We know that, among the disciplines contributing to the training of analysts, Jacques Lacan attributed a pre-eminent place to anti-philosophy.1 He thus opened up a new career for this old word, which in the eighteenth century designated the position of all the enemies of the Enlightenment. In fact, his position is a reversal of the conservative sense of the word. For, if it was expedient that analysts be antiphilosophers, this was precisely in the name of the Enlightenment, philosophy being assigned by Lacan to an essential ‘not-wanting-to-know’, namely (to speak like the Master), to the voluntary ignorance of anything concerning the effects of enjoyment [jouissance] at the heart of thought.
If philosophy does not want to know anything about enjoyment, it is because of the connection between enjoyment and the unnameable Thing, as unsymbolizable as it is despotic, which analytic orthodoxy assigns at its origin to the body of the mother. Philosophy is constituted literally by foreclosing the consideration of this thing, without which it would not be entitled to state that the all, or even the All, can be raised to the status of the concept.
If, from Plato to Husserl, philosophy does not stop declaring that it will finally return ‘to the things themselves’, it is indeed – says the Lacanian analyst –because it exists only by virtue of the fact that it has turned away from the Thing.
This exclusion of enjoyment in the examination of thought results in the constantly reformed connection between philosophy and asceticism. This connection is one of the paths chosen by Nietzsche for his personal entry into antiphilosophy. If for him the philosopher is ‘the criminal of criminals’,2 it is because the effect of philosophy’s refusal of the native power of enjoyment is merely to arm resentment.
We can here note that Nietzsche and psychoanalysis are in agreement insofar as both hold that the essence of philosophy is ascetic, at least if we define ‘ascetic’ as a doctrine for which the price of thinking is the avoidance of any knowledge concerning enjoyment. Philosophy would be edified within something like an un-joying or de-joicing [dé-jouir], whereas life can only be reinforced by a re-joicing [ré-jouir]. Refusing to see that enjoyment – the only way to attain access to the Thing – is at the heart of thought, philosophy would be one of the variants of the religious imposture.
But what relation is there between these considerations and contemporary nihilism? A relation of major clarification. For, the present moment incontestably stands under the emblem of enjoyment. At a time when, we are told, the old ‘ideologies’ are fortunately dead – ideologies which, like the Carthaginian Moloch, were devouring human lives by millions in an entirely vain ascetic sacrifice – the quasi-familial imperative ‘enjoy as you wish, enjoy as you can’, holds from now on and forever: it is modest, modern and realist.
There are two versions of this imperative. One libertarian, the other liberal.
The libertarian version, which differs from the other in being presented as emancipating, or even ‘radical’, is concentrated in a May ’68 slogan: ‘Enjoy without shackles’ [jouir sans entraves]. In fact, is this possible? Can we attain enjoyment that would exonerate us from any ties? This commandment is much more restrictive than the classical anarchist opposition to laws and rules. We are beyond what the Maoists of the epoch called ‘the anti-authoritarian revolt’. Let us say that the slogan ‘enjoy without shackles’ concentrates in it what we could call a drugged conception of existence. I refer you, for the poetics of this conception, to most of Philippe Garrel’s films, in particular Le vent de la nuit (which speaks with force of May ’68, of the impossibility of transmitting it) and Sauvage innocence (which tracks down the exact point of nihilism: the point at which enjoying and dying are indiscernible). We clearly see in this film that a drug is something quite different from an adjuvant, a dependency or a pleasure. Drugs are a metaphysics: a metaphysics of the de-linking. It is what renders inactive – temporarily – any link, and artificially produces a truly unshackled enjoyment. One is ‘high as a kite’, outside any connection.
However, the real world being nothing but a system of links, we can say that, in the drugged conception of existence, as long as it remains within the ideal of the suspension of the link, the enjoying is purely and simply the negation of the world. It really is then a question of nihilism. In its libertarian version, nihilism is the enjoying in itself. It is a question of turning oneself through enjoyment into the debris of the connections of the world, and so of being dead to the world, like a saint – but all the more miserable, since what one sacrifices the world to is only the absence of any God.
In its liberal version, the imperative is to purchase some enjoyment. This is what keeps the world turning today. The problem is that this imperative is empty, because enjoyment is, by definition, and by its connection to the unnameable Thing, what remains forever without an equivalent. It is radically impossible to purchase enjoyment; at the most we can pay for the wrapper, as is shown by the principal model of this sort of commodified imposture, prostitution, and particularly the prostitution which, in our world, takes the prize over all others, the prostitution of transvestites. Understand by ‘wrapper’, always isomorphic with the stockings and high-heeled shoes of transvestites, the endlessly replaceable surroundings of a failed attempt at enjoyment.
This essential lack around which the transaction is made obviously induces a second kind of nihilism. (And we are reminded here of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s admirable play, Dans la solitude des champs de coton, in which we see that instead of the Thing, we have an endless transaction concerning its attire. For in wanting to sell wrappers, for which there is no other veritable use except to throw them out, we transform the world into litter, into a pile of trash. The wrapper – and we can obviously include in this the totality of advertising devices – is, by its essence, rubbish.)
We might just mention that ecology consists, essentially, in wishing that the detritus of the missed-purchased enjoyment be biodegradable. Enjoyment, then – which, even aborted – would be ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’ by the fact of its wrapper being non-polluting. Perhaps ecology is only a reformism of the nothing, a rectified nihilism. Or a soft nihilism.
If the drugged conception of existence comes down to turning oneself into the waste of the world, its generalized mercantile conception comes down to turning the world into waste. In both cases, under the sign of enjoyment.
The synthesis of the libertarian conception and the liberal conception, a synthesis realized in the explicitly ‘liberal-libertarian’ person, Dany Cohn-Bendit,3 comes down then to turning oneself into the waste of a wasteland. There is little to be thought here. But this is certainly the ineluctable consequence for anyone who poses that enjoyment, sometimes re-named ‘happiness’, or even ‘humanism’, is the unique defendable human project (if not, of course, we will suffer the return of ‘totalitarianism’, absolute Evil).
We might then say that philosophy was right to leave enjoyment aside. Never, undoubtedly, more than today did the ancient Greek figure associating philosophy and asceticism have better arguments to put forward. We find, moreover, an ascetic proposal from all the contemporary philosophers of any importance, including the most resolute partisans of Nietzschean vitalism – Deleuze, for example.
And yet the most interesting course is probably not that of the restoration of wisdom. Rather, enjoyment must be conceived otherwise within philosophy. We must redefine and rehabilitate enjoyment, rather than re-establishing ancient asceticism.
This is precisely the challenge that Jean-Luc Nancy took up by proposing an assertive thinking of enjoyment. I am referring to his 1986 article ‘L’amour en éclats’ (Shattered Love), an article which for the most part treats the question: What do we mean by enjoying?
This article is built on three essential propositions:
•A double negation: ‘Sexual enjoyment is no more impossible, as Lacan maintained, than it is possible, as sexologists maintain.’4 This means that the two dominant conceptions of sexual enjoyment, both the liberal and the libertarian, must be dismissed. Sexual enjoyment neither requires death, nor can it be purchased. (By the way: I do not believe that Lacan had ever wished to say that sexual enjoyment was impossible. But we will leave that aside.)
•A definition: sexual enjoyment is traversing being as Other. It involves the touching of being itself, but being itself as Other. This definition authorizes a play on the words ‘joy’ (the joy of the-other-in-being) and ‘enjoy’ (traversed for joy).
•An ontology of the offering: ‘Sexual enjoyment is an extremity of presence, self exposed, of self enjoying outside of self, in a presence that no present can absorb, and which is not (re)presented, but which offers itself incessantly.’
The attempt is clear: asserting that sexual enjoyment is neither narcissistic nor selfless; neither pure relation to the self nor pure devotion to the other. Sexual enjoyment is in a relation to self outside of self. It is the exposition of self outside of self. It is not theatre, a representation, but a presentation, an offering. (Offering, exposition, these are two fundamental words for Jean-Luc Nancy: exposing oneself is something like a response to an offering.) Sexual enjoyment then becomes an experience of being itself, an experience of the traversing of sense. And nihilism is vanquished.
The misfortune – and this, after all, is my misfortune – is that I am not at all convinced by Nancy’s very elegant attempt, which seems to me to be oriented towards an angelic myth. I believe his definition to be entirely false, and the consequences he draws from it obviously false. I mark my opposition in five steps, in a deliberately brutal manner.
Sexual enjoyment is not an extremity; it is a fragment, a cut. Any enjoyment picks up its motif from a dislocated continuum. This is moreover why coming out of any sexual enjoyment is always a bit disconcerting: the return to continuity allows nothing to subsist, within it, of this obscure piece of flesh in which the fertile obscenity of the real had come to glow.
Sexual enjoyment is not an exposition. That is where too much angelism is harmful. Sexual enjoyment is first an imposition. We can say it is the exposition of an imposition. The aleatory question, when there is a risk of the advent of sexual enjoyment, is always knowing at what moment the imposition is possible. We cannot reasonably avoid the question of a time of violence inherent in any sexual enjoyment – even, and above all, if we recognize that this time is the result of a certain toil, of the sweat of bodies at work.
The ‘outside of self’ can only be conceived in what Nancy attempts to leave out (at least in this article): sexuation, the differences in the positions of the sexes. There is no indeterminate ‘outside of self’, and any determination is also a dissymmetry. We can add that for Lacan the self is taken up in the paradoxical logic of the Other to such an extent that there is no relation ‘outside of self’. There exists an intransitivity between the self and the outside of self. We understand then why Nancy, in a brilliant and tender essay, vainly attempted to restore the existence, denied by Lacan, of a sexual ‘rapport’.5
Sexual enjoyment, says Nancy, is a ‘presence that no present can absorb’. I would willingly hold exactly the contrary: Sexual enjoyment is a present that no presence can absorb, a pure present. It has no intrinsic temporality. Enjoyment-in-the-present presents no presence. It is only in the post-enjoyment that there is a return, to the other as well as to oneself, within the modality of presence. The necessary place must then be accorded to tenderness, which is the absolutely unrecognizable reverse of sexual enjoyment, its absolute Other. Sexual enjoyment is a demoniac present. In fact, Nancy’s formulation defies the authority of fantasy in enjoyment. A representation adheres to the enjoyment itself, and is dissolved in its unpresented present.
Something in sexual enjoyment, Nancy says, ‘is offered incessantly’. But is the ‘incessantly’ not the devouring of the ‘offer’, or of the offering? This enjoyment is implacably of the order of repetition. What can be done with an instance of sexual enjoyment, if not desire its repetition, the return ‘to the same place’ of the real which sustained the delight and the horror of it? The sweetness of the ‘offering’ weakens the dimension of the useless consumption of the enjoyment, which consigns it to the repetitive scansion of its pure present.
What can we conclude? Nancy’s effort to assert enjoyment opens the way: it is out of the question to come back to asceticism without mediation. However, we must elaborate the question of sexual enjoyment starting with something other than itself, to avoid falling into the Edenic conception that Nancy proposes. In this sense, we are partly obliged to accept the verdict of psychoanalysis: Philosophy cannot find its starting point in the consideration of enjoyment. It is true that it must turn away from it. It is also true that philosophy must nourish the hope of coming back to it, and without this hope, thought falls under the nihilist jurisdiction of the contemporary world. But by wanting to short-circuit asceticism too quickly, philosophy only opposes to this jurisdiction the uncertain figure of the Angel.
The starting point of a veritable anti-nihilism is found in four maxims:
•Contest the democratic emblem. This is the decisive task, the first liberation. Let us be very clear about this: It is not a question of abandoning the word ‘democracy’, but just the contemporary fetish the word represents. We hold that the only legitimate use is found with the adjective. ‘The’ democracy is a state fetish, ‘the’ democracies only designate the imperial comfort. But there can be democratic situations, or a fragmentary democratic politics. Part of the problem is to separate the adjective from the noun.
•Break with the naked power which underlies this emblem, the power of the imperial attack and of the ‘one-and-only politics’, that of capitalo-parliamentarianism.
•Exalt exceptions, without ever being intimidated by the denunciation of elitism or ‘totalitarianism’.
•Find the faults of the ‘democratic’ transcendental, and work for its logical and real ruin.
How does the democratic emblem function today? It proposes a possible peace. The planetary extension of the democratic regime would represent a definitively pacified, and so a ‘happy’ world. This means that only the non-democratic exceptions are blocking the advent of this pacified world. In short, there are still the wicked – the non-democrats, ‘terrorists’, ‘Islamists’. If we are to have democratic peace, we must wage wars against them.
The democratic emblem is that of a world which has already found its principle. But ill-will is preventing the world from organizing as a whole with respect to this principle, recognized by all as the best, and whose name is ‘democracy’.
What is supposed in all this is that there is a world whose principle and whose immanent perfectibility we know. This perfecting requires going through a war, which is bothersome, but inevitable.
My thesis, which also takes its starting point in the consideration of endless wars and innumerable acts of violence, certainly does not propose a democratic ‘perpetual peace’ which is thwarted by a few evil, autocratic leaders. I hold that we are at a very special moment, a moment at which there is not any world. This is obviously a thesis which recognizes the radicality of contemporary nihilism. But in its connection to the existence of the world, we must introduce a new distinction. For ‘nihilism’ then can mean two things:
1)There is a world, but this world is meaningless. We can speak then of existential nihilism.
2)There is not any world. Which means that this nihilism is ontological and not existential: There is an inconsistent multiplicity, there is incohesion of what there is.
In his 1990 collection of essays, Une pensée finie (A Finite Thinking), Jean-Luc Nancy includes a long note on the world, a theme to which he has since consecrated an entire book. For him, a world is the extension of existence to something other than humanity (stones, stars, animals…). ‘World’ is a response to the question: Why is there all there is and nothing but what there is?6
I am once again fraternally in disagreement with Jean-Luc Nancy. There is not ‘all there is’ because ‘all’ is an inconsistent determination with respect to the infinite multiplicity of worlds. And as very often something else than what there is happens, neither is there ‘nothing but what there is’. Nancy again gives too much place to Leibniz’s questions (‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ and ‘Why is there this rather than that?’). This is because, for Nancy, and for many others, ‘world’ is a category of existence. More precisely, says Nancy, the world is the place of the event of existence. It is then a generic category of the sense of being.
For me, ‘world’ cannot be a category of the sense of being. For there would then be no sense in saying, as I maintain, that there is not any world, except to hold that this ‘there is not’ is an ‘ontological’ defection of sense, a nihilist episode in the history of the sense of being. But this historic construction is entirely foreign to me.
I will say that there is a world when there is a certain logic of being-there, and so of contingency. It follows, to begin with, that there is a plurality of worlds due to a plurality of possible logics. And then the possibility that there is not any world is inferred from the fact that logic can be suspended in an interval between two distinct logics, which affects the being-there with a great vacuity as to its disposition, or as to the names which are suitable to it.
In reality, for philosophy, ‘world’ has two meanings. Either it means the source of sense, or else it is a simple logical figure for appearance.
These two meanings were born at the same time, because Plato holds both of them undivided in his great founding work on the world, Timaeus. Timaeus is a plausible narrative on the construction of the cosmos. In this narration, Plato plays with subtlety on the two meanings of the word ‘world’. Let us look at the very end of the text, one of the rare conclusions to his dialogues in which Plato seems quite content with what he has done:
And so now we may say that our account of the nature of the universe has reached an end. The world has received and teems with living beings, mortal and immortal, and has become a visible living being containing the visible – the sensible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its greatness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled. Our one universe, indeed the only one of its kind, has come to be.7
A very beautiful and very mysterious text, which has two meanings:
a)The world thus narrated is in the perfection of sense, it is a sensible god whose appearance is perfect, since it is that of an icon of the intelligible god.
b)The world is also a visible living being which situates and envelops all the visible living beings. It is then a logic of visibility, a topology of the visible, a logic of the strata of appearance.
We can simply say that I take ‘world’ in Plato’s second sense, while Nancy has chosen the first. For me, ‘world’ means for the moment nothing else than the logic of the situation which envelops all visible living beings.
I hold that, today, the world deprives the vast majority of human beings of their visibility. It is a protocol of exclusion of the visible, and not the transcendental distribution of a situation in the visible.
The fundamental question of the world is in reality that of names. Who receives a name? It is not to begin with the question of wealth and its distribution. It is the question of knowing who is counted under its name, and who is not.
The old world, which subsisted until the beginning of the 1980s, was in no way perfect, and it was even regularly sinister – but it was a world. There was a world because any worker from a city, any peasant from the (well-named) ‘third world’ had, as a possibility – opened up by the world itself – his or her own political name. One belonged to the struggles of national liberation, to the working class, to the socialist camp, and so forth. The world distributed its names and inscribed them in a situation. Under the name they adopted, each one had a future, even if it was improbable or illusory. We can say that the world was the place of the names of a History that could be shared by all, even in its moments of paroxysm.
Today, we are in an intervallic period in which the great majority of people do not have a name. The only name available is ‘excluded’, which is the name of those who have no name. The great majority of humanity counts today for nothing. ‘Excluded’ is the name of the absence of a name, and ‘market’ is the symmetrical counterpart of this ‘excluded’: it is the worldly name of what is not a world.
The question of contemporary nihilism, including its ties to the philosophical re-assertion of enjoyment, can then be formulated: Where lie the names with which logic will make the world to come?
Philosophy has no other legitimate aim except to help find the new names that will bring into existence the unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are waiting for it.
In a play written in his youth, Emperor and Galilean, Henrik Ibsen presents the story of Julian the Apostate, so named because he wanted to restore paganism after Constantine, after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. And according to Ibsen, Julian the Apostate, hesitating between the aesthetics coming from the Greeks and the revelation of the Christians, declares magnificently: ‘The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is not yet true.’8 What is the present time, for us, who carry the burden of a return to Marxism? A time in which former politics are no longer active, and in which the new forms of politics experiment, with some difficulty, their truth. We are the experimenters of the interval. We are between two worlds, one of which is falling little by little into oblivion, while the other is only fragmentary. What we have to do is pass through. We are passers. We create by fragments a politics without fetishes – not even, above all, the democratic fetish. In The Balcony, Jean Genet’s prophetic play, one of the characters, a rebel, an insurgent, declares:
How can we approach Liberty, the People, Virtue, and how can we love them if we magnify them! If we render them untouchable? They must be left in their living reality. Let there be poems and images prepared, which do not satisfy but irritate.9
Let us prepare then – if we know how to, but we always do know a bit – those poems and those images which fulfil none of the desires we are a slave to, but which name the future bearers of liberty.