. As if the divergence identified earlier—Socratic divergence—did not occur in the right place, or as if the dis- joining of existence had hardened into an onto(theo)logical split. As if the problematic domain were an unequivocal solution, and dis- joining were immunological defense: all in- themselves are attempts at warding off existence, integral protections against its fragility, its abandonment (to the) outside. But what do we mean here by this last term, being- outside? What do we encounter, once we are outside? Let us examine here the existential consequences of Socratic divergence.

Existence, extension, eccentricity.—The verb “to exist” is made up of ek- , outside of, and sistere, to be placed—sistere coming from ˚sta- , to be standing. By extension, to exist means to live. But what extension is this, precisely, and

Theory of the Trans-ject

29

how is existence related to the living? The only way adequately to respond to such a question is first to refuse the sacrifice of existence in the name of an ontology, or of an immediate generality supposed to account fully for it. Existence is, in actuality, the dismissal of being. How, then, to speak of it? If existence dismisses being, does this not simultaneously invalidate all thought? Must we invoke some mysticism of existence and affirm that we cannot speak of existence at all, except to betray its meaning? In posing such questions, we are more truly at the heart of thinking existence. In a certain way, this thought could begin anywhere, could call for any form of existence, any individual or living being, claiming as such the arbitrariness of the initial time and place, in the manner of a novel: “How did they meet? By chance like everyone else. What were their names? What’s that got to do with you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going to? Does anyone really ever know where they are going to?” (Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist). All novelists, from Cervantes to Toni Morrison, make the contingency of their language explicit through the creation of experimental characters.1 It is not, however, by means of contingency and the “nausea” that it can provoke that we must think existence from the position of philosophy. For philosophy, existence is instead that singular existence that recognizes contingency not as the pure opening of an infinite number of possibilities, or as an insupportable burden (Sartre), but as the background against which its situation of exception is formed—or rather, its eccentricity. Far from being reduced to some disseminating effect, far from being resolved into relativism that flattens all ideas and all values in the name of the fact that everything is contingent and thus equivalent, we must seize existence as this existence, here: this woman, standing, outside. None of this is purely biological, nor is this a form of so- called “bare life”: A bare life is that which, precisely, could not exist. For each existing living being is formed from the outside, in a sort of tension of existence that causes plants to grow, animals to move, and this author to write a Manifesto. “To live,” writes Perec in Species of Spaces, “is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.” To pass from one space to another is the ordeal of the outside. This passage is not a movement, or not necessarily: It can happen in place, but to be in place does not mean to be immobile. Neither mobility, nor immobility, existence is the tension that establishes the standing position (˚sta-) as before rather than behind, inclining rather than stiffening. If, after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, there is no center (cosmological, biological, psychological) this does not at all mean that every thing is equal; it means the impossibility of concealing the eccentricity of each existence. The concept of eccentricity does away with

30

Book II

two unfortunate ideas linked to the concept of the exception: narcissism (to demand exception for oneself) and sovereignty (exception from the law from which the law itself is produced). Eccentricity is obligation made, in an a- centric world, to singularize oneself. For a philosophy of existence, it is not the necessity of contingency that counts but the necessity of singularization that the contingency of the world produces. If everything were necessary, there would be no need for difference. In truth, difference would not exist—nor the universe.

Finitude.—Necessary eccentricity is classically called finitude. This term has been subjected to a powerful critique by Badiou and his disciples. For them, finitude is a sad passion, something deadly, the mark of the nihilisticdemocratic rejection of all Idea, of every emancipatory political project as well as every absolute. Finitude would mean that everything is finished; the future is that of capitalism; we must resign ourselves to what is, to common discourse as well as dominant powers. But actually this concept means nothing other than existence insofar as existence demands an “exit” from infinity, a necessary eccentricity. The problem is to understand what this exit—literally this out of—means. “How the absolute could come out of itself and oppose to itself a world,” such is “the riddle of the world,” wrote Schelling in 1795: “the very transition from the nonfinite to the finite is the problem of all philosophy.”2 This problem can be resolved in two ways: 1. Either by returning philosophy to idle talk, sometimes erudite, on the positions of such or not- such, a discussion adding one more opinion to the opinions already in circulation. Most of the time, this sort of discussion—to compare, to make one’s narcissism fluorescent—is far less interested in the question of the exit than in that of the entrance (into the university, or the mass media); 2. Or—and this is the point in which we are interested here—by considering that the real problem is that of being, of “being qua being.” However, in the time of its saying or writing, the statement “being qua being” now splinters into two distinct “beings,” and the second can by no means merge into the first: It is already outside, expelled, has left infinity. Infinity, however, is not a melancholic object that is left far behind and that we would seek in vain to recover; it is the finite insofar as it exists—all other conception of infinity is merely fantasmatic. Schelling ends up discovering that we can derive no existence of a compact God; it is still necessary that God shelters in himself a non- ground that ex- ists him, as if to exist were a transitive verb—an internal non- ground outside of him. This is what is most difficult

Theory of the Trans-ject

31

to understand: the meaning of the concept of finitude is that the exit is originary. Being- outside cannot be delayed.3 To say that we are already outside, and that the exit is originary: Is this not ultimately a melancholic position? Is the concept of existence opposed to that of becoming? Is becoming simply a decoy, a long detour toward that which does not become, but is? Such is the grand Hegelian thesis: One must leave oneself, exteriorize oneself, alienate oneself—exist—in order finally to know what one already was. It would have been necessary to rend the veils of Maya to perceive that we had already arrived, and to go through Heraclitus to show that Parmenides was right. Is existence the long detour from becoming to being? But the Hegelian dialectic is a certain relation between being and time; and the existentialism that I propose sees existence as a different relation to time: The eccentricity of each existent does not define a becoming, but the immediate tension—the ex- tension, the tension of the outside—that engenders difference. Put differently, that existence might be always already outside means that even immobile, even inert, even at the heart of the most serious of depressions, a surplus of time inhabits existential disjunction: the ex- is time.

Co- existence, projection, and double advance.—What is this surplus that constitutes and extends existence? Awaits at the same place it extends? Sartre, after Heidegger, will call this surplus “project.”4 But we can understand the manner in which existence projects itself in two ways: 1. The first is ideal projection, that which takes the existing subject in the direction of that which it is not, but would like to be. This the malady from which Conrad’s Lord Jim suffers: “the faculty of swift and forestalling vision.” “Projected headlong into the fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations,” Lord Jim is prepared for everything, except “the unexpected”—which subsequently becomes the “inconceivable.” Ideal anticipation is nothing other than the dream of the absolute realization of a model of the self. Thus, according to Sartre, the human being dreams of a “synthetic fusion of the in- itself with the for- itself,” and he “makes himself a man in order to be God.”5 A “useless passion,” as Sartre says, because it effectively denies the finitude of existence because it would exhaust the imagination in a reality that would completely embody it. Sartre has conflated ontology with the anthropological fantasy of ontology that he describes in the form of a fusional aspiration (that of the in- itself and the for- itself ). 2. Traversing this fantasy, it becomes possible to define another form of projection, which projects the subject there where it is. The advance is thus not something that is carried out in a future, a program to complete, a being to

32

Book II

become, an ideal to achieve, a fusion to bring about; it is a deviation interior to the present, the clinamen of time. Let us call this immediate projection a real projection. It does not liquidate the imagination but mixes it with sensibility: I project myself from that which my body perceives, from the sensibility that puts me in relation to the world, to others, to the community of feeling beings, perceiving and communicating.6 I advance into the world in the same way that the world advances toward me, into me. This double advance only sets existence in advance of itself to ballast it at the same time with other existences with which it makes up a field. By this double advance, existence is at the origin mixed with other existences in an existential field. At the origin, as soon as it exists, existence is more than itself. We find here one of Jean- Luc Nancy’s fundamental motifs: “the One is more than the one.”7 There is no One alone, no absolute One released from everything, nor existence purely separated. There is always surplus, projection, or advance in the form of the double advance (anticipation and ballast). To exist is always to co- exist, to exist with other speaking, living beings, and sometimes with revenants. On this basis, the concept of the outside is enriched: Outside of the self, there is a multitude of beings in relation. These relations do not connect objects; they are not added to pre- existing entities, but constitute them from the inside. The outside of the being is the set of relations that constitutes existents as an existential field. By co- , which is experienced outside, I am in relation with myself, my form of life linked to other forms of life. We now understand that what Sartre or Heidegger called projection could just as well be an injection. Think of those moments when we imagine something that is not: This ideal projection forms an image that manifestly does not correspond to that which perception might have expected. In an improbable form, a mental space like a hallucination or a perception enabled by art, we inject the more- than- One that we have received as being- with.8 This more- than- One injected into the image ballasts all of our anticipations, and means no projection duplicates simply a personal model. The imagination never only determines a narrow personal world; it communicates the universe—“The shortest path / From ourselves / To ourselves / Is the universe” (Malcolm de Chazal). For the special existents who live and die, the injection of existence is the manner in which the living takes a form that expresses itself only in the encounter with the world that has advanced toward it.

Existential field.—The beauty and the paradox of existence: only the experience of singularity lets us take account of the singularity of other existences. In this sense, each pure ontology can only lead to the underestimation (at

Theory of the Trans-ject

33

best) or the foreclosure (at worst) of existence. Existences form a field of eccentricities: each one of them demonstrates that in order to begin, it was necessary to deviate. The absence of deviation would be the absence of all existence, in Schellingian terms: the non- exit of infinity. The difficulty is to understand this deviation—this clinamen—not as a movement in a previously given space, but as the simultaneous creation of existence and its space (its environment). Clinamen is not added to an existent, but carves out the atopian spacing that manifests itself thanks to an existent. Because existence first is eccentricity, it has no place of its own, but shares an existential field with all other existents. The reality of this field depends upon each deviation, each way of inhabiting the absence of the center—which is to say, the lived outside. Imagine the existential field as a universe where each point would be displaced. It is in the place of this displacement that the co- of existents is expressed. Lucretius considered the encounter of atoms following a clinamen as formative of a world; we must, rather, think the world as the ex- pression—a pressure outside the self—of encounters. Crossed by an infinity of outsides, the existential field enjoys the endless dis- placements that roam it.

Coalitions To live alone, one must be an animal or a god—says Aristotle. The third case is wanting: one must be both—a philosopher. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

(0).—At the beginning, there was more than One. But this was not yet known, or else it was known vaguely. We believed we were only One, and that the multiple would come together toward the end. We knew very well that the story of the One did not make sense—but precisely because nothing was able to remain, because everything was flowing, we produced—as a sort of compensation—the fantasy of something that would persist, somewhere, from the beginning of time until its end. The fantasy of something that would be able to uni- fix itself in some firmama [firmaman]. In some absolute substance. But in order that there might be something rather than nothing, the absolute must have opened up, we said; the absolute had been subjected to a lack, we thought. We tried to preserve the absolute, to make it into finite forms without losing any part of the infinite. But the trick was too clumsy, and immanence too compact. The absolute itself, or nature, or God, had to contain a groundlessness, a shapeless precedent, an internal tear or transcendence. At once It and not It. (Always) already Two.

34

Book II

It has been necessary to begin again: At the beginning, the absolute was already divided. It was necessary to continue: The absolute was dissolved so that there might be world. It is necessary to conclude: There is the multiplicity of the world.

1.—But the story continued. It was taken up by one voice, more voices, all demanding a story, an odyssey in meaning and in image. One by one, these existences murmured to each other: What there is takes time, nothing happens all at once, I was born, I notice how long sugar takes to dissolve, I saw my son born, there are beings who come into the world and worlds that demand to open. One by one, they added: I exist, I am outside, I wait for the tramway, I smoke a cigarette, I think of later, how did I get here, am I outside? And they responded, a little later: I’m still coming, I’m not there yet, and maybe this will never end, even if it stops it will start again, elsewhere, otherwise, with someone else— a whirlwind takes up some leaves—and they began to compose a song, an existential one, like in the film Magnolia, film of the world in a film, and then they began to become disillusioned—thus, in turn, simultaneously, in turn, alone and together.

2.—One says: Let’s start again. I exist, I am outside even when I am inside, we call this exile and the right country is only the one that supports me, there is no other, no better, and each country is numerous, we’re numerous outside, even if it’s better to be outside inside when it’s cold, or when there are roundups, the outside insides have to be welcoming, hospitable, there must be thresholds to put me in relation to others, estrange me at the threshold of the Stranger I will never be, these thresholds must be guaranteed, they must be, this is the Justice of the Outside and it’s the only one, there is no other, no better justice, so that those of the outside aren’t sent outside, it’s complicated but it is like this. Another says: To exist, or to be outside, is necessarily to encounter people, to be several, even when I was Inside there were already at least Three. And even if I don’t want to meet them, they will be my ghosts, specters of a renounced common, reduced to silence but full of words that had been said and will maybe be again. Existence will always have been multiple, everywhere. Another adds: There are turtles in the garden, dogs who take the metro in Moscow and get off at the right stations, in Chicago there are over 2,000 coyotes who let out their growls, their huffs, their woofs, their whines, their

Theory of the Trans-ject

35

yelps, their howls, and their famous “wow- oo- wow,” it’s raining—we say— cats and dogs, pigeons equipped with sensors collect data on atmospheric pollution over San Jose, look close enough and you might even glimpse a transgenic mouse. And hears a response: There are walls of words in the social networks, web syndication voluntarily set up by computer escorts, electronic chips that blow their noses into the files of the police of the mind, the Internet of Things promoting the last opus of Philip K. Dick, nanorobots in a swarm who cooperate before obstacles, a lovesick android who knows he’s going to die. While another follows: Closer in myself than my own closeness . . . A fortress that compels every entrant to strip even of the One . . . God incarnated to the point of his own death, Light upon Light, Text without end . . . And telluric points, gods even in the kitchen, objects and animals that are more than objects and animals, “smart wood,” Prophets, Shamans, Sorcerers . . . And another responds: Images that are animated, more real than the real, taking the voices and the bodies of dogs, coyotes, or humans, they say unthinkable words at the edge of the void, they announce nuptials and ruptures, they hold their breath when their daimon asks them to, they take part in assemblies, in the creation of laws as in the extraction of new minerals.

3.—A multiple, at least four: human beings, animals, technological individuals, divine assumptions. A multiplicity beyond all count, made up of existents past, present, or to come, stretching temporality in every direction to the point of sending it outside itself. Cro- Magnon, Neanderthal, Posthuman; Savages, Barbarians, Primitives, Firsts, Moderns; chimpanzees, dolphins, pigeons; let’s let in the insects and the plants; objects, machines, practical mediations, artificial intelligences; spirits, phantoms, gris- gris, God, gods; works of art, social installations. Hybridizations: GMOs, GMAs [genetically modified animals]; an artificial uterus; a performer who grafts a camera behind his head; Mechs and Shapers; radioactive clouds. Becomings: One never changes without the other changing too. Confusions: The production of substance spilling over its bounds, hardly changing from one difference to another; the unaware crossing of thresholds, as if they were nothing; the abolition of binary divisions without the creation of remarkable singularities—a nightmare that no unity could ever interrupt.

4.—Impossible to know in advance, or even after the fact, what assembled beings can carry as common load, to make reference to the “bearing”

36

Book II

[munis] of the word community. We can only consider it. There is nothing outrageous about this: the thought of community will have always called for a metaphysics, that is to say a science of imaginary variations submitted to the Principle of reason. And the Principle of reason opposes the Principle of identity, it only acknowledges that there are some things rather than nothing—clinamen . . .

5.—...........||||||/|||....../ |..........||||||/|/|/|||....

6.—Things, living or artificial beings, are inclined with / against / on / in / from each other, using all possible prepositions. If we were to speculate, or to think to excess, we might as well leave free a share for that which leads beings to coalesce. This is to say, never to reduce the common to interests or identical intentions. Let us call coalition this ensemble of beings inclined one on the other, an ensemble bearing uncertainty without undermining the possibility of a being- in- common. From the corporeal absence of the common, a coalition is woven in all material forms, some crystallized by loves, wars, chatter, writings, magazines, assemblies, collectives—but always of the One un- filled several times and in all ways, letting the wild depths that give the coalition its sovereignty emerge.

7.—Let us call the subjective trajectories that advance, thanks to coalition, trans-jects. They advance by their projections, ideal or real. Each coalition goes forward, at the same time, in the form of an endless loop (a spiral), in each trans- ject that goes forward or back. The spiral of coalition and trans- jects is the place of the formation of the double advance. The absence of coalition does not mean the return of a subject to its pre- subjective animality, but reduces the trans- ject of existence to the ideal projection of a subject—its quixotic aspirations, its securing narcissism, its lack of love.

8.—To confused coalitions, which deny thresholds, smother singularities, produce hybrid confusions in which each object would be lost in another object, where the absence of One has become the nightmare of a malleable diversity, let us oppose not clear and distinct coalitions, which would annul community in its very principle, but those that recognize and celebrate their

Theory of the Trans-ject

37

excess. Excess of amour fou, exo- realist art, politics that liberate existence, un- institutionalized minoritarian religion, an economy commensurate with the abyss—the trans- ject of existence over wild depth. Or: everything that paid- off experts, immune nations, stolen mediations, private finances, manufacturers of atoms, pharmacies of forgetfulness, controllers of fictions, suppliers of high- quality images, butchers of processed foods, neuro- cognitive specialists, and logicians of the spirit strain to forbid and to make impossible. Rather than these inertial fixations, which produce this intravenous absolute, let us wager on the living flesh of adventurous coalitions.

9.—As a non- state politics, coalition demands organization. But no organization is desirable without the adventure of the collated. Without the free expression of that which is projected with others toward a Good cruelly absent. All alliance must remain an adventure.

Ab-solved Freedom Freedom lets beings be. Martin Heidegger, “The Essence of Truth”

The other than the One is existence, finitude, or disjunction. In various ways, these three terms name existence liberated from that which would contain it, surround it, or prevent it from being, rendering any form of adventurous coalition impossible. In other words, existence and freedom are inseparable. It is, however, impossible to invoke the concept of freedom without reformulating it, so much has freedom been subjected to neoliberal programming of behaviors, under the name of flexibility or social license accorded by liberal governments to individuals. By social license, we mean freedom of speech without consequence, the right to live without questioning the legal framework of life, the right to lead a private life without objecting to the manner in which this is under close surveillance, controlled, and anticipated by governing bodies, whether these are economic, forms of media, or political. We must, however, have the courage to say that these neoliberal “freedoms” are not freedom. They are patently only denials of existence, only the operators of that which we have called ideal projection, instruments of an exhausting auto- realization at once indefinite, laughable, and destructive. Indefinite in the sense that the self can never correspond to a model; laughable because non- adventurous models of life are the negation

38

Book II

of trans- jects of existence; destructive to the extent that the technological means employed by humanity to realize itself are the causes of ecological disaster. It is imperative to escape this ontological- economic trap.

From the “out of reach” . . . — To escape this cage, it is first necessary to think freedom outside of the humanist position. In fact, for humanism imagined metaphysically, freedom is nothing other than the human capacity for eternal self- definition.9 It is doubtless in Sartre’s work where the relationship between freedom, existence, and humanism finds its clearest expression: “existentialism is a humanism” of freedom. Let us not forget, however, that for Sartre freedom is literally unbearable. Being and Nothingness highlights the absurdity of the condition of freedom, which depends on the fact that “human reality can choose itself as it intends, but cannot not choose itself.” Freedom is choice, and not an ontological foundation. It is precisely this absence of foundational control that the fusion of the in- itself and the for- itself would seek to remedy, in the figure of a being who would exhaust himself by trying to be absolutely Man in order to be the divine Absolute. This programmed failure depends on the initial partition between the in- itself and the foritself, but an exact understanding of this partition is crucial if we do not wish to reproduce the humanistic schema of freedom. In Sartre’s philosophical system, this schema depends upon a mode in which human reality manages to distinguish itself from the in- itself. If it is certainly not possible to hold oneself outside Being—if freedom is thus always situated—“human reality” can, however, modify its relationship with Being by “[drawing] itself back on the other side of nothingness.” The negation of the world puts the human being “out of circuit,” “out of reach”: “Descartes, following the Stoics, has given a name to this possibility, which human reality has, to secrete a nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom” inasmuch as it precedes the essence of man and makes it possible.10 With Sartre, the atopia that we demand as existential disjunction becomes the immunization of human reality, a split that encloses this reality in a crushing responsibility. This immunization, this putting- out- of- reach that effectively recalls the remarks of Marcus Aurelius,11 turns atopia into the territory of the undamaged, whereas we seek to think it as communication of being- in- the- world, ectopia. The problem is when freedom is reduced to a pure negation that only can create an Absolute and its “passion,” which Sartre knows is “useless.” Useless indeed, and above all established by making human reality an exception. If freedom really is unbearable in Sartre’s philosophical system, this is because it precedes the essence of man, and would like

Theory of the Trans-ject

39

to be ontological foundation, envying its absoluteness. We must therefore free freedom of its jealousy towards any sort of foundational condition.

. . . to “Ab- solution.”—No longer to think freedom as ontological foundation—or lack of foundation—would be, first, to imagine it as a fact. As long as freedom is pure Idea, a call to be, it asks us to deny what we are in order to become what we are not yet. It ultimately demands that existence is preceded by an essence that it would already have projected in advance. That this essence should be before existence demonstrates its sovereignty. As JeanLuc Nancy insists, we should rather “liberat[e] human freedom from the immanence of an infinite foundation or finality, and liberate it therefore from its own infinite projection to infinity where transcendence (existence) itself is transcended, and thereby annulled.”12 For Nancy, freedom does not precede anything, but traverses (transit/e) existents: a. it communicates (transite) them as the movement of existence, an ectopic movement; and b. it transfixes (transit) them as concretion, intensification by which there are existents. Freedom does not precede anything because it is not a choice followed by an effect. Freedom is existence: this world, this trans-ject. It is spacing, deviation—a clinamen, according to Nancy.13 It is not freedom first, and then the thing; but there is a thing through freedom. Being and freedom are the same. For Sartre, nothingness is brought to the world by human negativity, which enables the human subject to put herself “out of reach,” outside matter. For Nancy, matter is made into a world thanks to the nothingness that tears absolute immanence. Freedom, writes Nancy, is nothingness that “affirms itself by making itself intense”: Intensified, nothingness is carried “to the point of incandescence,” like a “black fulguration.”14 This existing entity—that advent—is nothing other than freedom as “the deepening and intensification of negativity, up to the point of affirmation.”15 This approach to freedom allows for the release from the trap of the ontological foundation, and the liquidation of all conception of an absolute outside the world, an absolute that for Sartre is nothing other than the human being. Let us briefly follow these lines by Nancy, difficult but crucial: Freedom is absolute, which is to say that freedom is the absolutization of the absolute itself. To be absolute is to be detached from everything. The absolute of the absolute, the absolute essence of the absolute, is to be detached from every relation and every presence, including from itself. The absolute is being that is no longer located somewhere [my emphasis], away from or beyond beings, with whom it would again have this relation of “beyond” (which Hegel knew well), and it

40

Book II

is not an entity- being but is being withdrawn into itself short of itself, in the ab- solution of its own essence and taking place only as this ab- solution. The absolute is the being of beings, which is in no way their essence, but only the withdrawal of essence, its ab- solution, its dis- solution, and even, absolutely, its solution, in the fact of its existence, in its singularity, in the material intensity of its coming and in the tone of the autonomous Law whose autonomy, autofoundation, and authority depend only on the experience of being the law extended to the edge of the law like the throw of an existence.16

For Nancy, if the Absolute is not situated anywhere, this does not mean in any way that it is beyond, “out of reach,” or “out of circuit,” as Sartre would say, but that the Absolute is itself the circuit. This is why it can be attained, submitted to any form of damage, to all that happens and might happen—including death. Contrary to what we might believe, the logic of the Absolute does not lead to exception, but to its dissolution: “released from all relations,” writes Heidegger, the Absolute “is then still related to others if only in the manner of being absolved from it, and is on the basis of this relatedness, this relation, relative and not absolute.”17 And Nancy extends this logic to its extreme, beyond Heidegger, showing that the relation of the Absolute to some other is not exterior but internal, in the double sense of the transition identified above. The relative is relation (co- existence). Here is why the Absolute, pushed to its conclusion, is dissolved. But what does “pushed to its conclusion” mean here? If this push takes time, the logic of the Absolute becomes chrono- logic, and the dissolution of the absolute is the time that time would take to pass into existence. This question, as we know, was crucial for Schelling (see the section “Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x” in Book I), for all idealism, and for early German Romanticism. But we face two possibilities here: 1. if the problem is temporal or historical, then in fact all questions of escaping the Absolute or God rise again; 2. if the problem is only logical, then the very place of the concept of the Absolute becomes highly problematic. For why not start directly with finitude and relation? Is it not, in Nancy’s thinking, a matter of preserving the schema of a sacrifice of the Absolute—of God and his death as man—so that there might be something and not nothing? Freedom, he writes, is the “detachment—and unleashing—of being insofar as being is not retained in being and is absolved of its being in the sharing of existence.”18 But would it not ultimately be a matter of succeeding in ab- solving freedom from the sacrifice of being? We find the same awkward situation here as in the preceding chapter: going outside to realize we were already there. In the same way, perhaps

Theory of the Trans-ject

41

we must still proceed by the ab- solution of the Absolute to know that, in a certain way, this has already taken place (see the first point in the “Coalitions” section). In any case, philosophically, we must “hold the ground gained”19: being is freedom —immediately, in the form of being finite, which is to say, existing. This is true to the point that we might be able to say: “The stone is free. Which means that there is in the stone—or rather, as it—this freedom of being that being is, in which freedom as a ‘fact of reason’ is what is put at stake, according to co- belonging.”20 We are now far from every humanist conception of freedom. Freedom passes through all existence as a specific trans- ject, be it in place or in motion, human or animal, contemplative or engaged in political action.

To let be.—In 1843, in The Jewish Question, Marx denounced freedom as that which requires stopping before a “stake” separating two self- sufficient monads, assured of the human right to secure their goods.21 But to be an immunized monad has today become a full- time job. At the heart of neoliberal governance of behaviors, freedom is only given to produce self- subjection. This conditional, instrumentalized freedom, this social license is inscribed in the process of the autoproduction of the subject- entrepreneur- of- himself with his human capital on his shoulders, who feels obliged to become everything because he is nothing, because “man is not born, but made man” (Erasmus). Ultimately, liberalism grants freedom only in exchange for the imperative of infinite liberation, mobilizing the subject at the heart of a movement without end from which it is impossible for him to extract himself.22 A movement without finitude, and finally without existence, or an absolutely fluidified one. In this sense, complete integration into the world implies, as its condition of possibility, the sovereignty of a subject able to fully submit. The deepening of human sovereignty, which wears itself out trying to produce an unattainable autodefinition, is the instrument of the most profound compatibility with the world, of the greatest compactness. In sovereign subjection, being- towards- the- world never appears as such, and vanishes either in the form of the worker—before she takes sides and reclaims the world—or in the form of the solitude of the self- proclaimed master deciding by himself, for himself, and in himself, as if the world did not exist. Atopia is the removal of these two subjective positions, requiring that we think freedom not as self- production, self- definition or self- identification—even though mediated by another consciousness—but as letting- be [laisser- être]. Letting- be is not liberal laisser-faire, which always hides an absolute will to

42

Book II

politically impose the fantasy of a “self- regulating market” (Karl Polanyi)23 by all means possible. The new form of this fantasy today is that of the credit rating agencies, which, far from regulating State economies, continually destabilize them in order to confirm the sovereignty of financial markets. To the neoliberal forcing of automated manufacture, let us oppose letting- be and its politics of existences. Letting- be is the position of that which exists, and becomes a fundamental political demand when existences are prevented. Far from being reduced to a passive and non- political attitude, the politics of letting- be requires preventing that which prevents existence.

Language and Disjoining Fundamentally a poem comes from the Outside. I have no idea where, I have no theological or any other kind of notion of it. Green Martians was the thing I used before. It’s obviously not Martians. But I do think poems are delivered, when they’re good, from the Outside. Jack Spicer

We must still elucidate the fact that atopia requires a subjective position founded on the re- moval of that which prevents it from being. An ectopic spatiality—finite and free—has its interior correlative: an empty case, a crack. We would not be originally outside if the outside were not originally in ourselves. This is the strange topology that we have sought to describe since the beginning of this work, like a ∞ with its two holes, looping and unlooping forever. It is not ultimately a question of the outside, a term that too strongly evokes symmetry with a preceding inside, but rather a dynamic spacing, deviation, clinamen or dis- joining at work in the subjective constitution of speaking subjects. This dis- joining induces every speaking subject to experience a form of madness, which enables philosophy and the speaking subject to communicate. Speech and empty case.—“From where” we speak: This expression was popular half a century ago, when we were given to understand that the subject is ultimately the structure. We explored in depth the mysteries of the assignation of structure. We absolutely forgot Sartre’s assertion that “Valéry is a petit- bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit- bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.”24 Sober structuralists—in other words, post- structuralists—will eventually rediscover the truth of Sartre’s formula (the non- reversibility of the structure and of the singularity that a proper name contains, that is to say the fact that a structure is more a condition than an explanation): a subjective singularization results from a destructuring

Theory of the Trans-ject

43

internal to structure. This destructuring can be localized as an “empty case” at the core of the structure.25 As Deleuze explains, the empty case is missing from its place and is constantly displaced, permitting the distribution of differences across an entire structure. It is, crucially, the “the differentiation of difference itself.” Blind spot, zero, the place of the king in the Velasquez painting described by Foucault in The Order of Things, Claude Lévi- Strauss’s floating signifier, object=x that refers to the x of a subject, the empty case is that without which we would not speak, because everything would be presaid, always already written or decreed, edited: it would be the writing of the things structured by a dead language, that is to say, a language that would have filled its empty space. When the lack lacks, words become things, the structure becomes a jail, and metaphors turn into frightening things—a transformation that Moosbrugger experiences in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities: It had happened that he said to a girl, “Your sweet rose lips,” but suddenly the words gave way at their seams and something upsetting happened: her face went gray, like earth veiled in a mist, there was a rose sticking out of it on a long stem.26

To speak manifests the atopia of the empty case, yet without being identified with it, in the form of a dis- joining. In linguistic terms, we find something similar in the Saussurian relation between langue and parole, a relation itself doubled or multiplied by the relation between society and individual, between the treasure of language (Lacanian “big Other”) and the exchange of phases (conversation), and between passivity and activity. Along the same lines, we could also mention Chomsky’s relation between competence and performance. In every instance, we must start from the evidence that linguistic performance, actualized and thus finite, is at once inferior to the infinite possibilities of grammatical construction and heterogeneous to these possibilities because to speak implies and expresses registers of competence that are not simply linguistic, but contextual, sociocultural, affective, and so on. Speech is never adjusted to language, but is always a misuse of language (un écart de langage), distinguishable by the hesitations of the voice, the stumbles, the “uh”s, slips of the tongue, all those abolished baubles27 where individuation is sought and found. There is never an “id” that speaks without an “it” being on the point of becoming an “I,” even if this point is sometimes frozen (as in psychosis). What is language, after all, if it is not a spacing between the imaginary and the real, a symbolic emergence that speech re- actualizes? Readers of Derrida and lovers of poetry might argue that spacing, misuse of language, and disturbance do not concern only speech, but also writing. Certainly, but in poetry the cut is always measured more than once, calculated many times during the making; poetry is always counted.28 Written

44

Book II

iterability—the possibility of being repeated—anchors the language, turning a hapax into a new signifier proliferating into countless copies. In this sense, writing enables the adjustment of dis- joining. On the contrary, and without a phonocentric gesture, in speech disturbance is lived specifically as a presence that, far from being pure or phantasmatic, is exposed to its irreversible lack of anchor, its anarchic volatility.

Negativity and madness.—Spacing, deviation, and dis- joining: the question is that of negativity at work in the constitution of the subject. Negativity is not only brought by the human subject into the world but frees the subject as such. Freud saw this in his account of the creation of the symbol of negation. In the place of a first attempt at the unilateral expulsion of that which is judged to be bad, this symbolization makes possible, through negation, the maintenance of that which we would like to externalize: This is not A (although that might be it); there is no B (even if there is B); I am not C (although this might be false). This is not my mother, says the analysand about a dream, denial serving as the proof of “a first degree of independence from the results of repression”: Thanks to the symbol of negation, thought “frees” itself of the “limitations of repression.”29 In the case of psychosis, the lack of this symbolization translates into an a priori destructiveness without limits—for how to rid myself definitively of what constitutes me, if not in the suicide of all that is close to it, including myself? Thus, Serge Leclaire considers psychosis an auto- immune disorder, attacking alterity—the big Other—without which we would be out- of- speech. To the body of the infans, all words arrive in the manner of a foreign body, causing the production of antibodies. No appropriation of words without a corollary rejection, these two processes constituting the unconscious as a heterogeneous ensemble. The first rejection is none other than the Verwerfung, which Freud as well as Lacan (under the name of foreclosure) would attribute only to the psychotic, radically separated from the neurotic by a qualitative difference. Yet for Leclaire, neurotic and psychotic are only distinguished quantitatively, according to the extent of the linguistic rejection, limited for the first, undefined for the second. But in all neurosis resides this rejection, this “accursed core”30 without which, taking everything from the big Other, reiterating its otherness as if it were an identity, a subject would be nothing.

Madness and civilization.—There is thus no subject except through a creative incompatibility, a heterogenesis. “Originally the ego includes every-

Theory of the Trans-ject

45

thing, later it separates off an external world from itself,”31 writes Freud, when he explains the “oceanic feeling” as an expression of our “limitless narcissism.” Yet it is from the hypothesis of an original totality, whether Freudian or Hobbesian, which we must stray, when we consider that a subject comes into existence by leaving its status as self- centered monad, self- totalized, humanized only by the civilizing violence that comes to breach the ramparts of the original fortress of drives. Let us think here of Cornelius Castoriadis, who, through Piera Aulagnier’s psychoanalytic perspective, maintained that the human being is first a “mad animal” who is civilized by the use of reason (thus of logos).32 Where the id was, completely a- social and violent, the I must sublimate even the thinnest “veneer of civilization.”33 Contrary to these positions, I affirm that to become civilized is to become mad, if we grant that the madness inherent in the process of civilization is not clinically diagnosed psychosis, but consists of a normal madness, that of dis- joining, of approximate performance, of atopia. Psychosis is either the unlimited extension of atopia, antopia (schizophrenia), or its absence, the saturation of the void, overtopia (paranoia). It is a mixing of the two—antopia and overtopia, the proliferation of places deprived of anything habitable and the lack of any sort of free space, the fragmentation of the world in empty junk spaces and the impossibility of bearing emptiness—that best describes contemporary pathology: a frozen atopia, full of fears and safety measures, over- territorialized in absolute flux. A healthy subjective atopia requires more or less reluctantly leaving the possibility of an infinite road with one direction for a sinuous road not correctly listed on maps, with exits that appear only too late, with gas stations that are somewhat dubious. If these paths lead nowhere, it is not that at the end of them there is nothing, but that nothingness, phantom of the negative, accompanies the path that we follow as much as we trace out; this is called clearing. The madness of atopia is that which opposes the principle of Identity, the laminar flow that characterizes, in Lucretius’s system, the parallel fall of atoms in the void. And the principle of Reason, as Michel Serres has brilliantly shown, following Lucretius, is not that which makes conformity but, on the contrary, that which accounts for the fact of being, for the fact that there is something rather than nothing— that there are other things besides pure identity, pure grammar, the confusion between words and things. In this perspective, the subject is not an identity resulting from the civilization of his drives, but a difference discovering the approximate madness of singularization, the wandering of reason without any basis other than improbable clinamen. Born of contingent encounter, the subject is caught permanently, until death, in a whirling disequilibrium.

46

Book II

When the force of this current favors creative intensities, the subject enjoys her being- towards- the world.

The void and the drives.—In his 1964 seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the subject comes more from its fissure than from its drives.34 In the first sessions, Lacan reminds us that the Freudian unconscious shows itself as a dis- joining, the fact that there is “always something wrong” “between cause and that which it affects”; but if we seek to see the unconscious directly, all we would perceive would be a “gap.” If something stumbles and faints in dreaming, as in a Freudian slip, this means there is something else that takes place and seeks to be realized: The unconscious is the gap through which neurosis is joined to an indeterminate real. The unconscious is therefore the “unrealized,” the “not- born,” “limbo,” something on the order of those “ambiguous mediators” such as sylphs and gnomes, Lacan tells us. What appears as the formation of the unconscious is at once a finding, as formation, and a re- finding of contact with the shapeless, the non- realized, and so on. The unconscious is thus first not a drive but a rupture, a discontinuity, which, Lacan specifies, is not preceded by any totality. Discontinuity comes first, and it is from discontinuity that absence emerges. The unconscious is thought not diachronically but synchronically, as a horizontal bar without depth, and this synchronicity of the unconscious is centered around “the subject qua indeterminate.” The biggest remaining theoretical difficulty is that which concerns the relationship between gap and limbo, indetermination and the figure of the sylph. For Freud, the drive is an intermediary, “a borderline concept between the psychic and the somatic”35—in other words, an interval, a hyphen, and a dash of discord. One question remains: Is the empty case full, like an egg? This is not very Lacanian. But if we add: an egg of virtuality? This is the Deleuzian solution, reading and un- reading structuralism. The void that engages the symbolic “is, however, not a non- being; or at least this non- being is not the being of the negative, but rather the positive being of the ‘problematic.’ ”36 This is not so far from Lacan, who argues that the unconscious is neither “being, nor non being, but the unrealized.” Perhaps drives should be considered as the spatium of intensive virtuality, made of differential relations of which nothing can predict the actualization.37 The void would then be the spacing between differential relations and differentiating actualizations, which is to say the fact that the totality is never given or givable as such: the there- is of being—the il y a or the es gibt—is an unlikely declination, always a throw of the dice, even if we do not know from what hand they are thrown.

Theory of the Trans-ject

47

Beneath or before?—In this sense, a subject is always a problem, problema, literally what is thrown before, pushed ahead, proposed to existence. Such a conception of the subject is, however, paradoxical: The subjectum is that which is thrown beneath, which is not the same thing as being thrown before—but before what? Is it not time to change the subject? This is to say: to think the subject from an inaugural dis- joining, and not according to the humanistic schema. Humanism always consists of imagining 1. that there is no subject but the human subject and 2. that the human subject is what escapes the status of the animal, that biological and empirically determined form of life.38 Against this linear ontogenesis, it is necessary to reconsider the status of animality, itself subjected to dis- joining.

On the Subject of Animals If a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

From the subject to the structure and from the structure to the subject, from structuralism to post- structuralism: In all, we have progressed less than some would think. We have remained in the restricted frame of the human being and his structures or his ways of escaping them. Today, however, a new way of thinking appears: on the scene of the “death of man” announced by Foucault at the end of The Order of Things, we could expand the concept of the subject into the animal world—as, for example, Tom Regan does with his concept of a subject-of- a- life.39 This theoretical proposition is necessary to counter a humanist and anthropocentric mode of civilization. It is, however, insufficient, even harmful, if it ultimately maintains the figure of Man behind the subject. Is it not from the concept of the subject itself that it is necessary to depart, insofar as this clings to the humanist schema? Unless we change the meaning of the subject: Instead of situating it as apart from the living, we should consider a subject as the edge of an existential trans- ject. Let us put this idea to the test by confronting the concept of existence with that of animal life.

To which subjects?—If I say, “Sean, the Irishman,” with a comma between the two terms by way of marking the breath, the spacing, this means that first I give a singularity (a proper name), then a particularity (nationality). But with

48

Book II

“Washoe the chimpanzee” or “Kanzi the bonobo,” something else happens: the apposition without a comma creates a zone of indecision between the proper name and the common name (or the name of the species). As if the species—bonobo, chimpanzee—were on the point of losing its generality to the very name of the case of the species. Must we thus remain in this zone of indecision, à la Agamben? Or re- mark the spacing? Let us think of Washoe who, at four years old, had a vocabulary of more than 140 signs, and could combine up to five characters of ASL (American Sign Language), taught to him by Allen and Beatrix Gardner, two psychologists from the University of Nevada, at the end of the 1960s. Or of Lucy, the chimpanzee who, asked to sort photos of chimpanzees and human beings into separate categories, put her own into the category of human beings. Simple anecdotes, we might say, in order to sweep their truth under the cover of an anthropomorphism that ought to be resisted. However, anecdotes concerning animals are the means to bring about the spacing that prevents all efforts to collapse the case into a generality supposed to describe a behavior. The error would consist in inferring, from these singularities, a thinking substance hidden behind the act (paralogism already invoked by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason) whereas it is instead a matter of conferring on some animal a biographical trans- ject that would be sufficient to himself, in his brilliance.40 Dominique Lestel, on whom we rely here, speaks of this matter as “accreditation.”41 Instead of looking for hidden properties, it is a matter of seeing those properties that are constructed at the heart of the singular arrangements of humans- animals(- machines). Rather than build a binary knowledge upon animals (subjects or not, persons or not, individuals or not), it will be necessary to think the cases in which we could distinguish between subjects with stronger or weaker autonomy, subjects more or less dependent on the human- technical arrangements in which they are engaged. In doing so, we will establish degrees of pluralized consciousness according to the multiple forms that these take. The point that occupies us here is the mode of accreditation of forms of animal individuations or personalizations. This mode, in fact, implies the existence of what Dominique Lestel calls “hybrid human/animal communities,” without which the question of animal singularity would not be posed, at least not as it is posed in the existential dispositifs that have been constructed by human beings: experiments conducted using animal life (laboratory experiments) or the lives of humans in the company of their pets. It is, in fact, in the modality of an interrogation of the cognitive or communicative capacities of animals that these respond by using, in their

Theory of the Trans-ject

49

own ways, the human artifacts that they are permitted. As Lestel shows, the scientific experiments involved in this interrogation undergo permanent “overflowing” that show the emergence of unexpected, and actually moving, behaviors—eventualities that would never occur, to the displeasure of those who fetishize object- oriented ontology, in an interaction between toaster and human being, for example (although perhaps computer and human being). It is certain that today, with these experiments, with the deployment of the category of the subject beyond its modern confinement to the human being, with the extension of rights to animals and particularly to primates, we are witnessing a paradoxical situation: an opening of humanity beyond itself on the grounds of “interior colonizations of the animal,” as Lestel writes. The question is to know whether colonizing closure or destabilizing opening will win out. To give this question its maximal degree of amplitude, we must understand what happens in these interactions in which an animal singularity awakens. Imagine a scene of encounters between different worlds—different Umwelts (Uexküll)—that would come to interpenetrate for a time: The animal who becomes what he was not is not that which he was. It is as if, from an ocean of virtuality, a form of instantaneous biography was awakened. This form has two ways to produce its differentiation: 1. in the weak form, the difference falls between individual and species, giving way to a negative personality, “by default” in conformity (here we think of Lorenz’s geese); 2. in the strong form, which is more rare in the animal worlds, the difference occurs inside the individual. This internal difference is what we have earlier called disjunction or dis- joining. In the first case (the weak form), the unexpected behavior will be brief, like a flash, or limited, like a small variation of the expected ethogram42; in the second (the strong form), the points of the unpredictable trajectory condense into a biographical trans- ject that, in the case of humans beings and several other species, is fixed by the art of memory and of prostheses.43

This memory, this linguistic prosthetic, exists in the case of the dolphin and its “signature whistle,” a unique sonic modulation that each dolphin learns at the beginning of life, and that can be imitated by another dolphin—but why such an imitation? Certain researchers associate these signature whistles with first names that let dolphins “call to” each other.44 Unlike “Washoe” or “Lucy,” these names were not given by a human being. They are the living signs of a heterogenesis that has not waited for human colonization to exist.

50

Book II

If a lion could speak, it would be time to find some alternative between an immediate pseudo- comprehension that annuls alterity by translating it into human language and an a priori deafness, stripping in advance the capacity for generating their own ways of subjectivation from all other animals.

Trajectories, trans- jects, subjects—If to start it has been necessary to speak of human existence, then of co- existence, then of the subject, these terms should now be rethought from the category of the trans-ject. A trans- ject is neither a substance, lying beneath human or animal behaviors, nor the pure Lego game to which the constructivists seem sometimes to reduce the groundless game of being. The living is not plastic matter that can be shaped at will without becoming precisely what one wants it to be: Its “flexibility” is not inherent to it, but comes from the humanist project that falls upon it, taking everything in its forcing—not only humans, but also animals and machines. Trajectories are unpredictable in that they have always overflowed, with no pre- established plan, the constructions we would flatten onto them—from this comes their eccentricity. While a trans- humanist— bio- art artist (Stelarc) or not—wants to change bodies because he thinks that of the human is “obsolete,”45 in the place of what he rejects there will appear a dis- ject (an object of rejection). But trans- jects are unconstructible: In the term trans- ject, the trans- does not indicate a capacity to pass through everything, to produce anything according to any aim, but the incredible apparition of a creation that smashes all expectations. Trans- as in transit: the ectopic movement that materializes as a singular form of being. Yet the concept of the trans- ject is obviously dangerous: Does flexible capitalism not rejoice intensely in the dissolution of the concept of the subject? As this is undone, ever- changing trajectories appear, always adjustable, modelable according to new economic imperatives. But a trans- ject necessarily involves a history, stases, remarkable moments, marks, injuries, and sometimes certain forms of resilience.46 Unlike the concept of the subject, that of the trans- ject involves the passage of time across places; it carries with it what Guattari calls “existential territories.” An existential trans- ject can resist neoliberal modulations because it has a past, because it has existed— because it has become. It can be the place and the time of a refusal because it has already been the scene of a negation. Repetition now becomes an essential question: The problem of an existential trans- ject consists in knowing whether a negation will be repeated—a repetition bringing forth a confirmation. I will call this confirmation “subject”: a repetition that is equal to an act, not a deed that one regrets after the fact, but a resolute response to what

Theory of the Trans-ject

51

would try to erase the deed. What is thus sub-, under the ject, is the name of an a- subjective force that is the memorial of a decision. A subject can refuse the fate that is made for her, or a politics that she does not want, or a perverse trap, in the very name of that which has made her this transient singularity, this existential trajectory. An existence does not need to be immortal to feel the power of its eccentricity.

Book III. The Metaphysical Proposition

The Transgression of the Principle of the Excluded Middle People say, “It’s either this or that,” and it’s always something else. Claude Lévi- Strauss, Conversations with Claude Lévi- Strauss

In the first two parts of this work, we have seen a certain number of concepts appear: the undamaged and the contagious, secret complicity, hydroglobe, absolute flux, saturated immanence and transcendence ≈ x, Socratic divergence, atopia, being- outside, existence, existential field, coalition, finitude, real projection and ideal projection, double advance, absolute freedom, the absolute, clinamen, deviation or spacing, dis- joining, trans- ject. These concepts show what philosophy today must think in order to face the problems of our times—but do they enable us to grasp what philosophy is as a problem for itself? Is it enough to say that philosophy creates concepts to account for the way in which philosophy relates to the undamaged, contagion, double advance, being- outside, and so on? It would first be necessary to agree on what concept means. Hence the necessity of proposing a concept of the concept able to open to an outside—an outside that relates philosophy to its own creation. Here is my definition: every concept contains, in the form of an excluded middle, an out- of- place [hors- lieu].1 To understand the manner in which philosophy is constituted as a problem requires thinking the relation of this out- of- place to the existential atopia that we have sought to identify from the beginning of our inquiry.

The Metaphysical Proposition

53

Consistency of the concept.—For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is defined first and foremost by the creation of concepts. There is also the plane of immanence, which philosophy must trace, but it is said to be “prephilosophical” or even “non- philosophical,” an image of pre- conceptual thought. And the conceptual personae (Socrates as the “main conceptual persona of Platonism,” Nietzsche’s Dionysius, Cuse’s idiot, and so on) who “show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations,” are said to be “proto- philosophical.” In the “philosophical trinity,” the Son (or the concept) has precedence over the Father (the plane of the “cut”) and the Holy Spirit (the conceptual persona who ensures the mediation between the two, as well as between chaos and the plane of the sieve that filters a part of it).2 Each concept has a history, connecting it to the philosophical corpus on which it has the task of commenting: this is the external relation of the concept to tradition. Yet the concept is not only oriented toward the past: In the end, its orientation toward the future relates each component of the concept back to that concept. This relation is not an external one; it is a relation immanent to creation. By staying at the level of the first relation (the external one, with its over- emphasis on tradition), we miss the emergence of conceptual novelty, reducing it to historical necessity (or even historial: Deleuze and Guattari clearly attacked Heidegger on this point). It will thus always be necessary to interpret the past starting from the greatest powers of the present, in a Nietzschean manner: to show how the concept, because it is created, is its own interpretation of the history that it thoroughly rebuilds (on the whole, what would have been made by Heidegger as well as all other creators of concepts). The internal consistency—the self- consistency, the persistence—of the concept is its capacity to stand entirely on its own without there being anything to refer it to some exterior object or some mode, like every creation, such as a painting or a film. The Mona Lisa consists and subsists with no need of knowing whether it resembles Mona Lisa; all paintings seem in an intransitive way. This autonomy is manifest by a particular relationship that the components of the concept maintain between themselves, a relationship that crosses all specific distinctions: If a and b are two components of the concept c, then there exists “an area ab that belongs to both a and b, where a and b ‘become’ indiscernible. These zones, thresholds, or becomings, this inseparability, define the internal consistency of the concept.” The definition of this zone is crucial, and Deleuze and Guattari show clearly—but too quickly—what the matter is: “the concept has already passed into the

54

Book III

excluded middle.”3 It does not seem to me that all the consequences of this short statement concerning the principle of the excluded middle have been elaborated, including the manner in which these two thinkers present their examples of concepts. Why?

Hegelian transgression.—To understand this, we need to go back to Aristotle, the first to state the principle: It is not possible for “there [to] be any intermediate between contrary statements, but of one thing, we must either assert or deny one thing, whatever it may be.”4 True or false, being or non- being—but no intermediate (metaxy), nothing in the middle. From an ontological point of view, this principle is Parmenidian: either something is, absolutely, or it is not at all. What are termed many- valued logics will call this principle into question, starting with Łukasiewicz in 1910. But we know the thinker who, in the nineteenth century, has already challenged the principle of the excluded middle: Hegel, who wanted to get to Parmenides via Heraclitus; Hegel and his philosophical transgression that re- interpreted the entire philosophical field. What Hegel brought to light is the warding-off function of the principle of the excluded middle, consisting in the refusal of contradiction—but this refusal is, in fact, the denied recognition of contradiction! Let us explain this delicate point. For Hegel, all that is can be said to be concrete, which is to say, formed by a non- correspondence. For strict self- congruence would be the purely abstract identity of the type A=A. But all of Hegel’s philosophy consists in showing that logical equality conceals a passage: The first A is not identical to the second. As soon as we seek to seize what is, we seize, after the fact, what has shattered the principle of identity. What is has a finite form, and finitude signifies for Hegel that the immediate being of a thing does not correspond to what that thing is in itself. This lack of correspondence founds for itself each finished form, and consequently singularizes it. Singularity is not the absolute identity of the thing excluded from the rest, without world, for this is impossible (meaning non- concrete, non- real, inexistent): Singularity is necessarily relation with the Other. In this sense, A is not A: Each thing is only in relation to itself insofar as it is in relation to the Other. This relation is not exterior to the thing; it constitutes it internally as contradiction, and cannot be reduced to an either/or, which Hegel attributes to abstract understanding. Abstract understanding is limited to the principle of the excluded middle because it excludes the possibility that contradiction might be the very movement of the passage beyond—and not the affirmation—of the either/or. Yet the middle is still present, but as becoming, the becoming of

The Metaphysical Proposition

55

that which is predicated. In effect, when we say that “A must be either + A or – A [. . .] [i]t virtually declares in these words a third A which is neither + nor –, and which at the same time is yet invested with + and – characters.” Because each term (+ A, – A) “has an existence of its own in proportion as it is not the other. The one is made visible in the other, and is only in so far as that other is,” “the one is only reflected into itself as it is reflected into the other.” Reflection and appearance (Schein) certainly are not the supreme state of concreteness, but its conditions of specular possibility: It is the concept that is absolutely concrete,5 and not that multiplicity given to senses where each thing seems linked to each other from the exterior. The concept takes in itself this sublation of the sensible multiplicity after it has seized the essence (reflection and appearance of the one in the other), the foundation from which comes existence, then the appearance (Erscheinung) of the essence as existence,6 then the relation of existents between themselves, the total reality of which the concept is charged with supporting, containing, and retaining. The concept is indeed the “murder of the Thing,”7 which is to say the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic, and in this passage the concept frees itself 1. from the Other because it has com- prehended (understood and included) it in itself, and 2. from finitude, because the concept corresponds to its capacity to account for the non- correspondence of being.

Contradiction and difference.—Certain similarities appear between the DeleuzoGuattarian philosophical approach and Hegelian logic. Both cases are committed to the middle, metaxy, the ontological space deserted by the poor logic of understanding. For this, it is necessary to think becoming as a transgression of the principle of the excluded middle. But it is ultimately the principle of non- contradiction that Hegel wants to overcome through this transgression, where Deleuze and Guattari want to affirm difference as such. These two perspectives diverge when it comes to the superiority accorded to the and or the nor. What interests Deleuze and Guattari is the both/and; but Hegel, even though he identifies the logical function of union, insists on what precedes it: the neither/nor. For Hegel, the zone of indiscernibility (both/ and) is conditioned by an originary negation (neither/nor). Deleuze and Guattari have minimized this negative condition. The advantage of their philosophical position is that in the logic of both/and, becomings concern not only that which is contradictory, but also that which is different. Must we say that for Deleuze and Guattari becomings concern only that which is different? It is possible. The opening of unpredictable (contingent) becomings probably implies the eviction of that which is contradictory,8 to the extent that

56

Book III

the becoming of what is subjected to contradiction is also on condition of necessity: If the seed dies, there will be no plant. In the Hegelian system, contingency is only formal (whether that particular plant grows or not does not matter). I state only the obvious: The entire question for Deleuze and Guattari, their philosophical bet, is to be able to do away with contradiction in favor of difference. Here is also a philosophical divergence, and its price: either we limit becoming to that which is contradictory and we lose radical contingency, or we extend becoming by minimizing the negative. Blindness of the neither/nor to the improbable conjunctions of being that not only become, but come back; deafness of the both/and to the negativity that works always already mutely. Either, or: Do we leave it there?

The Leap and the Loop x=x says something about “=” but nothing about x. Heinz von Foerster

No philosopher has ever left it there. Divergence is only the initial situation of philosophical thought, or where it ends up falling back, out of fatigue. Each time a concept is created, the principle of the excluded middle is transgressed. The question is to explain the gesture of transgression and what sort of creation results from it. Such a gesture cannot come about without some apprehension. It requires a sort of wager, an eidetic imperilment, an act that is unreasonable, harrowing, and marvelous. A leap at once out of and in the circuit of the being, there where the double- holed ∞ of subjectivity is undone.

Becoming and line of flight.—Deleuze repeats often that becoming is one of the concepts that he and Guattari have created, along with the refrain or the body without organs. Yet the first pages of the chapter in A Thousand Plateaus dedicated to this concept are very clear: It is first a matter of showing that becoming is neither a, nor not- a, neither b, nor not- b—neither correspondence of relations, nor resemblance or identification either. “We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, a block of becoming.” The terms put into play—for example, human and animal, in the “becoming- animal”—are not traversed as fixed points; rather, becoming “runs its own line ‘between’ the terms,” it is a rhizomatic line that is neither “a classificatory or genealogical tree.” Becoming is neither producing, nor appearing, nor being, nor equaling, and so on. If, consequently, becoming- animal is said to have to pass through the

The Metaphysical Proposition

57

“contagion of the pack,” we must specify that multiplicity, if it is certainly not the One, is also not the multiple without “exceptional individual”—“there may be no such thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack,” the “Anomalous” of the pack, which is itself neither abnormal nor normed, and finally neither individual nor species.9 If this double negation fades thereafter,10 this is without doubt because the man/animal relation is too molar, and what interests Deleuze and Guattari is what happens above or below this waterline, with “becoming- imperceptible,” the question of intensities and improbable arrangements, “becoming- minoritarian” as that which is the loss of all identity as ascribable face. Waterline versus “line of flight”: This last concept has frequently been glossed. For our purposes, it is enough to note that, in describing becoming, the line of flight also describes the creation of concepts as experimentation or risk- taking, and not the assurance of erudite knowledge about being. If becoming is always in the middle, “neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in- between, the border or line of flight or descent, running perpendicular to both,”11 we must understand a line of flight as an event that really happens to the philosopher who tries to become something besides a commentator on tradition. And as the movement of becoming is always double, it is the tradition which suddenly changes form. The one who says only both Deleuze and Hegel, or both Sartre and Nancy, without losing herself in the double negation of the neither/nor, is ultimately not only unfaithful to philosophy but to her own existence.12

Hic salta.—One cannot move into the excluded middle via a straight line, because no path leads there, nothing pre- traced. Even worse, the “perpendicular” of which Deleuze and Guattari speak is traced above a void which every creator must face with anxiety and jubilation. This is not the anxiety of the blank page, for filling it changes nothing, the void will not be filled in the manner of the empty case; the void moves and composes itself differently, in new configurations which are proposed to existence. The anxiety here has to do with the leap—the leap as the only way to move into the excluded middle. Let us study this risky move via several examples. In the fifth chapter of the second section of Book I of Capital, Marx is confronted with the following problem: in the M- C- Mʹ process, where does surplus value—the fact that Mʹ>M—come from?13 Certainly it cannot be exterior to the sphere of circulation, but it cannot be reduced to it either. Either equivalent goods are exchanged and nothing is added, or nonequivalence is offset over time: The seller, who has sold the commodity at a higher price than its value, will in turn be the buyer and lose what he has won, and

58

Book III

vice- versa. If we wish therefore to understand how money is transformed into capital, we must find something that is neither money nor some commodity, the only way to show that surplus value is simultaneously in and out of the sphere of circulation. In the face of this impasse, Marx closes the chapter with “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” a line from Aesop’s fable The Boastful Athlete: “Here is Rhodes, jump here!” This leap consists in identifying, at the very heart of the sphere of circulation, something that might at the same time be exterior to it, an anomalous commodity: the force of labor which, consumed, produces value.14 Hic Rhodus, hic salta: We find this formula again in Being and Event, when Badiou explains what an event is.15 The event is at once internal to the situation and at the same time exceeds it. Here again, it is a matter of localizing an anomaly, a strange place, an “evental site,” an “anormal multiple,” “on the edge of the void,” which is certainly not the event itself but its condition: the pre- revolutionary situation, the agitated searchings for an art born out of dissatisfaction with the icons of the time, the workings of science on a worn- out paradigm. The event has this paradoxical consistency of the simultaneous inclusion of the elements of the site and what marks it as event itself. This auto- inclusion would seem to close the event into itself: Who could say if there is a real event, or simply an illusion, or a necessary unfolding of the conditions already present? This is precisely what is “undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself,” for all questions on this matter would be “circular”: to know if the French Revolution is an event, and neither the expected and continuing results of historical structure (nothing new under the sun) nor a fantasy (nothing will have taken place but the place of exaggerated speech, a useless excess of signification): To escape this either/or, we must—escape! This is at the same time a tautology and an absolute conceptual risk. For, from the standpoint of the situation, I cannot be inside and outside at the same time; yet it is before this impossibility that it is a matter of the leap, and thus of being in and out at once. This is what Badiou at that time called an “interpretive decision,” a “bet,” an “illegal” nomination in view of the structure—in other words, a second event, this one linguistic. Against the “circle,” here is the method: “splitting the point at which it rejoins itself ” and making “the curious mirroring of the event and the intervention” appear in its strangeness.16

Circle and loop.—Curious indeed. For the decision is a “belief ”17; it pertains to a certain faith in the ability to escape from a circle in which thought is immersed. This is not to say that there would be something incurably

The Metaphysical Proposition

59

religious or theological in philosophy, but on the contrary to maintain that religion—supposing that this generalization makes sense—is a specific manner of integrating belief, faith, confidence, the credit given to a certain conception of transcendence—the concentrated transcendence of the One, as we called it before. In this respect, it is possible to identify other ways of integrating belief, confidence, and credit, what our age verifies with its attempt to sanctify the financial sphere and its technological fantasies. In Creative Evolution, Bergson gives philosophy the goal of “dissolving again into the whole,” beyond the intelligence that grasps clearly only the discontinuous, the useful and the immobile—but how to go beyond intelligence except with the intelligence? “Vicious circle” that can only be broken by an action of the type “I throw myself into the water,” accepting “frankly” the risk.18 We must leap, even if this would only mean to perceive that the circle is not as vicious as it seemed. For Bergson, it is a matter of saying that the intelligence was not in fact as separated from the rest of the world as it claimed to be. Actually the circle appears as a real circle, which is to say without interruption, only for those who believe in the absolute interruption of the intelligence by instinct. This is why it is so important, as Badiou taught us, to “split” the point at which the circle “rejoins itself.” It is crucial to understand that if the circle were perfectly homogeneous, uniform, symmetrical, absolute, no leap would be possible, no creation, no thought; it would be impossible to distinguish what flees and what comes back, becoming and that which has become. Let’s take a step further: Why should we believe in the concept of circle? Is it not a perfect time to leap? I leap: there is no circle. But there are loops—heterogeneous, differentiated, asymmetrical—that are sometimes circles before becoming loops again. Unlike atemporal circles, loops have a point that is at once interior and exterior to them, a point of looping which is equally a point of un- looping. This original symmetry breaking is that without which there would be neither being nor thought. It is accessed by a leap. And even if it is a leap in place, as Heidegger maintains,19 this disconnection—which is of the order of finite transcendence, of existence—changes everything. We are perhaps tired of hearing about Plato’s Cave, and yet, how better to describe the loop of being, the fact that the ontological circuit is always already cut?20 The allegory of the Cave seems to begin with an inaugural dis- connection: A prisoner is freed; then he gets out of the cave and enjoys the contemplation of Ideas. But the narrative does not end here, for the prisoner agrees to lose her freedom and to return to the cave. The goal of this ethical- political return is to free the other prisoners, en masse, thanks to education—but also to offer a logical explanation for the first dis- connection:

60

Book III

Indeed, the condition of possibility of the first liberation results from the liberation itself! Is it a vicious circle? Or the affirmation that the outside of the Cave is always already inside the Cave, that every subject bears a breaking point that contests the ontological reality of full circles. What exists are the infinite loops through which our freedom experiences itself as a ceaseless un- looping.

Wager.—But to what extent are we assured of these points of un- looping? Of the continuity or the discontinuity of being? Of these dis- joinings that would exercise their supposed effects even in animal realms? Of ek-, as such? Faith and belief, we say, in other words, alliances. Alliances of philosophy with what philosophy is not, when what philosophy is not comes to think philosophy, according to a recursivity that can be accomplished only at our risk and peril. As Pascal said, we “must wager. There is no choice. [We] are embarked.”

The Unlocatable I cross the philosophical field in an absolute solitude. And so now there are no more limits, no more walls, nothing holds me back. It’s my only chance. Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference

But it is not enough to wager. It is necessary to develop what the wager requires, beyond the mere creation of concepts, in the formation of metaphysical propositions. It can certainly seem difficult to take up the term “metaphysics” after all the attacks to which this term has been subjected: Did Nietzsche not declare that being is only a “fiction”?21 The human sciences have jealously attempted to take the place of metaphysics; but the humanities are today classed among those hollow idols, supplanted by the cybernetic sciences, computer computation, neurobiology, and research that digitizes literature in order to quantify it more easily. It is against all these cognitive simulations that I appeal to metaphysics, that name given to a science that will always lack a name.

The unlocatable of the concept.—Philosophy would not have been possible without an out- of- place, that un- attributable dimension with which it is sometimes too strongly identified. Philosophy is, however, not the only thing to suffer from this identification, this adhesion to nowhere: All cultural em-

The Metaphysical Proposition

61

anations—literature, science, religion—phenomenalize atopia to different degrees. All creation, singular or collective, draws the possibility of constituting an artistic or theoretical interiority to the outside. Even more than philosophy, economics now represents the socially realized psychosis of a mathematical out- of- place barred from all real human and ecological situations. What separates philosophy in this inevitable regime of creative detachment is its definition as reflexive practice of atopia, curled out- of- place. The term “reflection” goes back to a fundamentally classical conception of philosophy, a minimal conception, largely dismantled from Nietzsche to Deleuze—who, along with Guattari, reminds us in What Is Philosophy that scientists and artists know how to think by themselves, and have no need of philosophy to think what they create. Jean- Luc Godard, Paul Thomas Anderson, Virginia Woolf, Judy Chicago, and Ilya Prigogine are eminent thinkers in their own right, but in what way would it be forbidden to name the specificity of philosophy’s reflection? The creation of concepts is only the metabolization of the specific problem of philosophy, the problem that it is for itself in terms of thinking about thought. We cannot only compare, as Deleuze and Guattari do, creative operations (percepts for science, affects for art, concepts for philosophy), for it is equally necessary to include the creation of concepts in that paradoxical situation of the thinking of thought that makes the concept itself—far from being able to be reduced to the “tools” in what would be a sort of toolbox- book22—always in part unlocatable. It is this part that prevents the concept from becoming purely a tool, and makes it sometimes temporarily or ultimately unusable. To speak the language of Heidegger’s Being and Time, we can say that the unlocatable part of the concept makes it into something entirely other than a tool that is “present- at- hand” or “ready- to- hand,” for it causes the signifying “structure of reference” to crumble.23 It is thanks to this obscure part that the concept can venture beyond what is supposedly visible or invisible. This adventure can lead the concept to encounter a real aspect of the world. It is because of this that surfers, or origami- folders, according to Deleuze, might recognize themselves in The Fold, his book on Leibniz: The unlocatable makes unforeseen uses possible. Certainly this does not mean that it does not matter how we use concepts; not everything is “use,” as we are too quick to say today. The unlocatable part of the concept requires that the ethical gesture consists in problematizing more than in using. The unlocatable part of the concept is its luck and its damnation, the same as that of philosophy—and philosophy must respond to it. Philosophy must be accountable for its atopian condition. This is a condition and it can be

62

Book III

rejected; no one is constrained to philosophy—and this lack of constraint seems more and more to turn into the lack of philosophy itself, its disappearance in the name of theory, “studies” and trans- disciplinarity. However, because of its unlocatable and un- institutionalizable part, philosophy has always been trans- , firmly in disdain of frontiers, internationalist—or we should say, borrowing from Peter Gizzi, outernationalist.24 If political sovereignty has its source in the nothingness that allows it to give death and norms to living bodies, in the guise of what Achille Mbembe calls a “necropolitics,”25 then philosophy would be a relation to freed nothingness, unconditioned, without use, removed from all sovereign will. Philosophy is intrinsically an- archic.

Metaphysical problems.—Each domain of knowledge rests on a problem and different ways of dealing with it. But philosophy poses a problem to problems themselves, and this is what tends to disappear as soon as knowledge is assigned to calculation and to technologically assisted simulation. To problematize all problems pertains to the same passage that von Foerster opened up to transform science into what he calls “systems”: a doubling that puts what is interrogated into the interrogating position.26 The questioner himself has become the one who is questioned. This is not a simple doubling, but a change of epistemological status: the questioned object only becomes a questioning subject. Because of this doubling, truth emerges as what pierces knowledge, a mise- en- abyme that approaches—but only approaches—absolute skepticism.27 In effect, an absolute skepticism would attempt exactly to espouse the madness of being, that chaos that cannot even be set as foundation, because it is the absence of foundation—that absence itself giving no guarantee, in no way able to be mathematically held back. But an absolute concordance with chaos would be the end of thought; the doubling would dissolve in the pure One of a pure multiplicity of multiplicities. Philosophy can only be doubled, in the form of the thought of thought: This doubling is the abyssal place that philosophy creates for itself in order not to fall into the abyss. This is its paradoxical territory, which can be named the territory of metaphysics. When we say metaphysics, we insist on the atopian character of philosophy, its relation to the –ek, to the outside. Around 50–60 b.c., Andronicus of Rhodes, putting the Aristotelian corpus in order, classified the principal work as meta ta phusika, literally what comes after physics. In this sense, metaphysics is without content, simply designating that which cannot be classified: a science with no name. Whether empirical or speculative, critiques of metaphysics have always been about hollowing out metaphysics, showing that

The Metaphysical Proposition

63

its contents had been usurped, and from there returning these contents to a more concrete philosophy, a more authentic ontology or a specific science (sociology, economics, neurology, and so on). In so doing, these critiques ultimately end up purifying metaphysics as a domain outside domains, an extra- epistemological era, an extra- territorial science, unwittingly confirming—this is the irony—metaphysics’ original gesture and necessity. If ontology is the science or logic of being, the possibility of thinking being as such implies metaphysics as the position and operation of thought on being. The difficulty is—and this is indeed what we have been confronting since the beginning of this work—not to transform the “after”—the meta—into the “above,” into absolute split; not to change dis- joining into immunization, into auto- immune disorder. Here is our categorical imperative: “Metaphysician, do not turn atopian deterritorialization into the territory of the undamaged!” We might re- read the philosophical tradition starting from this internal confrontation: If Sophia can also mean wisdom, this would be only in terms of its capacity to metabolize the negativity that is unique to it—a metabolization forbidding that “metaphysics qua metaphysics [might be] authentic nihilism” (Heidegger). In other words, the absence of an interior struggle against ontological immunization is always the sign of a rejection—known, unknown, projective—of philosophy. The justice of this agonistic operation is the reminder of originary chaos, of the temporal flame that flickers in each object, each thought: every matheme is the suppression of noise. Philosophy is obligated to suffer from a hypermnesia, just to the point of forgetting what it naively—natively—needs to create its concepts.

Being, existence, and the living.—What must be defended today, what must we promote? A fundamental ontology (Heidegger), a phenomenological ontology (Sartre), a mathematical ontology (Badiou), or an ontology of multiplicities (Deleuze)? We understand the value of a defense of ontology as constitutive exercise, opposing the thought of being to the celebration of the Other, in its moral or religious forms. Ontology also appears healthy when one wants to banish philosophy to the confines of studies concerning shallow language games,28 instructions for social behavior (how to be happy, whom to vote for, and so on.), micro- topics trapped in stifling “areas” of knowledge. Reducing reality to a social, cultural, and linguistic domain, in the end constructed by humans, dominant forms of knowledge are now challenged by a timely wave of ontological investigations: speculative realisms and new materialisms have launched a new set of researches into objects, reality,

64

Book III

and matter that imply several conceptions of being as something literally unhuman, irreducible to human construction. Yet I am not sure that reality or matter is a good point of departure for theory. In fact, every time we begin an investigation by trying to find an accurate name for being, existence fades. When being is the first object of thought, a movement of absolutization is automatically launched; this absolutization unavoidably makes existence secondary. Thus what seems to me the main task of contemporary philosophy is to fight this secondariness and to ab- solve philosophy of the absolute. This does not mean that being is just a hollow fiction; rather, it means that being, the name of being, has to be found after existence is investigated. What is at stake is not a mere inversion, à la Sartre, of the kind “existence precedes essence,” but a new version of being as a difference retroactively found from the inside of an existent. Neither a substance that precedes subjects and objects, nor a hollow fiction that we ought to forget, being can be grasped as an effect of the self- differentiation of the existent—a stone, a living being, or the whole universe. Once we understand that a true philosophy of existence accounts for the differentiating spacings by which an existent comes into being, how can we understand life? For Nietzsche, life is nothing other than the real name of being: “The living is the being: there is no other being.” Every other name given to being would be wrong: “The ‘being’—we have no other way to represent it than ‘to live’—So how can something that is dead be a ‘being’?”29 The mistake here would be to consider life a substance severed from such or such existing living being. Rather, we should understand the relation between existence and life, in the living being, as an indistinct separation: There is a difference, somewhere and somehow, but we are not necessarily capable of (al)locating it. For example, sexual difference can exist without being distinctly ascribable to a precise biological locus of the body, not because the body does not matter, but because the matter at stake in the process of sexual differentiation does not necessarily correspond to what supposedly is the norm (the “normal” “sexual” characteristic of such or such “identity”). We understand now why a philosophy of existence, far from being a flat kind of knowledge, requires a metaphysical depth of field: The metaphysical function is to leave a place for the unlocatable that is involved in the selfdifferentiating process that gives way to an existent. If a vitalism should stem from this philosophy, it would be an affirmation of the fact that life, rather than being a principle or an animated matter, is what confirms to the highest degree that there is no such thing as being as such. In this lack of being- as- such, metaphysics creates its territory.

The Metaphysical Proposition

65

The unlocatable [insituable] and situation.—Hypothesis carved into unassignable territory, the metaphysical proposition awaits perceptions. A metaphysical proposition is neither relation to objects, nor to subjects, but to trans- jects, to trajectories as incalculable as the disjunction whose movement it seeks to repeat. Inhabiting a paradoxical territory, a metaphysical proposition must, however, guard itself from being too guarded from the world. As Bernard Aspe has shown, the danger of metaphysics is in believing that speculation is a self- sufficient act: Such belief will unavoidably bypass real political action, especially if speculation finds a comfortable place in culture—as, for example, a book.30 How does the passage from metaphysical out- of- place to place in the world come about? From the unlocatable to the situation? It does not come about, it cannot. A metaphysical proposition can only charge a trans- ject with metaphors of the unhuman, with the hope that these metaphors will not completely vanish once exposed to politics.

The Madwoman of the Out-of-Place For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner’s adage forbids: to work one’s way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through a higher concept of the negation of the negation. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems

Name for a science that does not have one, out- of- place, unlocatable character of the concept: All of these conditions are assembled to set new and imaginary doves flying in the “empty space of [the] pure understanding.”31 I want to affirm rather than to deny the relation of metaphysics to the imagination. Against philosophy’s inaugural and persistent mistrust of the imagination, I say that metaphysics summons the imagination in its out- ofplace. But in what form? What type of imagination is at play in metaphysics? The question is whether the imagination seals and encircles metaphysical territory, or if it can open it toward its extremes: the immemorial and the end of time.

Madwoman of the house.—Like their predecessors, the thinkers of the twentieth century are highly wary of the imagination. On this point there exists general

66

Book III

agreement from Plato to Deleuze. Deleuze and Guattari insist on the real aspect of becoming; Lacan develops the concepts of the real and the symbolic against the imaginary and the illusory captures of the “mirror stage”; Badiou, following Lacan, accords to fiction only the virtue of being a stop- gap for the real; Derridian “messianism without messiah” implies the casting off of all anticipation so as to leave space open for the “to- come.” The idea that the imagination is the “madwoman of the house,” a “madwoman who is pleased to play the fool” (Malebranche),32 is systematically maintained. Pascal points out the difficulty: If she were only the “mistress of error and falsehood,” this would be a lesser evil—but the problem becomes that the imagination is “all the more treacherous because it is not consistently treacherous. For it would be an infallible rule of truth if it were an infallible one of lies.”33 The imagination can be true, and it is exactly this possibility that is intolerable. To evade this danger, we place her under the control of reason, by producing allegories (Plato)34 or by insisting on the fact that “truth has the structure of fiction” (Lacan).35 From here, we can truly say that imagination could possibly pronounce something in the way of truth. What is repressed each time is the destabilizing power of the imagination, which exposes a certain unlimitedness that cannot be fixed in some divine or mathematical infinity, not only to the wandering of the truth, but to wandering itself. Descartes thus shows that the imagination does not reach the essence of wax, and that it must leave room for the understanding and “the inspection of the spirit.”36 But this failure of the imagination is welcome: It enables its evacuation to the benefit of certitude. Against the fluidity of imagination, let us pose the fixity of the concept, understood as description of domain. I am not certain that it is possible to escape this use of the imagination, as I write these lines in order to explain imagination, that is to say to fix it in a system of thought. Writing implies a symbolization in the form of emergence that spaces the two edges of meaning and links them on the basis of their difference. Interpreting the meaning of the second Biblical commandment, Lacan tells us that “the elimination of the function of the imaginary presents itself to my mind as the principle of the relation to the symbolic, that is to say, to speech.”37 The difficulty, which Lacan confronts in The Ego in Freud’s Theory, is to think symbolic emergence as such, and then to see the way in which this emergence reconfigures the situation that preceded it,38 in such a way that the latter, retroactively, seems to have been that of all time. A symbolization locally forbids the affirmation that “nothing will have taken place but the place” (Mallarmé), no matter how intense an obsessive anxiety and its canceling drive may be. However, the great danger to which Lacan, like others following him, has often succumbed is to fix the

The Metaphysical Proposition

67

Symbolic by over- emphasizing its detachment from the edges of meaning. It is this reinforcement that does away with the possibility of reconfiguring the symbolic, renewing the emergence of the distinct, anticipating any politics that would contest the symbolic in its contingent social form. The Symbolic with a capital S, according to Butler (as well as Foucault), is nothing other than a norm. Against this hardening of the symbolic, the opposite temptation is powerful: to refuse to distinguish between symbolic and imaginary (Butler,39 Derrida40). Certainly a local refusal might be useful, even politically necessary. But a confusion of registers will ultimately lead us to miss the unique power of symbolization as well as imagination. It is the “forgetting [of] this primitive world of metaphor,” the “petrifaction and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid,” that, according to Nietzsche, explains the fixing of the concept, this no more than a “residue of metaphor.” But for all that, can we do without this forgetting? And is metaphor only a product of the imagination? To answer these questions, we must go very far—in order to leap, again, even farther.

Non- knowing and prospecting.—In his Doctrine of Knowledge, Fichte defines a sort of inaugural unconscious, before all repression, which consists of the absolute impossibility, for the self, of becoming conscious of the imaginary formation of the world: “not a reflection,” this formation “is not ascribed to the self,” and is only reattached to the self after the fact, “in the philosophic reflection which we are at present engaged in and which must always be carefully distinguished from the common and necessary kind.”41 In other words, to that of which we are conscious as a product of imagination, we do not ascribe reality; yet we certainly do this to what we find contained in the understanding, to which we ascribe no power of production at all, but merely that of conservation.

In so- called natural (non- philosophic) reflection, we cannot go back up behind—and before—the understanding and its activity on the world; we go back up to it and discover that there is something “given.” Something has been given “to reflection as the material of presentation,” but we “do not become conscious” of the way in which this matter “arrived there”: this original presentation remains inaccessible to consciousness: “Hence our firm conviction of the reality of things outside us, and this without any

68

Book III

contribution on our part, since we are unaware of the power that produces them.”42 If we could naturally and immediately become conscious of this original power of the productive imagination, we would not have this “firm conviction,” the assurance that things beyond us exist. For Fichte, the assured existence of an out- of- us results from our ontological incapacity for the immediate grasp of the imagination. The unconscious, Fichte tells us, is thus thinkable as an operation (and not a content): It is that without which everything would be only oneself, and thus defines a sphere of non- power, an originally barred access. Fichte approaches psychosis here, insofar as his thought strays into the closest reaches of that without which alterity would fail. But he permits us to understand, a century before Freud, the difference between the unconscious as repression, “the unconscious proper,” in Freud’s terms, and the original unconscious barring access to a certain imagination that we would call creative, originarily creative or formative of the world. The “fiery liquid” of which Nietzsche speaks is already a derivative production, a representation, linked to a re- productive form of the imagination. What was called by the name of genius, as capacity, is the possibility of connecting the second imagination (re- productive) and the first (productive). This connection is first and above all artistic. But it also has, without doubt, a place in a certain regime of political formation, or of scientific intuition. Let us add that this connection also comes about by metaphysical thought, in an abstract mode and not in the modality of any realization (artistic, political, scientific). This mode is double. 1. Under the category of consciousness, metaphysics does not mean that which pertains to identity and to the dialectic of self and other, but that which is in touch with the immemorial. Consciousness, said to be reflexive, is not what initially accompanies my representations but what summons them to their point of appearance. It is the immediate grasp of the immemorial, grasped in terms of form and not of contents (this is the Fichtian lesson). By consciousness, which is nothing other than the “outside of itself,”43 and which constitutes not so much objects of thought as a universe in quest of meaning, I am immediately carried to the beginning of time, and once again to the question: “why is there something rather than nothing” (Leibniz)? The inaugural unconscious does not have to become conscious, since it is that consciousness which, in touch with the immemorial, does not know itself. According to what is only apparently a paradox, the consciousness of the immemorial that knows itself is the known inaugural unconscious—not illuminated, disclosed or canceled, but known as such, with its gap (its absence of ground).44 Hypothetically, if a subject—a supposed Sage—incarnated the thinking of thought, and if this thinking managed to maintain itself, I believe that it would be necessary

The Metaphysical Proposition

69

to say, with Schelling and the obscure tradition that innervates his philosophy, that this knowledge would also be the end of the subject, a non- knowledge indistinguishable from the subjectivity left vacant by the disappearance of the subject—a non- knowledge turned into a subjectivity for a subject who would know nothing about it. 2. This obscure contact with the immemorial, which is the ground of the unlocatable part of the concept, is the basis upon which metaphysics separates from time, toward something like the non- memory of the future, literally and metaphorically the end of time. It is here that the concept, riddled with holes, becomes prospective. If, as Adorno claims, metaphysics “is both a critique and a reprise or resumption of theology,” if it “attempts to rescue through concepts what it simultaneously calls into question through its critique,”45 this rescue simultaneously implies an advance in time that exceeds this critique. Certainly, Adorno tells us, “one will not survive by preserving some so- called higher spheres, or what I would prefer to call nature reserves, which reflection is not allowed to touch”; against this putting- into- reserve, he proposes to “[push] the processes of de- mythologizing, or enlightenment [Aufklärung], to the extreme”: “ ‘renounce, that you may gain.’ ”46 But it is the same Adorno who tells us that metaphysics cannot gain anything except by being also the possibility of “thinking beyond itself into Openness.”47 This Openness is the symmetrical temporality of the immemorial. Thus metaphysics “is the form of consciousness in which it attempts to know what is more than the case, or is not merely the case.”48 To know “more than the case, or is not merely the case” pertains to the imagination, and not to the calculation of understanding. Beyond what we know and what we feel is the place where the understanding becomes hallucinatory, the eye becoming concept and the concept seeing. Cartesian “evil genie,” Fichte’s “living sight,” Nietzschean “overman,” and so on.

Rational enthusiasm.—But what is this Schwärmerei? Are we not here beyond the boundaries of philosophy, and even of metaphysics? Or are we not confirming, but at our expense, what is said of metaphysics: namely, that it must be taken care of, nursed, because it is delirious or childish? At no moment, however, do we propose to abandon the Principle of reason, in the sense that Serres has been able to show, this Principle being simply that there exists something rather than nothing: Exist rather than. Which is almost a pleonasm, since existence denotes a stability, plus a deviation from the fixed position. To exist rather than is to be in deviation

70

Book III

from equilibrium. Exist rather. And the principle of reason is, strictly speaking, a theorem of statics. If things exist and if there is a world, they are displaced in relation to zero.49

The metaphysical imagination is what enables the contemplation of deviations or spacings that are not immediately perceptible, whether they concern the past emergence of things or their future possibilities—two localizations of the out- of- place. This rational imagination promises the incredible and gives itself to the enigma of the presence of the world. Thus metaphysics does not escape its boundaries, but incorporates them into its abyssal questioning.

Science(s), Art, Politics If ancient tragedy was thrown off course by the dialectical drive towards knowledge and the optimism of science, one should conclude from this fact that there is an eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic views of the world. Only when the spirit of science can be carried to its limits and its claim to universal validity negated by the demonstration of these limits might one hope for a rebirth of tragedy; the symbol which we would propose for this cultural form is that of the music-making Socrates. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

A double temptation threatens philosophy: to close in on itself, abstract itself absolutely from the world, or to want to become itself absolutely other. These two possibilities can coincide, resting on a closure into itself by which philosophy would believe itself to be the other—a science, Science, art, a religion, politics. In other words, what Badiou calls “conditions,” the “truthprocedures” of philosophy. Is philosophy, however, never its own condition?

The philosophical act.—Badiou affirms that philosophy is missing an act, unlike its conditions. There is the act of love, or political actions (declarations of war, revolutions, and so on). There are also forms of techno- scientific production, artistic performances, and perhaps, beyond the conditions identified by Badiou, religious ritual. What, however, is philosophy’s act? We might say of the philosopher what Lacan said of the psychoanalyst: that she has a “horror of the act” (for the act could be reduced to an interpretation, even though interpretation is ultimately secondary vis- à- vis the symbolization that takes place in psychoanalysis). Here is Socrates:

The Metaphysical Proposition

71

You do not understand what is going on; none of the arguments comes from me, but always from him who is talking with me. I myself know nothing, except just a little, enough to extract an argument from another man who is wise and to receive it fairly.50

Socrates—or any philosopher—can sometimes be a Master, but certainly no more in the manner of Pythagoras, assuring that “He, the Master, said it [Ipse dixit].” For only the silence carried by a philosopher assures the impact of his act: the re- moval of weak knowledge, the displacement of trajectories, the transformation of circles into spirals. The philosophical act is conditioned by an exemplary passivity (“to receive,” says Socrates) attested to by the lives of the Stoics, Cynics, or Pyrrho: The rejection of the world rests on the utter conviction of being “embarked.” When the philosopher plays the Master (or, impatient disciple,51 names his Master in order to install himself in that line of descent and thus become, in a form of supreme recognition, the Master of his Master), he is perhaps a professor; if not, an imposter. There is thus indeed a philosophical act, and because of this the risk—to take up here the ideas of Bernard Aspe—of an enclosing, a sort of suture of philosophy to itself, in its own speech, its words, and their cultural packaging. And, linked to this risk, philosophy’s permanent questioning of the act by which it would no longer be itself, but one of those privileged others that it tends to resemble: Science, sciences, art, religion, or politics:

1. Science. For Hegel, the Sage is possible, and Science names the end of philosophy and the end of questioning—which is to say, the answer. In his commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève insists on the fact that the elimination of the possibility of the Sage implies either a skeptical end of philosophy, or a theological affirmation of a non- human—that is to say divine—knowledge. Vis- à- vis the first possibility, he indicates that a radically skeptical end of philosophy leads to a supreme silence, taking in its fall not only philosophy but the possibility of speech itself—an “absolute silence.”52 This corresponds to what we have affirmed in Book I: the fundamental alliance of philosophy with existence as such. As for the second possibility, Kojève affirms that the condition of Science is the circularity of knowledge: to deny this return to the initial, which verifies that everything has been said, is to deny wisdom. On the contrary, the theological hypothesis implies the circle’s point of rupture, a “singular point” that “closes” and “interrupts” it, this point being God. It is remarkable that the lessons of Kojève, which are dedicated to this question of absolute knowledge, are confronted ceaselessly

72

Book III

by the hypothesis of madness (that which his auditors—Bataille, Lacan— would indeed have heard). In fact, an extreme possibility is here at play: an either/or, which can only be resolved—if we try to maintain the Hegelian philosophical system as Kojève describes it—in a radical immanentization where human being, the world, and God are identified. What was not evident for Kojève here is the possibility of the spiral, which is only the incessant and a- theological multiplication of the points of interruption of the circle, throwing the latter into what is no longer simply the question of philosophy or the sage’s answer, but metaphysical proposition, and what it owes to the out- ofplace—to the interruptions—as well as to the imagination.

2. The sciences. Once we have abandoned the idea of a mathematics capable of accounting for being- as- such, there remains the close relation that meta- physics keeps with physics. (Besides, Heidegger reminds us here that Aristotle’s Physics is an authentic book of metaphysics, which is not a good sign for him—but is, assuredly, for us.) The physics that we need concerns existence and tries to respond to Leibniz’s question—“why is there something rather than nothing”—transformed as follows: Why is there something rather than (nothing). The rather- than, as Serres after Lucretius has said, and as Prigogine and Stengers have confirmed, consists in accounting for the bifurcations, original phase transitions, structuring dissipations—the clinamen of being.53 When sciences do not think (to refer to Heidegger’s ungenerous diagnosis), it is because they become simulated calculations cut off from the immemorial and the unpredictable, subjected to the control of existences needed by capitalism. Thus we understand—thanks to Heidegger—that it is essential to make manifest the dimension of nothingness that, in Leibniz’s proposition as in the aforementioned Occidental tradition, seems largely to have been ignored. Yet Heidegger would certainly have interpreted our parentheses around the word nothing, in our formula “why is there something rather than (nothing),” as—again—the sign of the foreclosure of nothingness. To address this Heideggerian concern, we must subsequently write: why is there something rather than → nothing

Thus rather than to consider nothingness qua nothingness, it is better to understand how the arrow of nothing(ness) tilts the letters of rather than → nothing, and to understand nothing(ness) as the groundlessness of being which takes place as spacing, rolled- up- between the spirals of being and its multiple singularities, living and non- living. On this level, physical and metaphysical are conjoined; but whoever is curious enough to closely observe the present

The Metaphysical Proposition

73

state of the sciences can confirm to what point, for speculative physics in particular, the spirals of comprehension become wide and whirling as we approach the immemorial, the Big Bang being no more than an ancillary element to add to the file of the groundlessness of being. The universe has, in fact, been expanding since a quasi- origin 13.7 billion years before today, but the cause of this expansion’s acceleration is a force that is still unknown, that we call “vacuum energy,” and that would constitute 75 percent of the universe. Add to this 20 percent of what we call “dark matter,” and what remains is 5 percent for our visible matter. Five percent: The more we learn, the more it is dark and empty, and the more precious our candles become. In the same dark vein, M- theory (or branes theory) implies a space- time with eleven dimensions—although, happily or unhappily, we only perceive four of them (the three dimensions of space, plus time). Our universe would evolve among hidden branes, miniscule or on a very large scale. According to cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, a sort of Big Crunch / Big Bang is produced when two branes enter into collision.54 These hyper- cosmic encounters would be regular, and would be repeated several times in large periods of about a thousand billion years, according to the model of an ekpirotic universe signaling the conjunction of this new cosmology with certain Stoic intuitions. For the cyclical universes described by Steinhardt and Turok, there is no so- called Big Bang singularity (a singularity designating here a point of infinite density and temperature). But, indeed, is it not this cyclical character of these universes that must be interrogated? We say to those physicists that they have not yet found their spiral. No subjectivism or relativism here, but a strange loop that seems on the verge of verifying Parmenides’s intuition that being and thinking are the same. Except we add one word: being and thinking are almost the Same, always failing to agree on what the Same is. Such is the meaning of the cosmic comedy in which our consciousness is experienced as the privileged receptacle of a tragedy.

3. Art and religion. But are we not making the sciences into a grand game of metaphor? Rather, it is the sciences themselves, which, calculating, must also think the incalculable domain that is offered to them in the mode of original metaphors, transports—that is to say what metaphorès literally means—that their “percepts” try to slow (to cool) down. Or is it not philosophy itself that we destine ineluctably to be lost, like poetry, as Carnap argues? Let us repeat, philosophy is a question about itself, its essence and its gender (son genre). It is impossible to classify philosophy. It is truly neither art nor science, the young

74

Book III

Nietzsche tells us: “We must make up and characterize a species [for it] [eine Spezies].”55 This species of thought he defines in Heraclitus as “invention beyond the limits of experience [. . .] continuation of the mythical drive [. . .] thus essentially pictorial.” He adds: “Overcoming of knowledge by means of the powers that fashion myth. Kant is remarkable—knowledge and faith! Innermost kinship between philosophers and founders of religion.” Kinship, or rather affiliation that would be misleading to consider as an identity. Unlike believers, philosophers begin by de- founding the beginning and the end of time, which they revive into metaphysical propositions. Making holes in the two extremities of time, exceeding the human lifespan, metaphysical propositions demand neither communion with oneself (religere)56 nor unification (religare), but rather faith in an unhuman meaning that no God can guarantee. In poetry, far from being the effect of a pure flow of the imaginary, metaphor fixes a new symbolic emergence, even though the “fiery liquid” of the imagination is not dried up, but always active, always running on the surface—a metaphor is a volcano, too, burning to be a monument. Poetic metaphor does not have to harden absolutely, contrary to what happens ineluctably to the concept, which is detached from the imagination. Nevertheless, a philosophy worthy of the name must not repudiate the contrary movement, which consists in redoing the path of the concept towards metaphor, not to come to an end there but to grasp the meaning of this round trip. In other words, a certain circulation between imagination and symbolization, image and concept, can be at work in metaphysical territory. It is this circulation, this double translation of—and from—silence, which has in a certain way always taken place in metaphysics. In this respect, metaphysics is a place where we remember that “metaphors are not for humans.”57

4. Politics. The woe of the political territorialization of philosophical atopia has been much described (Plato and Dionysus the tyrant, Hegel and Napoleon, certain philosophers of the twentieth century and Stalin or Mao). It is, however, easy to understand that a political application of a philosophical program with no discontinuity between program and application is not only a negation of the philosophy that we have promised since the beginning of this work, but also of politics, which is a matter of the case. Badiou has largely shown to what point to “act in the absence of Idea”58 would mean acquiescing to the disasters of time. But what is an Idea? Either it is the entire truth, the universal without exception, and the passage of philosophy into politics would be catastrophic—the passage would be application. Or the Idea inherently bears the mark of an interruption, or better, the strata of

The Metaphysical Proposition

75

successive interruptions by which wounded truth is made the history of a thought in progress, of a trans-ject of thought. Subjectively, the Idea is situated at the point where I can only fail and despise it by denying what has initiated my own existential trans- ject. Taken speculatively, closed into philosophy, this failure would be the negation of the relation of philosophy with its others. The act that consists of embodying this Idea can, in fact, only take place in the form of a Political Other of philosophy. This act cannot find the reason—the justification—for its passage in philosophy. And this is precisely because there is a non- assured passage that the truth can be experienced as such. It is experienced not immediately as Idea, but as the loss of the Idea in the instant of the act. This is what I call a political case, a case being that which cannot be treated a priori. Said again in other words, a political act does not desiccate atopia, but dismisses it in the reality that bears its mark. This dismissal is that which prevents the political act from becoming a revelation, for politics as well as for philosophy. Certainly there can be revelations—in terms of crystallized intuition, of sensation, which is confirmed in intensity as in extension—but in no case do these permit us to do away with either thought or act. There is no possible absolutizing of the act as thought and of the thought in action. So what does philosophy do to politics? It charges it with meaning and promises politics the possibility of a bridge.

Out- of- place drives out.—But philosophy assures the necessity of a leap as well. Internal to the creation of the concept, this necessity also concerns all existential creation, insofar as this advances toward the unknown. This condition returns to philosophy: to be always unconditional in its relation to the world. Philosophy’s absence of condition must be protected from its immunitarian temptation. It is, however, precisely the rupture unique to the condition that is the very condition of being- towards- the- world, which demands to be lived as such. Philosophy must experience the madness of its out- of- place, which drives it from itself and extends it toward an other.

What Cries Out Let humanity and the earth disappear, and nothing in the cosmos will have changed. And this leads to the ultimate paradox: we aren’t even sure that the knowledge that reveals our insignificance has any validity. We know that we are nothing or not much and, knowing that, we don’t know if this truly is knowledge. To perceive that the universe and thought are incommensurate leads us to question the validity of thought itself. It’s never- ending. —Claude Lévi- Strauss, Conversations with Claude Lévi- Strauss (“Politics and Race”) If there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

In truth, we have nothing much to say. Written or verbal profusion does not change this. To the contrary. Several intuitions, some revelations. An ordinary experience, a “miserable miracle” (Henri Michaux). Sometimes a grand event, that will have solicited us only on the basis of a barely felt rupture coming from the past, or of a strange and far- off pleasure that we would like to rediscover. We might as well call this an unthought, at the edge of the world of life and the life of spirit—but what should we do with this unthought?

Incommensurable and translation.—We seek to translate the unthought. From silence, from the unhuman, from the barely formulated, from far- off sensation. To translate does not consist in making a passage from one form to another one on the grounds of a universal language. “When I look at an article in Russian,” Warren Weaver, pioneer of today’s flourishing automatic translation, tells us, “I say: ‘This is written in English, but in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’ ” The other is here considered a failed self that does not even know how to speak English well. And translation becomes, according to what Naoki Sakai calls the mode of “homolingual address,” the production of a commensurability that reveals a discursive

78

What Cries Out

homogeneity that aims to neutralize any sort of alterity.1 The unity of the other and the “self ” is that of a “self ” lent to the other, and that the latter will give back when it knows how to recognize and reproduce it—a little less well than the “self,” it goes without saying. Such is the virus of homolingual automation that verifies that all is the same in reducing all to the same. As an antidote, let us emphasize, as Brett Neilson does, that authentic translation is not a “communication of information between language groups,” a weak form of communication that reduces languages to codes and codes to one unique code, but “the institution of relation at sites of incommensurability.”2 Translation as a relation that maintains a form of incommensurability takes place in philosophical utterance. There is a philosophical “people” [ peuple] in translation, but this people is divided, always attesting to an incommensurability between the saying and the to- say. The written is not the record of the Idea, for the Idea is negative, incomplete; writing drifts on a drifting surface. To consider that there is an identity between the Idea and the written is ultimately to be consistent with the spirit of capitalism and its move of generalized equivalence, an equivalence that non- Prigogien science has facilitated by its reduction of everything into measurable, commensurate quantities. Marx summarized this perfectly as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, when he understood that in the Hegelian system, and beyond it in the capitalist system, logic is the money of mind.3 To fight the pact of logic and money, philosophy must first recognize the limits that shape what has to be said. Certainly philosophy is held to the requirement of explicitation (etymologically: to un- ply, i.e. to unfold); but it must also combat the manner in which this solicitation can become the imperative of a logical flattening, of a translatability whose automation would reinforce saturated immanence, that integral fluidity that tends to completely assimilate absolute transcendence. From here, several strategies are thinkable for a philosophy that refuses to submit the search for communication to the eradication of the incommensurable. The only way to arrive there consists in communicating the incommensurable. To the circularity of absolute knowledge, some will substitute a closed work, attesting to an out- of- measure (Guy Debord and his Society of the Spectacle); the concept will be struck by such a negativity that it will be compelled to give up, at the level of the content, all foundation, but the form of the concept will be kept, promising the enunciation of a still- inaccessible truth, or a truth whose immediate access would, for a civilization irreparably lost, be the sign of a failure (Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben); some will seek the passage toward the poetry of thought, toward the “other thought” (Martin Heidegger), toward the point where literature and philosophy become indistinguishable ( Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Jacques

What Cries Out

79

Derrida, Avital Ronell), toward the prophetic of the overhuman (Nietzsche), a world-literature [littérature- monde] of schizophrenic projections (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). Each time, the meaning of philosophy will be put back into play in the form of a vivifying anti- philosophy—sometimes to the point of refusing the name of philosophy in the name of feminism (Catherine Malabou).

Atopia and relation.—Writing a manifesto for philosophy had as its goal: to promote that which in philosophy was deserving of its name, as the divergence or dis- joining attested to by all existence. To underscore the violence at work in all manifestos, I might have gone after media- friendly philosophers, but the target would have been too easy; or after the dignitaries of philosophy who prevent untimely knowledge from crossing the threshold of the university—but even the university no longer tolerates them. It will later be necessary to explain myself at greater length to certain new disciples of the absolute, of object- oriented ontology, or of “flat ontology”: returning to the idea of substance, the absolute, or the object out- of- relation is less reactionary than ultimately engaging a movement for restoration that, without doubt, has not yet breathed its last. But orientation in terms of objects or things is just one aspect of so- called speculative realism. This trend of thought also includes thinkers who refuse to reduce being to objects. For instance, Iain Hamilton Grant, one of the founding members of speculative realism, leans on Schelling’s philosophy in order to oppose “somatic” representations of nature that reduce nature to bodies or objects: Nature is also a subject, understood as “the dynamic process of the self- construction of matter.”4 Elsewhere, Steven Shaviro resists what he calls “eliminativism,” which consists of positing an inert material Outside, without life and without thought.5 Finally, we should mention one of the major works associated with speculative realism: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, which, in stunning style, describes the manner in which “anonymous materials” shatter all subjectivities and all poles of identification from the inside. A speculative fiction inspired by Deleuze- Guattari and Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia brings horror to the ontological dignity demanded by our tormented era.6 For now, let us note that what is salient in thought has always required a form of exteriority vis- à- vis the economy, social spaces, or the State—and let us add, for our day, social networks. There is nothing new in this. It is indeed necessary that metaphysical atopia have, in a way, its point of localization in a deterritorialization vis- à- vis power, even when it is a matter of opposing it. It is, however, more than probable that the social form that

80

What Cries Out

is drawn before us might have the effect of reinforcing this delocalization, as well as the search for new sites for the discovery of thought and acts of transmission that would not be reduced to the verification of immediately utilizable skills. The new social form integrates via norms even as it accentuates the “symbolic misery” (Stiegler) and the expropriation of everything that could allow living beings, human and non- human, to hope for a life. It is in this respect symptomatic that madness itself can no longer benefit from a dismissed case (non- lieu).7 Before, any reason left to the madman was the condition of possibility of his healing, while his madness excluded him from any form of punishment; today, it is in the name of what remains of his reason that the madman will be punished. Where article 64 of the old French penal code specified that “[t]here can be no crime, or delict, where the accused was in a state of madness at the time of the action; or when he has been constrained by a force which he had not the power to resist,” and that a dismissed case could potentially be granted him after psychiatric examination, the article 122- 1 that replaces it introduces a notion of alteration that makes him punishable.8 But why relate this change in psychiatric paradigm to the question of socio- ecological misery? Because there is no relation without atopia. Atopia is not the exception held back from the All, posed in sovereignty like an absolute difference similar to no other, but the room to maneuver from which it becomes possible to connect. Without this spacing, the very idea of relation makes no sense; there is no relation when everything is compact. But it is equally certain that relation, or in other words, the existence of more- than- one,9 is what enables the cut. It would, however, be pointless to wonder which, relation or atopia, comes first, insofar as atopia concerns any more- than- one, not necessarily human. At the origin, there is always the play of clinamen, the originary spiral by which the being comes and goes, makes its way in the form of a world then disappears. If atopia is the possibility of an untethering, it does not, however, prescribe a non- relation. In no way does it require being in a situation without truly being there: that pathology of presence, that non- presence, is the hardening of atopia into existential immunization. “Hamm: I was never there. Clov: Lucky for you.” The critique of the ravages of the undamaged must in no manner lead to a pure and simple binding to the world, but to the affirmation of being- toward- the- world, transcendence ≈ x, neither binding nor exception, both relation and atopia. Transcendence ≈ x: Was this the conceptual formula that we sought to elaborate in this book? It is quite possible, in that ectopia would doubtless have been preferable to atopia. However, it seemed to me necessary to shift the emphasis toward the side that is today most inaudible. The prefix of

What Cries Out

81

the term atopia, the privative a- , is necessary because it insists on the place of negativity in the relational elaboration of being- towards- the- world. It introduces the existence of metaphysical territory as perilous camp into the possibility of thinking, calling forth the two extreme functions of the imagination: to take account of the immemorial, and to engage in negotiations with the end of time.

Ecology and existentialism.—What type of philosopher could engage such relations with the end of time and the immemorial? I have described her as a peripheral medium. Peripheral because she occupies no center but can bring about—starting from eccentricity—a certain number of mediations, a certain exercise of consciousness extended as non- place of passage toward metaphysical lands. These lands shelter very strange adventures. There we seek a medicine— there the doctor- philosopher of language or of civilization (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) is at work, taking care while keeping his distance. But these philosophers make strange doctors, prescribing that we keep ourselves equal to the task of existence even as existence is ballasted by an infinitely profound universe, irremediably lost in the groundlessness that binds it to its enigma. There is no philosophical therapy, or else it exists only to create relations of meaning.10 Philosophy first thinks these relations starting from a primordial untethering. From there, its risk is to expose subjectivity to the cruelty of the real, chaos, or the empty case. Is the philosopher thus committed to re- creating a center, restoring the position of the subject in the manner of late Foucault, as well as Badiou (Theory of the Subject) and, in a reactive and weak form, of numerous French “new philosophers” of the 1980s? Unless the world might itself be the center, the world as relational field riddled with out- of- fields. Not Object-Oriented Philosophy, but Field- Disoriented Philosophy. I have, however, indicated the necessity of not purely and simply evacuating the position of the subject, but of situating it on the edges of existential trans- jects and their incessant re- moval. Spiral re- moval, always materialized in a new form of life (looking the empty case straight in the eye is a resolutely depressive position). It is one of the great merits of Muriel Combes to have shown this: “no bare life is severable”: a life cannot be severed from its form without losing what qualifies it as living.11 If we accept that a form of life is existence, then we must say that existence is not being or the being, logically detachable, but that without which life would be what the majority of scientists try today to obtain in vain: a plastic matter exploited at will. Untethering, disidentification, or de- subjectivation are only the desirable

82

What Cries Out

moments of transition towards a new form of life—“No detachment from a form of life except by configuring another.”12 The philosopher must work toward these new formations. All of his or her conceptual equipment has no meaning except when extended toward these terrestrial projections and the politics that existence requires: not to give life to existences (an essentialist position that would see existence as a sort of spirit to embody), but to make it so that nothing prevents the living from existing. This is not a pan- psychic or pan- vitalist formula, which by giving life to everything risks denying the precarity of the living (it does not matter if the animals die, for everything is living, robots are living, and so on) or that asks that all life be protected. It is a formula in which an existentialism attentive to ecology is brought to recognize the eccentricity of the living: To prevent the living from existing consists first and foremost in collapsing them (on an object, a commodity, patentable DNA, common substance, generalized vibration, and so on). To allow to live is to do justice to the rare forms by which the living express themselves. Philosophy’s metaphysical propositions thus situated have the ultimate aim of making livable the space between the immemorial and the end of time. They must make it so that this grand transition that is the universe does not break down under a lack of promises, whether these come from politics, from art, or from love. This work will have sought, by example, to see if it is not wonder, or at least enthusiasm, about the existence of the universe which the figure of Socrates, “maker of music,”13 has sometimes carried.

Notes

Critique of Pure Madness 1. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 59. 2. “Fountain of Youth, High Tech Style,” New York Times, June 14, 2010. See also the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan (1994). 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186. Bruno Latour, “Beck ou comment refaire son outillage intellectual,” in La Société du risque (Paris, Champs/Flammarion, 2001), 8. 4. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 5. On the question of wilderness, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90. 6. Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 42; Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 442; Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 7. Even if one calls this constructivism a “compositionism.” Bruno Latour, “Il n’y a pas de monde commun: il faut le composer,” in Multitudes 45 (2011–12): 38–41. 8. It is certainly cavalier to conjoin Latour, who refuses “the power of the Two” in any guise, and Žižek, who intensifies antagonism into a politics; yet their common constructivism must be emphasized. In Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), Žižek maintains that fantasy “constructs” desire as such, because desire is not “given in advance” (6). Such is the standard poststructuralist position (and its inevitable submission to the hegemony of ontological constructivism): There is no natural desire because there is no nature at large. Compare this to the Lacanian syntax, by far less linear: “le désir se (my emphasis) soutient du fantasme”: the pronominal verb (se soutenir) implies that desire is the source of the action. This is very different from “fantasy [an active and perverse agent telling ‘how’ to desire] produces desire [here envisaged as a quasi- passive instance of the application of the perverse program of fantasy].” 9. Quentin Meillassoux speaks of “mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors, to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent,” After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 26. 1. We might note that the problem, for Meillassoux, is to show that an absolute exists, separated from humanity. For us, the problem is to show how the separation affects every existence, from the inside: Separation does not occur between an inside- inside and an outside- outside; 2. Mathematics seems here to operate a

84

Notes to pages 6–14

certain castration function (to produce some separated being), able to contain the excess of absolute chaos (see After Finitude, 64, on “hyper- chaos” and mathematical guarantee). For a critique of a mathematics stripped of all relation to history, see Alexander R. Galloway, Les nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2012), 112–25. See also the political critique of Harman by the same author (“A response to Graham Harman’s ‘Marginalia on Radical Thinking,’ ” https://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a- response - to- graham- harmans- marginalia- on- radical- thinking/). 10. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 6. See also “things can be many and various, specific and concrete, while their being remains identical” (6). 11. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks (Melbourne: Re- press, 2009), 22. 12. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 36. 13. Ibid., 37. Prévert’s poem, “Inventory,” reads: “A stone / two houses / three ruins / four gravediggers / a garden / some flowers // a raccoon // a dozen oysters a lemon a loaf / a ray of sunshine / a groundswell / six musicians / a door with doormat / a gentleman decorated with the legion of honor // another raccoon,” and so on. In Words for All Seasons, trans. Teo Savory (Greensboro, N.C.: Unicorn Press, 1980). 14. See my article “NO/US. The Nietzschean Democracy of Jean- Luc Nancy” in Diacritics, forthcoming 2016. 15. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” trans. Arthur Pap. In Science and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Logical Empiricism at Its Peak, ed. Sahotra Sarkar (New York: Garland, 1996), 12. Metaphysics is “empty of meaning,” Carnap tells us; it “simulates” having a theoretical content and the ability to express life, but it only apes science and art, respectively, mixing and thoughtlessly perverting them. In short, the metaphysician is a failed artist as well as a bad scientist. The “Manifesto of the Vienna Circle” (1929) clearly indicates that a “scientific world conception” must rid itself of depth, mystery, and imagination—that is to say precisely what I defend in this manifesto. Against the Circle of Vienna, the Spiral of the World. “The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle,” in Empiricism and Sociology, ed. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, trans. Paul Foulkes and Marie Neurath (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973), 307, 305. 16. See Naoki Sakai, “Introduction. Writing for Multiple Audiences and the Heterolingual Address” in Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–17. 17. Claude Lévi- Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1968). 18. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books), 123–33. 19. Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

Book I: Toposophy 1. P. J. Crutzen and E .F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” in Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 18.

Notes to pages 15–24

85

2. See Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique” (http.eipcp/transversal/1106/holmes/en). 3. On clairvoyance societies, see my article “Occupying the Future. Time and Politics in the Era of Clairvoyance Societies” in Susanne Witzgall, Kerstin Stakemeier (Hg.), Die Gegenwart der Zukunft (Berlin, Zürich: diaphanes, 2016). English version (e- book): The Present of the Future (Berlin, Zurich: diaphanes, forthcoming 2017). 4. On the concept of alteration, see Boyan Manchev, L’altération du monde (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009). 5. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2001), 63. 6. On the idea of the intact and the drive to remain untouched, see my article, “Intact,” in SubStance 40 (2011): 105–14. On the notions of the hydroglobe and absolute flux, see my book Clinamen, Flux, absolu et loi spirale (e®e, 2011). 7. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 8. Such as that which seemed to be at work in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement (see my short article, “Lose a Job, Gain an Occupation,” Libération 28 October 2011, http://www.liberation.fr/planete/2011/10/28/perdre- son- travail- gagner- une - occupation_770903). See also my article “Occupying the Future: Time and Politics in the Era of Clairvoyance Societies.” 9. On the strict opposition between contingency on the one hand (“there is no good reason but contingent reason”) and necessity, destiny, and the structure on the other, see Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 93. See also “Experiment” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 277. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 281. 11. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 304. 12. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour declares that “transcendences abound,” defining a “transcendence without a contrary” (without immanence) as the “maintenance in presence by the mediation of a pass” (129, 128). But a bit earlier he tells us that scientific principles need networks of verifications so that they “do not exit from their worlds any more than the Achuar leave their villages” (119). This techno- scientific “cold chain” (119) that must not be interrupted—what is it, if not immanence? An abundance of immanences never leaving from themselves? 13. Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. IX, Parmenides, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925). 14. Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. XII, Theaetetus, trans. Harold N. Fowler. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1921), 150c–50d. 15. Aristotle, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols. 17, 18, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989). 16. This not- quite- chaos is the mark of a certain skepticism unique to philosophy (the true philosophical skepticism, and not that which destroys even the possibility of speech). 17. Alain Badiou, in Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 147.

86

Notes to pages 24–32

18. Sarah Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 247, 248, 7. 19. However, we will note, and not without pleasure, that Badiou calls upon Socrates and not Plato when it comes to affirming the “existence” of philosophy against prevailing morality—“ever eternally is Socrates judged.” Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2011), 72. The figure of rebellion is eternally Socratic, and not Platonic. 20. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The government of self and others, II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983, 1984, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros, general editors François Ewalt and Alessandro Fontata (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 180. Citations are from the seminar of 1984, only several months before his death. 21. According to Diogenes Laertius, it is indeed Antisthenes, the first cynic, to whom we must attribute the formula: “the concept is that which expresses the durable essence of things.” 22. Foucault, 17. 23. “Invited to a feast, he said nothing; when asked why, he responded ‘Go tell the king that there is someone here who knows how to keep quiet.’ ” 24. On the chorismos, see Etienne Tassin, in “La question du sol. Monde naturel et communauté politique” in Jan Patocka. Philosophie, phénoménologie, politique, ed. Marc Richir and Etienne Tassin (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992), 177. 25. In fact, Breton’s phrase is: “Je cherche l’or du temps” (I seek the gold of time). But I play on words, or (gold) and hors (out of, outside, but also apart from) being, in French, two perfect homophones.

Book II: Theory of the Trans-ject 1. On this point, see Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Perennial Classics, 2003). 2. F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794– 1796, trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 174, 173, 177. 3. On ex- as “dis- joining” and not distance, see Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). While Heidegger, in his “Letter on Humanism,” reduces existence to that which uniquely can be said of the essence of man and his “way of being,” my book 1.) extends existence to all beings, and 2.) poses being as a second object of thought. 4. See Jean- Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 5. Jean- Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 626. 6. “From”—in “from the sensibility that puts me in relation to the world”—is nothing other than Kant’s definition of finitude, the fact that a finite subject is that which receives but does not create the matter intuited by the senses. On the Heideggerian interpretation of Kantian finitude and the concept of projection, see Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

Notes to pages 32–43

87

sity Press, 1997). On the reading I propose, see L’Indemne. Heidegger et la destruction du monde (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2008), 134–39, note 187. 7. Jean- Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 39. 8. After Gilbert Simondon, we might say that we inject the transindividual. 9. I develop this point at length in my book Homo Labyrinthus. Humanisme, AntiHumanisme, Post- Humanisme (éditions Dehors, 2015). 10. Jean- Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 479, 24. 11. “That is why a mind, free from passions, is a fortress. People have no stronger place of retreat, and someone taking refuge here is then impregnable.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin, 2006), 80. 12. Jean- Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 13–14. 13. “Inclination of the ‘there is,’ of the ‘es gibt,’ of the offering. For it to be, it must bend.” Ibid., 159. 14. Ibid., 82. 15. Ibid., 81. Nancy deliberately takes up Hegel here: “The supreme form of Nought as a separate principle would be Freedom: but Freedom is negativity in that stage, when it sinks self- absorbed to supreme intensity, and is itself an affirmation, and even absolute affirmation.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), § 87, 162. 16. Ibid., 109. 17. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. John Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 43. 18. Jean- Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 109. 19. The phrase is Rimbaud’s, from A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1945), 89. 20. Jean- Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 159–60. 21. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx- Engels Reader, trans. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 40. 22. See Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp), 1989. 23. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). 24. Jean- Paul Sartre, A Search for Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963), 56. 25. Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism,” in The Desert Island and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 170–92. 26. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Vintage, 1995), 259. 27. From Mallarmé’s “Sonnet en X”: “aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore.” 28. “The reality of poetic operation is the release and the identification of the distinct.” Jean- Christophe Bailly, “L’action solitaire du poème,” in Toi aussi, tu as des armes.

88

Notes to pages 43–48

Poésie et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011), 21. See also Jean- Luc Nancy: “the poem or the verse refers to the elocutionary unity of an exactitude.” 29. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers of Freud, vol. 5., ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 185. 30. Serge Leclaire, Écrits pour la psychanalyse, 2. Diableries (Paris: Seuil /Arcanes, 1998), 194–98, 224. 31. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 41, 47, 59. 32. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 299. 33. There are two references to Freud here: civilization as a “thin veneer,” and “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” the latter translated by James Strachey as “where id was, there ego shall be.” Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1964), 100. 34. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 22–30. 35. Sigmund Freud, “Drives and Their Fates,” in The Unconscious, trans. Graham Frankland (London: Penguin, 2005). 36. Deleuze, The Desert Island and Other Texts. 37. On the difference between “differentiate” and “differenciate,” see Gilles Deleuze, Desert Island, 179–80. 38. We might think here of the thesis Badiou defends in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2013). For this reading of Badiou’s philosophy, see Aux bords du vide. Événement et sujet dans la philosophie d’Alain Badiou (è®e numérique, 2011). 39. Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in In Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 40. To confer means that the animal can respond and is not reducible to a machine. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie- Louise Mallet, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). But Derrida ceaselessly retreats before the possibility of ceding back to the animal a quality that would have been denied it, seeking—as he clearly says—less to “give back” (159) something to the animal than to deconstruct that which has been uniquely attributed to the human being, that being resolutely subjected to a certain number of quasi- machine- like automated behaviors—unconscious repetition, for example. Like Heidegger, he accepts the “abyss” between humans and animals, and proposes only to multiply or to contemplate the differences. It is surprising that Derrida assimilates “abyssal ruptures” (30) and differences, when all the thinking of the 1960s, including his, sought by all means, contra Hegel, to show that difference is not an abyss (it is not localized as that which separates absolutely but as that which calls into question the logic of the absolute by “differing” from itself, as “differential repetition,” and so on). Derrida hesitates in this text, and remains stuck in his unilateral refusal of the metaphysics of the subject, on the basis of which he rejects animal rights: This would accidentally accord them a status of the “subject of rights” (88). He knows well the trap of the humanist extension of the cate-

Notes to pages 48–55

89

gory of the subject, but he does not name this trap, for lack of a concept capable of locating and keeping a necessary position of the subject (that which we undertake starting from the concept of trans- ject). A subject of rights is not other (or must not be something else) than the punctual requalification of a trans- ject. A requalification implies no effort, no pretension, no subjectivizing “event” on the part of the trans- ject. 41. Dominique Lestel, L’animal singulier (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 120. 42. Ibid., 111, 68, 36. 43. For Joëlle Proust, an animal representation is “detached” when its contents are not “centered on the manner in which the animal uses information”: The representation thus leads back to the exterior world. It is “immersed” (and in this sense “proto- representation”) when it remains, on the contrary, centered on the reactivity of the organism. Les animaux pensent- ils? (Paris: Bayard, 2003), 30. Thus we would distinguish the immersed memorization of the wasp from the detached memorization of the jay, capable of certain actions linked to the memory of the circumstances of past actions: “the jay has thought detached from his world” (58). In the same way, Proust analyzes the difference between clue (immersed) and signal (detached from the clue) by a “process of the ritualization of information,” by the copy of a section of natural behavior followed by its exaggeration, by operations of cut- amplification- deformationrepetition. The growl is an example of exaggeration, which signifies an intention— but of what? Of acting upon another: “infiltrating and subverting the receptor’s sensory- motor chain of command,” masking a motivated or emotional state (the tendency to flee or fight) (72–73, 93, and 95). 44. “Dolphins May Call Each Other by Name,” in Wired, February 2013. http:// www.wired.com/2013/02/dolphin- names/. 45. Stelarc, “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies,” Leonardo 24, no. 5 (1991): 591–95. 46. Catherine Malabou takes this possibility to the extreme in “The Phoenix, the Spider, and the Salamander,” in Changing Difference (New York: Polity Press, 2011).

Book III: The Metaphysical Proposition 1. The out- of- place [hors- lieu] is the proto- concept of the event in Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009). It seems to me that I use this concept differently. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 41, 63, 69, 77. 3. Ibid., 20, 22. 4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 219–20. 6. “Essence accordingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, but just because it is the essence which exists—the existence is Appearance.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), § 131, 239.

90

Notes to pages 55–59

7. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: Routledge, 2001), 77. The expression “killing of the thing”—or “murder of the thing”—refers to Hegel via Kojève’s interpretation of the logic of the concept: “In Chapter VII of the Phenonenology, Hegel said that all conceptual understanding (Begreifen) is equivalent to a murder” (Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969], 140–41). 8. “We sorcerers know quite well that the contradictions are real, but that real contradictions are only for laughs [ne sont que pour rire]” A Thousand Plateaus, 244 (modified translation). This statement would not have made Hegel laugh. For the original text, see Mille Plateaux, 298. 9. Ibid., 238–43. 10. But remains present: “a haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination.” Ibid., 263. 11. Ibid., 293. 12. Other examples include: 1. We might think of Freud’s drives, a borderline concept that is neither reducible to the body nor to the psyche (see “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”). Clearly, Freud defines drives elsewhere as the “mythology” of psychoanalysts (which does not mean that drives are unreal but “more real than the real” [Schelling]); 2. The symbolic of the structuralists describes an order that is neither only real, nor only imaginary; 3. Based on his dialogue with Hegel, Gotthard Günther describes his “transclassical machines” as what can neither be thought starting from objective Spirit, nor from subjectivity. La conscience des machines. Une métaphysique de la cybernétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); 4. Heideggerian Dasein aims to exceed the essence/existence relation; and so on. 13. M- C is the purchase through which money is changed into a commodity, and C- Mʹ is the sale, when the commodity is changed back again into money, with Mʹ>M. 14. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 258–69. 15. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 179–81. 16. Ibid., 209. 17. Ibid., 219. It would also be necessary to show that starting from “Meditation 13” another equally fundamental decision is at play, one concerning mathematical infinity, thus ontological, being qua being—and not the event (which is “that- which- is- notbeing- qua- being” [otherwise called the generalized Sartrian for- itself]). See Badiou, Being and Event, 13. 18. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), 210–11. 19. The situation put forth in Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason reveals the place and the function of the leap: to escape from the “circularity” of the principle of reason (either this principle has a reason [a Grund], and it is not a principle; or it does not, and contradicts itself), it is necessary to leap from/on the proposition in itself, to accentuate it differently, read it in another way: not “nothing is without reason” but “nothing is without reason.” This is why the rose of Angelus Silesius can be without why, but not without reason. “We leap through as through a flame.” The Principle of Reason, trans.

Notes to pages 59–66

91

Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 60. In its passage, blown, the flame changes the italics. 20. Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. Chris Emlyn- Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti- Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 168. 22. “A theory is exactly like a box of tools [. . .] It must be useful. It must function.” Language, Counter- memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). Too many are those who took the word “exactly” to the letter, regrettably neglecting the leap and lines of flight. 23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), § 14–16. 24. Peter Gizzi, The Outernationale (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). 25. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/ achillembembe.pdf. 26. Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer, 2003). But Heidegger has already said the same thing: “every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is also there within the question” (“What Is Metaphysics?,” 82). 27. This skepticism makes it so that all science worthy of the name should be preceded by nothing other than “universal doubt, or total absence of presupposition.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898), § 78, 142. 28. These kinds of studies have been demolished by Gilles Châtelet, in To Live and Think Like Pigs:The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014). 29. Nietzsche, Fragments posthumes, tome 12—automne 1885—automne 1887—(Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1978), 26, 153. 30. Bernard Aspe, Les mots et les actes (Caen: Nous, 2011). See also my essay on Aspe’s book, “L’oubli de l’acte,” in Outis! 1 (2011). 31. “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses as setting too narrow limits to the understanding and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty of the pure understanding.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 47. 32. Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics, trans. Willis Doney, in Philosophical Selections, ed. Steven Nadler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 148. 33. Pascal, Pensées, in Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16. 34. For example, the famous allegory of the cave, discussed in an earlier section, “The Leap and the Loop.”

92

Notes to pages 66–74

35. Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 12. 36. Descartes, “Méditation seconde” in Méditations métaphysiques (Paris: GFFlammarion, 1979), 86–87. 37. Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 81. 38. Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991). 39. Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imagination,” in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). 40. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 41. J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and translated Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 205, 208. 42. We might note in passing that Thomas Metzinger reaches the same conclusions starting from cognitive philosophy. The Ego Tunnel (New York, Basic Books, 2009), 44, 107. 43. “Consciousness has no ‘inside.’ It is merely the exterior of itself and it is this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance, that constitutes it as a consciousness.” Jean- Paul Sartre, Critical Essays (Situations I), trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 43. 44. This paradox rests on the fact that we are opposing consciousness, which is linked to the present instant, and the unconscious, attached to the past. Yet consciousness, by its contact with the immemorial, is the unconscious, or in other words the past; and this is always current, urgently present, via consciousness—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner). The out- of- place is not out of consciousness, but haunts it endlessly. 45. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 88. 46. Ibid., 115. 47. Ibid., 68. 48. Adorno, cit. Metaphysics, 196. 49. Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 21. 50. Theaetetus, 161b 51. “What? You are looking for something? You want to multiply yourself by ten, by one hundred? You are looking for disciples? Look for zeros!” Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 157. 52. Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, 84, 106. 53. On these points, see Clinamen, Flux, absolu et loi spirale (e®e, 2011). 54. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang (New York: Doubleday Books, 2007). 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press International Inc., 1979), 19.

Notes to pages 74–81

93

56. Beyond reflection, however, Cartesian “meditation” is a preparation. But not so much for death, under an ethical or spiritual guise, as for knowledge itself—for the rules of the spirit. Cartesian meditation does not so much secularize a religious exercise as it fosters, by an extreme use of negativity (hyperbolic doubt), a certain form of asceticism that metaphysics makes possible (and not the opposite, which would consist in making metaphysics possible by a form of asceticism). 57. Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me:The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 300. I thank Lewis Freedman for having introduced Jack Spicer’s poetry to me. 58. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 218.

What Cries Out 1. See Naoki Sakai, “Introduction: Writing for Multiple Audiences and the Heterolingual Address” in Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 2. Brett Neilson, “Opening Translation,” in Transéuropéenes, 2–3 (http://www.trans europeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/107). We find here the citation from Warren Weaver mentioned previously. 3. “Logic—mind’s coin of the realm,” Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan and Dirk J. Struik (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 128. See also Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 193–94. 4. Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 13. 5. Against a realism that ultimately reinforces a dualism between being thought and being, Shaviro leans on Whitehead’s philosophy to affirm a “panpsychism”: the mind, which should be considered a property of matter, is everywhere. Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014), 12, 73, 79. 6. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re- press, 2008). 7. A “dismissed case” in French is a “non- lieu,” literally a “non- place.” 8. This article stipulates: “A person who, at the time he acted, was suffering from a psychological or neuropsychological disorder which reduced his discernment or impeded his ability to control his actions, remains punishable; however, the court shall take this into account when it decides the penalty and determines its regime.” Source for old penal code: http://www.napoleon- series.org/research/government/ france/penalcode/c_penalcode2.html. 9. Jean- Luc Nancy, “More Than One,” in Aurélien Barrau and Jean- Luc Nancy, What’s These Worlds Coming To, trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 10. See Josep Rafanelli i Orra, for whom all creation of relation is therapeutic (En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique. Soin, politique, et communauté, Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond / La Découverte, 2011).

94

Notes to pages 81–82

11. Muriel Combes, La vie inséparée. Vie et suject au temps de la biopolitique (Paris: Dittmar, 2011), 276. Robert Esposito makes an identical pronouncement: “every life is a form of life and every form refers to life,” Bios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 194. It would, however, be necessary to discuss elsewhere the second part of this statement, which seems to abusively transfer life to any form. 12. Muriel Combes, 320. 13. “If we look [. . .] at the highest spheres of that world which surges around us, then we perceive how the craving of an insatiable optimistic knowledge which appears in an exemplary form in Socrates, is transformed into tragic resignation and need for art [. . .] At this point, we knock with stirred emotions at the gates of the present and the future: will this ‘transformation’ lead to ever new configurations of genius and precisely of Socrates as maker of music? Will the net of art which is cast over existence, whether under the name of religion or science, be woven ever more tightly and delicately or is it destined to be torn to shreds in the swirling restlessness and barbaric turmoil which now calls itself the ‘present’?—Anxious yet not disconsolate, we stand to one side for a moment, as contemplative bystanders to whom it has been granted to witness these great struggles and transitions. Oh! it is the magic of these struggles that whoever observes them must also enter into the fray!” Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 92–93.

Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 65, 69, 78 Aesop, 58 Agamben, Giorgio, 48, 78 Alcibiades, 24, 26 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 61 Andronicus of Rhodes, 62 Antisthenes, 26 Aristotle, 23, 54, 72 Aspe, Bernard, 65, 71 Aulagnier, Piera, 45 Aurelius, Marcus, 78 Badiou, Alain, ix, x, 11, 24, 25, 30, 58, 59, 63, 66, 70, 74, 81 Bataille, Georges, 72 Benjamin, Walter, 7 Bergson, Henri, 11, 59 Bigelow, Kathryn, 22 Bogost, Ian, 84n10 Breton, André, 27 Butler, Judith, 67 Carnap, Rudolf, 10, 73 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 45 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 28 Cavell, Stanley, 28 Cervantes, Miguel de, 29 Châtelet, Gilles, 91n28 Chazal, Malcolm de, 32 Chicago, Judy, 61 Chomsky, Noam, 43 Combes, Muriel, 81 Conrad, Joseph, 31 Copernicus, 29 Cronon, William, 83n5

Danowski, Déborah, 28 Darwin, Charles, 29 Dawkins, Richard, 16 Debord, Guy, 78 Deleuze, Gilles, x, xi, 5–7, 15, 19, 20, 43, 56, 57, 61, 63, 66 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, xii, 10, 19, 20, 53, 55–57, 61, 66, 77, 79 Democritus, 26 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 16, 17, 25, 43, 67, 79 Descartes, René, 38, 66 Dick, Philip K., 35 Diderot, Denis, 29 Diogenes, 26 Dionysius, 74 Egan, Greg, 83n2 Empedocles, 22 Epicurus, 27 Erasmus, 41 Fanon, Frantz, 3 Ferré, Léo, 24 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 67, 68 Foerster, Heinz von, 56, 62 Foucault, Michel, 11, 15, 22, 25, 26, 43, 47, 67, 81 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 44–46, 68 Galloway, Alex R., 84n9 Gardner, Allen and Beatrix, 48 Gizzi, Peter, 62 Godard, Jean-Luc, 61 Grant, Iain Hamilton, 79 Guattari, Félix, 50, 56, 61

96

Index

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 4 Harman, Graham, 6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 20, 25, 39, 54, 55, 57, 71, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 11, 31, 32, 37, 40, 53, 59, 61, 63, 72, 78 Heraclitus, 1, 22, 26, 31, 54, 74 Holmes, Brian, 85n2 Humboldt, Alexander von, 14

Morton, Timothy, 5 Musil, Robert, 43

Irigaray, Luce, 5

Orra, Josep Rafanelli i, 93n10

Kant, Immanuel, 48, 74 Kierkegaard, Søren, 25 Kofman, Sarah, 24 Kojève, Alexandre, 71, 72 Kundera, Milan, 86n1

Parmenides, 22, 31, 54, 73 Pascal, Blaise, 60, 66 Perec, Georges, 29 Plato, x, 22–25, 27, 59, 66, 74 Polanyi, Karl, 42 Prévert, Jacques, 7 Prigogine, Ilya, 61, 72 Proust, Joëlle, 89n43 Pyrrho, 71 Pythagoras, 71

Lacan, Jacques, 4, 19, 24, 44, 46, 66, 70, 72 Latour, Bruno, 4, 5 Leclaire, Serge, 44 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 61, 68, 72 Leopold, Aldo, 14 Lestel, Dominique, 48, 49 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 43, 52 Lorenz, Konrad, 49 Lovecraft, H.P., 79 Lovelock, James, 14 Lucretius, 45, 72 Łukasiewicz, Jan, 54 Malabou, Catherine, 60, 79 Malebranche, Nicolas, 66 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 66 Manchev, Boyan, 85n4 Mao, Tse-tung, 74 Marx, Karl, 11, 41, 57, 58, 78 Mbembe, Achille, 62 Meillassoux, Quentin, 4 Metzinger, Thomas, 92n42 Michaux, Henri, 77 Morrison, Toni, 29

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 32, 39, 40, 57 Negarestani, Reza, 79 Negri, Antonio, 19, 21 Neilson, Brett, 78 Nietzsche, Friedrich, x, xi, 7, 10, 13, 18, 24, 25, 33, 53, 60, 61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 74, 79, 81

Regan, Tom, 47 Rimbaud, Arthur, 87n19 Ronell, Avital, 79 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 78 Sakai, Naoki, 10, 77 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 11, 29, 31, 32, 38–40, 42, 57, 63, 64 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 19, 20, 30, 40, 69, 79 Serres, Michel, 45, 69, 72 Shaviro, Steven, 79 Sloterdijk, Peter, 87n22 Socrates, 8, 22-27, 70, 71, 82 Spicer, Jack, 42 Spinoza, Baruch, 16, 19, 20 Stalin, Joseph, 74 Steinhardt, Paul, 73 Stelarc, 50 Stengers, Isabelle, 72 Stiegler, Bernard, 80

Index

Tassin, Etienne, 86n24 Theaetetus, 22, 23, 25 Turok, Neil, 73

Weaver, Warren, 77 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 47, 81 Woolf,Virginia, 61

Uexküll, Jakob von, 49

Zeno, 26 Žižek, Slavoj, 5

Valéry, Paul, 42 Velázquez, Diego, 43

97

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism. Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot. Translated by Hannes Opelz. Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (eds.), Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism. Jaime Rodríguez Matos, Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time. Kristina Mendicino, Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism. Geoffrey Bennington, Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth. Daniel M. Stout, Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel. Frédéric Neyrat, Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. Translated by Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner, Foreword by Steven Shaviro.