When I recall the philosophical lightning strike that fell upon me in the lycée, it seems to me to be entirely contained in a single formula from Jean-Paul Sartre, which provided the inexhaustible matrix for my loquacious adolescence: ‘Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.’1 The remark has already been made before, not without malice: so many mentions of being in order to say the nothingness of the for-itself! But the power of this formula lies elsewhere. It operates the synthesis of dialectical interiority, captured in the principle of being that is in question, and of intentional exteriority, of the constitutive projection onto the Other. It fixates a double maxim, which I must say continues to organize my thinking:
•On the one hand, the ego or interiority are deprived of all interest and thus despicable, if they do not carry an effect of meaning for which the only measure can be the whole world, the totality of whatever is disposed when thought seizes it in its disposition. This can be said as follows: psychology is the enemy of thought.
•On the other hand, the whole world, such as it is disposed, is of no interest if it is not taken up and treated in the subjective prescription of a project that is equally extensive. The world must literally be put into question. This can be said as follows: pragmatic empiricism, adaptation, ‘we must cultivate our own garden’, are also enemies of thought.
That interiority is the whole world as disposition and that exteriority is the whole world as imperative: this is the idea of which philosophy, such as Sartre in my eyes incarnated it, convinced me forever. If the ego is the measure of all things, philosophy is not worth an hour of our effort. It has meaning only through everything in thought that exceeds our inevitable petty stories. Philosophy is by no means destined to make us satisfied. Since always, and forever, it agrees only with eternity, which we know is the eternity of the True only in the future anterior of a temporal fierceness.
Thanks to Sartre and to him alone, this central conviction originally seized me. Today, when the narrowest sense of prudence seems to have been restored as far as the ends of humanity are concerned, and when a grave suspicion weighs down on the slightest proposition of universality, I nevertheless cannot but stick by this conviction: Humanity, insofar as the word retains a meaning that is not abject, is that being which is sustained in its being only by projects or procedures whose identity with respect to the world as it is must necessarily appear as inhuman.
Today I call truth, or generic procedure, this essential inhumanity in which the human is summoned by that which makes that in certain situations something else happens than their being.
This is not to say that the human being, as Nietzsche thought, is what must be overcome. What must be overcome – this is a decisive intuition on Sartre’s part – is being, such as it is qua being. And the human being is this chance that is unrelated to humanity, this inhuman chance, which stands out qua subject in the generic and infinite becoming of a truth.
But if the conviction remains that the subject is that which detaches itself from being so that there may be some truth, the articulation of this conviction had to give up, piece by piece, the Sartrean formula. I can thus say that the trajectory of my thinking may be perceived as the paradoxical combination of an energetic fidelity to the Sartrean message and the formal pulling to pieces of the dialectical schema that undergirds this message.
With regard to the philosophical supremacy of Sartre’s schema, I should add that, from the beginning, as in a disjointed aesthetic, there were completely heterogeneous preferences and usages of thought.
There was mathematics, of which the least we can say is that they left Sartre rather cold, in spite of the subtitle of the Critique of Dialectical Reason – Theory of Practical Ensembles – which I have never been able to read without thinking that it recognizes Cantor’s founding role for modernity.2 Now mathematics in my eyes necessarily had some relation (but I did not know which one) with the question of being, or with the being in question – a relation that the Sartrean doctrine of consciousness did not elucidate.
Symmetrical to mathematics there were also the poets, and singularly, Mallarmé. Was there a supplementary crossing of paths with Sartre’s concerns, since the figure of Mallarmé, literally, haunted him?3 No doubt, except that in my eyes Sartre underestimated the affirmative capacity of the poet’s thinking, in favour of a historico-subjective exegesis of his machinations of nothingness. It was not the alleged failure of the Book that attracted my passion, nor the fact (which is Sartre’s thesis) that this Book would have been nothing but a pathetic mystification. I was even less interested in the temptations of suicidal despair. I saw in Mallarmé’s poems and prose the most radical effort ever conducted to think thinking, an effort manifested in the accomplished appearance of the Constellation, the Swan, or the rose in the darkness.
Finally, there was Plato, to whom I constantly return with a quiet remorse, because of the degree to which the ‘objective’ ideality and much-flaunted primacy of essence over existence seemed absolutely to contradict the Sartrean doctrinal body. It was as if philosophy, aside from its most effective modern maxims – and here Sartre was so irreplaceable to me that for a long time I was accused of producing nothing but pastiches of him – possessed an intrinsic virtuosity that was totally detached from all interiorization, from all pathos of consciousness.
Thus, in an anarchic coexistence of sorts – perhaps analogous to the one that in Sartre allowed for the coexistence of the piano and Chopin, silently and without concept, with all the rest – I literally inhabited the Sartrean philosophy of consciousness of freedom, all the while reserving the domain of the poem as affirmation and of the matheme as Idea.
In what I call today the four generic procedures (politics, science, art, and love), there was at bottom only politics – the politics of commitment against the colonial wars, which at the time stemmed from simple principles of opinion, and which seemed to me capable of being subsumed under the Sartrean concept of freedom. Thus in these combats there was in my eyes a kind of direct link between Sartre’s philosophy and the practice of the committed intellectual.
No doubt this is why, in the final instance, what was needed was the rupture inaugurated by May 1968 and the years that followed – that is, the entrance into militant politics ‘on the ground’, as an autonomous process that includes the immanent determination of its concepts – for me to abandon the dialectical schema of interiorization, though not without certain detours and regrets. I can certainly say without paradox that it is the fact of having practised and continuing to practise thought in its detour through the factory, of participating in the elaboration of a renewed vision of emancipatory politics, of holding onto the idea that in politics, no matter how bloody the turmoil and the apparent triumph of Capital, the signifier ‘worker’ has not yet said its last word – all this is what progressively distanced me from the prestige of the dialectic.
However, this distancing was never accompanied by any depreciation of Sartre as an active thinker. In that tormented decade, he was the thoughtful and curious companion of a generation that was not his (nor, truth be told, was it exactly mine). Especially today, against the grain of the hackneyed theme of ‘Sartre’s mistakes’, we must salute the rigor that he displayed in always standing in the thick of things. The fact that progressively there has been a distancing, both in the order of political prescription and in that of the apparatus of thought, should by no means be seen as an objection to this essential historical community.
What would I say today, considering the almost magical formula that held my thinking spellbound thirty years ago? Let us restate it: ‘Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.’
The word ‘consciousness’, first of all. I will no longer maintain its philosophical pertinence. It seems to me that ‘consciousness’, designating a concept with a philosophical history that is definitely glorious, can no longer be used except as a political category – as in, ‘political consciousness’ – or perhaps as a category of psychoanalysis. No doubt nothing indicates better the distance that I affirm today between politics – as a sui generis form of thought-practice – and philosophy than the destiny of the word ‘consciousness’, which at bottom is a very technical concept of modern politics since at least Lenin. I can no longer believe – and I am tempted to say: alas! – in the happy transitivity between philosophy and politics, for which Sartre provided me with the paradigm and in which the philosophical concept of consciousness (or of praxis) played a pivotal role.
By contrast, I do not think that we can give up on the intraphilosophical unfolding of the concept of the subject, once it is disjointed or decentred from its conscious or transcendental supposition under the decisive effect of Freud and Lacan’s inventions. The subject, then, is not the reflective or pre-reflective movement of the self-positing of the I; it is exclusively the differential point that supports, or endures, the becoming-generic of a truth. I call ‘subject’ a point of truth, or a point traversed by a truth, seized in its chance. It is the ‘old man’ of Mallarmé, the one who is defined by having to sustain a ‘supreme conjunction with probability’.4
I now think that Sartre’s subject-consciousness was a last and brilliant avatar of the romantic subject, of the young man given over to a world whose inertia little by little bogs down, except for a few flashes, both the infinite liberty of desire and the universality of the project. I would gladly say that the still incomplete redeployment of the concept of the subject finds an index, as we see after Mallarmé in the work of Beckett, in the replacement of the young man by the old man, in which we can see stated that no subject is ever truly young, for there is a subject only from the point at which he turns out to be as old as at least one truth.
With regard to the era of Sartrean commitments, this is also one of the aspects of the mutation in political thought, or rather in politics as thought: the revolutionary theme went hand in hand with that of a youthful world, of a rejection of the ‘old world’. But the youth is too young for the truth that it inaugurates in the event. Whence its common barbarism. And, symmetrically, what is most horrible in the world of Capital that is ours is its perpetual and monotonous, artificial youth. All forms of radical politics will restore, in accordance with the infinite measure of the generic, the time to grow old that is needed for there to be truths, ‘the time taken to have been true’, says Beckett in Watt, ‘the time taken to be proved true’.5
But let us continue on with Sartre’s formula: ‘Consciousness is a being…’
For a long time, I did not care about being, because like Sartre I rejoiced only in the meaning-giving functions of Nothingness. Being had the painful thickness, the massiveness, the superfluousness, the practical inertia, of the roots of the chestnut tree. What got me out of this – awoke me from my Sartrean slumber? – is an interminable meditation on set theory, and especially on its two existential extremes, which are the axiom of the empty set and the axiom of infinity. The decision to hold the historical corpus of mathematics for that which has said what there is to say about being qua being, and thus for ontology in the strict sense, sums up the renunciation of the blocked metaphors of massive and ultimately unthinkable being (‘without raison d’être’, says Sartre, and ‘without any relation whatsoever to any other being’). In contrast, by confiding being to the safeguard of pure multiplicity, such that the matheme takes hold of it, we prepare it for the most subtle and ramified form of thinking possible, all the while subtracting it from all experience. Being such that mathematics thinks its being is neither contingent (as Sartre declares) nor necessary (as the classics say). It infinitely exposes itself to thought, and subtracts itself from it at the same time. This is why mathematics is both and at the same time immense and interminable, proceeding by way of axiomatic decisions (as if it were contingent) and by way of constraining demonstrations (as if it were necessary).
By demonstrating that the double original support of the thinking of being is the void, as suture onto the inconsistency of all consistency, and then the infinite, whereby the otherwise genial and romantic idea of the limit becomes secularized and de-sacralized in favour of the lacunary number, we truly accomplish, without existential drama, the proposition – so exemplarily Sartrean in the tension that it induces in thought – of the death of God.
Next: ‘A being such that in its being, its being is in question.’
The subject, such as I today conceive of it – a subject plotted or woven out of the cloth of some truth – has no interior, even a transparent one, nor any interior-exterior, in which a questioning (of) self can be generated. It is even, properly speaking, the unquestionable, for it is that from which an answer proceeds, the evental answer as to the being of a situation.
The vocabulary of the question and the questioning no doubt marks the highly original manner in which Sartre related to German thinking, and especially to Heidegger. And I should say that, precisely in its Sartrean version, displaced from the care of being towards the anthropology of liberty, this vocabulary of being as the nullifying question of the self exerted a tenacious power of seduction on my thinking. With time passing, this seduction has become inoperative. The question of the question is, it seems to me, the enjoyment of thought. But the answer alone is its action. The answer is often disappointing, so that one regrets the inexhaustible charm of the question. For the answer substitutes joy for enjoyment. Thinking thinks only in the un-enjoyment [dé-jouir] of self, which is also the way in which it un-joins or evades [dé-joue] the question. This is after all something that Sartre also said, having always thought, as he confessed, ‘against himself’.
If God is dead (and Sartre convinced me of this more than Nietzsche, who was too concerned with disentangling himself from the Nazarene), this does not mean that everything is possible – and even less that nothing is. It means that there is precisely nothing better, nothing greater, nothing truer, than the answers of which we are capable. The ethic of the answer completes that of the inhuman ends by which the human becomes worthy of Humanity. It means that there are truths and, consequently, nothing is sacred, except precisely the fact that there are truths.
‘In so far as this being implies a being other than itself’, said Sartre, reading Husserl in his own way.
My reticence with regard to the theme of intentionality is grounded in the fact that it requires the maintenance of the category of the object, as the correlate of conscious intention, and more generally of the dialectic subject/object, of which the Sartrean motif of the in-itself and the for-itself is a genial projection. I defend a doctrine of the subject without object, of the subject qua vanishing point of a procedure that originates in an unmotivated evental supplement. In my eyes there is no being-other of the subject, except the situation of which a truth is the truth. I have no doubt paid my debt to Sartre by taking back the theme of the ‘situation’, of which he spun variations with a confusing virtuosity. But for me, as well as for Sartre – from a completely different angle – this apparent Other of the subject is the Same, for truth in an immanent way realizes the generic being, the whatever, the indiscernible of the situation itself.
The true is not said of the object; it is said only of itself. And the subject is not said of the object either, nor of the intention aimed at it; it is said only of the truth, such as it exists in a point that vanishes from itself.
Is all this, however, really as decisive as I make it out to be? Beyond the technical elaborations of thought, I am attached to Sartre by a determining ‘existential’ motif, which is that philosophy is not of matter of life or of happiness. But neither is it a matter of death or unhappiness. We will live or die in any case, on top of it all, and as for being happy or unhappy, it is what we are constantly required not to care about – neither for the others nor for ourselves.
The point is to throw the dice, at least once, if possible. Mallarmé’s old man does not come to this resolution easily, it is true. He ‘hesitates a corpse cut off by its arm from the secret it withholds rather than plan the game like a hoary maniac in the name of the waves’.6
What ordinarily is called life, but also culture, leisure, elections, work, happiness, balance, flourishing, performance, economy, is exactly that: the hesitation to play the part in the name of the waves. And thus – precisely for this reason the signifier ‘life’ is involved – to live forever as ‘a corpse cut off by its arm from the secret it withholds’. Life, the life proposed to us, about which Sartre said that it barely lifted itself above that of ants, is resolved in the disjunction between a corpse and a secret. Every human being holds a possible pass for at least one truth. Such is its secret, which our common lot under the law of Capital turns into the other extreme of a cadaver.
For if ‘every thought emits a dice throw’, we must admit that where there are no dice throws, there also is no thought. More so than Pascal, it was Sartre who for me decided the concept of this unconditional demand of the wager. At least he was able to do without God.
The secret for Sartre could be said in the form ‘every man is worth as much as any other’,7 whereas I will say: All humans are capable of thought, all humans are aleatorically summoned to exist as subjects. And if all humans are capable of thought, the guideline is clear: throw the dice, play the part in the name of the waves, and then be faithful to this throw, which is not so difficult, since once thrown, the dice come back to you as Constellation. This Constellation is said ‘cold with neglect and disuse’,8 but why should philosophy have to promise that the truth keep us warm and fuzzy, that it be convivial and affective? If Sartre’s thinking keeps its trenchancy it is because it dispenses with such a promise, without for this reason lapsing into nihilism. The truth is not convivial or affective, because its power goes no farther than to be or not to be.
The guideline is for a truth, or some truths, with regard to any situation whatsoever, to be suspended from their being. We will also say: let us be, without too much hesitation, ‘maniaques chenus’, hoary maniacs of the generic. Then – strange thing – we will discover the truth of that other saying of some old man, the one who crawls in the mud and the darkness with his bag, in Beckett’s How It Is: ‘In any case we have our being in justice I have never heard anything to the contrary.’9
We can indeed name ‘justice’ that there are some truths, the ‘there is’ of truths thought in its pure ‘there is’. Justice is then another name for the inhuman ends of humanity.
I do not believe that on this point, though by way of a series of mediations which in the end are very far from what I report here, Sartre has ever given up.
Humanity is what does justice to humanity, because if there is some event that summons it to do so, it has in it enough of a secret to chuck its corpse and crawl with its bag in the darkness of truth.
Of this darkness, which he knew to be dark – and that will remain no matter what one says – Sartre was, already almost half a century ago, one of our rare illuminating guides.