It is unlikely that Bertrand Gille ever envisaged the possibility that has come to pass in the age of disruption to which the barbarians lay claim. Conversely, disruption is almost a direct consequence of what André Leroi-Gourhan did envisage in Gesture and Speech, as a possibility that would also amount to the end of humanity:
The infiltration of urban time [is] now spreading to all moments of the day to suit the rhythm of radio and television broadcasts. A superhumanized space and time would correspond to the ideally synchronous functioning of all individuals, each specialized in his or her own function and space. Human society would […] recover the organization of the most perfect animal societies, those in which the individual exists only as a cell.1
What I have tried to show is that the reticulation of automatisms tends towards the concretization of such possibilities, through the production of traces functioning as ‘pheromones’ in ‘digital anthills’, where social systems are replaced by global companies that own and operate the algorithms that ensure the hyper-synchronization of what, by that very fact, is prevented from developing into an internation.2
Hyper-synchronization prevents the power of calculation from being socially individuated by the incalculable. This is precisely what the disruption claimed by the barbarians produces, where the social systems, which are never able to ‘catch up to’, ‘appropriate’ or adopt the technical system (which would be to metastabilize an age of transindividuation), are instead disintegrated (in the strict sense3) and crushed, reduced to dust, that is, dissolved into entropic becoming.4 Transindividuation is replaced by processes of transdividuation5 that are under corporate control, by corporations that are in turn controlled by shareholders who ‘manage’ them according to a single criterion: the increase of dividends – at the cost of psychic and collective disindividuation, at the cost of madness.
Every human society is obviously a social network that is both founded on traces and produces traces – that is, tertiary retentions, which generate primary and secondary retentions. What lies at the origin of Western civilization is literate tertiary retention, which requires citizens to thoroughly reshape their mnesic and anamnesic capabilities, which is also to say their protentional capabilities.
The successive epochs of the Western era (of monotheism, for which the philosophy of Plato paved the way, and which becomes the Christian era) are all, whether recent or distant, thoroughly conditioned by processes of synchronization and diachronization that result from the literate culture of citizens, or the faithful, or the subjects of what amounts to the epochs of the book, which are themselves the eras of monotheism – Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The Renaissance occurs during this age dominated by Christianity in the form of printed books and the ‘age of madness’, which undoubtedly stems from the great disadjustment caused by printed tertiary retention, from which would emerge primitive capitalism as described by Max Weber.6
Analogue traces appeared in the twentieth century with photography, phonography and cinema. The circulation of these analogue traces via broadcast networks produced what Leroi-Gourhan described as the programme industries, giving rise to a process of synchronization that would have been completely inconceivable in the epoch of handwritten or printed literate tertiary retention: it was in terms of this possibility of synchronization, which they understood also as standardization, that Adorno and Horkheimer anticipated a ‘new kind of barbarism’ – of which 9/11, as a programme and spectacle broadcast into a billion television sets around the world, was a symptom, as was the Nanterre massacre.
The standardization of symbols by the culture industry in fact amounts to a de-symbolization, where the senders of what are, precisely, programmes, and no longer symbols, are functionally distinguished from the receivers. Here already, it is a case of economic organizations taking control of the imagination, that is, of the primordial source of protentions, as well as of the formation of collective secondary protentions, and, ultimately, of individual and collective dreams.
Nevertheless, a new step is taken, one that undoubtedly amounts to a break, with the formation of what Leroi-Gourhan foresaw in 1965, and which he referred to as a ‘magnetic library’ [magnétothèque]:
There can be no doubt that for several thousand years, quite independently of its role as keeper of the collective memory, writing has by dint of its one-dimensionality provided the analytical instrument indispensable to philosophical and scientific thinking. The preservation of thought can now be envisaged otherwise than in books, which will not for long possess the advantages of quick and easy manageability. Preselected and instantaneously reconstituted information will soon be delivered by a huge magnetic library with electronic selection.7
By somehow projecting outwards from the tendencies expressed in the analysis of the contours derived from the palaeo-anthropological and historical documents that he synthesized as a prehistorian, ethnologist and observer of the contemporary world, Leroi-Gourhan succeeded in producing an analysis of astounding perspicacity. What he describes amounts to the advent of digital tertiary retention that would occur after that of the programme industries founded on analogue tertiary retention, giving concrete effect to the hypothesis he advanced in his analysis of the ultimate consequences of this synchronization:
Because of the development of its body and brain, through the exteriorization of tools and of the memory, the human species seemed to have escaped the fate of the polyparium or the ant. But freedom of the individual may only be a stage; the domestication of time and space may entail the total subjugation of every particle of the supraindividual organism.8
There is no doubt that what we are presently living through corresponds to what for Leroi-Gourhan fifty years ago was a futuristic prediction. If I am to believe what was once confided to me by Jean-Paul Demoule during a seminar I organized on Leroi-Gourhan’s work,9 Leroi-Gourhan, who had taught Demoule, at the end of his life discouraged his students from reading his own speculations.
In fact, these extrapolations, which express tendencies, are a kind of ‘thought experiment’, but, in this experiment, a certain number of elements are diminished or ignored. These elements amount to those counter-tendencies that this book is an attempt to highlight:
The ‘storytelling’ that accompanies and legitimates disruptive reticulation amounts to the claim that disruption inverts ‘top down’ power, by permitting individuals to exercise theirs from the ‘bottom up’. The disruptors proclaim their individualism – glorifying the ability of individuals to constantly express themselves and interact with the network – which they present as freedom’s triumph over the rules, regulations and frameworks of all those orders in which society consists, and which ensure the adjustment between the social systems and the technical system.
But Leroi-Gourhan showed in advance that this reticulation would be anything but some new conquest, triumph or rediscovery of freedom over and against the rules that would supposedly have suppressed it. The ‘magnetic library’, as we have just seen, is the very thing that suggests that the ‘freedom of the individual may only be a stage; the domestication of time and space may entail the total subjugation of every particle of the supraindividual organism’.10 The barbarian disruptors posit as a fundamental principle that only psychic individuals should ‘arbitrate choice’ – that is, produce clicks.11 This individualism, which is in reality a destruction of individuals through the herd-like characteristics that prevail, claims to be purely ‘bottom up’, that is, freed from all the constraints of the ‘top down’, thereby emancipating itself in a ‘revolutionary’ way from ‘reform’. And this ‘reform’ is, indeed, totally discredited in the face of this new stage that is digital grammatization, and that is being concretized as automatic and reticulated society: the indigence of national or European public power is in this respect shocking and undeniable.
But what is ignored by the ideology of disruption, driven by the new barbarians who claim to be importing the ultra-liberal vision of the silicon libertarians,12 is that freedom is constituted as a transductive relation, that is, as the play of the set of constraints shared precisely as the rules of this game. In the case of disruptive companies, contrary to what the latter claim, these rules and this play exist, but ‘psychic individuals’ are no longer the players: they have become pawns – turned into the powerlessness of a public who watches but no longer arbitrates anything as these games play out, understanding next to nothing of their stakes.
The ‘conquest of freedom’ through what Leroi-Gourhan called the ‘liberation of memory’ by the process of exteriorization has always consisted in the law and the fact that psychic individuals can take part in individuation only insofar as the latter is always at once psychic, collective and technical – and by introducing a diachronic heterogeneity formed by the singularity of desire, which itself transforms collective retentions and protentions into psychic retentions and protentions bearing neganthropic bifurcations.
This exteriorization that constitutes the principle of ‘liberation’ is always also an ‘alienation’: it leads to an offsetting of neganthropic possibilities to exosomatized organs that amounts to a kind of dependence, which is the basis of proletarianization as the loss of knowledge (of how to live, work and conceptualize), that is, as entropy. This is nothing new. And it is so as to constitute, on the basis of this exteriorization, which is firstly a loss of knowledge, new forms of knowledge – that is, new forms of neganthropy, as the diversity of knowledge, culture and social organizations – that a readjustment must occur, through which it becomes possible for therapeutic circuits to form, circuits of those pharmaka in which all exteriorizations consist.
As the Anthropocene approaches its limits, disruption – which consists in accelerating the process of exteriorization by short-circuiting and annihilating the question of psychic and collective interiorization that is individuation – establishes the reign of proletarianization by placing all those ‘disrupted’ sectors outside the law.
In so doing, the principle of disruption consists in hastening the Anthropocene’s approach towards its limits. By violently accelerating this event, disruption risks triggering in each of us the feeling that we are rushing headlong into an abyss, which would be to produce a purely negative collective protention – bringing with it the most barbarous behaviour imaginable.
Faced with this possibility, which in the end Leroi-Gourhan never foresaw, it is imperative to reconsider exosomatization and organogenesis from a pharmacological perspective, where the question is always that of turning the poison into a remedy, that is, of making that which produces a local increase of entropy turn into its opposite, so that it becomes a new neganthropic and neganthropological factor – one that would for this precise reason be epokhal.
As Ars Industrialis has said from its inception, such a transformation requires a new critique of political economy – the economy having become purely, simply and absolutely anti-political with the advent of purely, simply and absolutely computational capitalism: the elimination of social systems is the liquidation of political collective individuation, coming at the cost of the destruction of psychic individuals – of their psychic apparatus, which constitutes their reasons to exist in view of consistences, beyond mere subsistence.
The disruption promoted by the new barbarians is the reign of the law of the jungle such as this is dreamed of by the most reactionary conservatives. This air-conditioned jungle – as Duke Ellington called it – establishes a reign of dread that is also a new stage of the ‘shock doctrine’, and it does so as the attack of the barbarians, which is, in effect, that is, in the facts, an organization of chaos deemed to be creative. And this chaos would also be that to which the advocates of ‘Sharia’ lay claim, in awaiting a divine law that would restore order to this exhaustion of public law, that is, of profane realities.
For the barbarians, who, conforming to the prescriptions of Abu Bakr Naji, await the divine law that will restore order to the chaos that they themselves organize for this very purpose, the public thing, which is profane in nature and therefore secular, has become totally illegitimate – the public space of Öffentlichkeit having been privatized by what Adorno and Horkheimer describe as a new kind of barbarism.
As for the new barbarians, despite the 2008 collapse and the actions of the European troika that went on to sacrifice Greece, they continue to celebrate the invisible hand as the Providence of God that would be the omnipotent market in the competition of all against all, which is obviously bound to turn into a ‘war of all against all’. This Providence that underlies the market proclaims the omnipotence of calculation, which is nevertheless heading straight for the wall of the Anthropocene, while at the same time giving Europe back its old demons – now heavily armed.
Society is constituted through the transindividual construction of social systems. For that to occur, the technical system must be metastabilized – it must maintain a general form while supporting the deviations that make it dynamic. Such a process of internal phase shifting, which is what any dynamic system amounts to, always conditions psychic and collective individuation.
The digital technical system currently individuates by radical (that is, disruptive) innovation, driven by the speculators that shareholders have become. Today, then, the technical system is engaged in a constant and unlimited process of mutation, which, as we will see with Peter Sloterdijk and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, amounts to the most extreme stage of a process of disinhibition that began to unfold in the fifteenth century. The result is that, at the same time:
The metastabilization that would render to reason the time to synthesize and hence to psychically and collectively ‘protentionalize’ the lightning-quick analyses produced by automated understanding, so as to transform them into social ends, is thus the very thing that disruption prevents. It does so by submitting speculative investments in radical innovation to a single criterion: the increase at any cost on the return on investment of those who are therefore no longer investors, but speculators.
Those who speculate on radical innovation, its chaotic effects and the gains they expect to make thereby bet against the social systems, just as in other times they might have bet on being able to make a profit from famine or poverty. In this case, the bet against the social systems consists in hastening the players (the speculators themselves) as well as the pawns (us) headlong into the wall that is the blocked horizon of the Anthropocene, that is, sending it to its limit, which is approaching at high speed.
This blocked horizon is what I once referred to as the ‘wall of time’:13 this is the moment when a ‘shift’ holds sway, that is, a potential for highly chaotic bifurcations, of the kind referred to in the Nature article, ‘Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere’.14 As an imminent event, this must be anticipated, projected and wanted through a radical transformation of radical innovation – in this way becoming the true social and open innovation that lies at the heart of what we call the economy of contribution.
For thirty years, I have tried to build upon the concept of disadjustment, by taking it from Gille and articulating it with Simondon’s theory of psychic and collective individuation. I will return to it when I introduce the question of φιλία (philia) – that is, of what it is that binds together the members of a community, which is also what is torn apart when a civilization degenerates, giving way to barbarism, and which is related to what Roberto Esposito calls delinquere, or what I am here calling ὕβρις.15
What Gille describes as adjustment, which I describe in Simondonian terms as metastabilization through transindividuation, is the condition of formation of what, as φιλία, also conditions this transindividuation. The circular causality this involves leads us to propose that φιλία is that transindividuation through which what Simondon calls the transindividual is formed, which is the condition of meaning as sense [sens], that is, of reason conceived not as ratio, but as affect.
It is in φιλία that the transindividual is given. It is generated by processes of transindividuation and vice versa – transindividuation (and, with it, φιλία) being itself conditioned by tertiary retention, such that potentials for synchronization and diachronization come to be distributed in what amounts to a general processuality that is both an organology and a pharmacology.
In the case of disruption, the circuits of transindividuation constituted through φιλία, and vice versa, are short-circuited and replaced by what I have described in the first volume of Automatic Society as processes of ‘transdividuation’ – taking up the concept of the ‘dividual’ put forward by Félix Guattari.
In his discussion of what he called a ‘magnetic library’, Leroi-Gourhan showed extraordinary foresight, both in terms of analysing the stakes involved in the culture industries and anticipating the rise of digital networks.16 He imagined the ‘dividualization’ of a ‘humanity’ that would have become totally dependent on the prostheses with which all human knowledge – of living, doing and conceptualizing – would be exteriorized, but a humanity who would then have become inhuman in a strict sense, that is, devoid of any neganthropological capability.
Such is the intolerable perspective of the ‘wall of time’.
There is, evidently, a kind of paradox involved in Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of exteriorization, inasmuch as it leads to its own disappearance – where there would no longer be anything to exteriorize, metastability giving way to stability, unless we envisage a war of prostheses among themselves, such as through the intermediary of ‘killer robots’, where individuals, who will have become cells of a supra-organism, would play no part other than as victims, or where, too, a ‘process of interiorization’ may be initiated, consisting in effecting, through ‘NBIC convergence’,17 the re-engineering of life in totality, and, in the first place, through the engineering of ‘enhanced’ human life.18
From an anthropological perspective that has become neganthropological, such scenarios are the least rational: they are what provide the least reasons for living, subjecting the whole of life to this entropic fate that Freud also called Thanatos, as a tendency contained in the technical form of life itself. This is why it is the bearer of that madness concealed in every loss of reason.
What we know from Beyond the Pleasure Principle19 is that technical life is noetic life, and, in that, desiring life,20 constituting the battleground of a struggle between two tendencies that Freud calls Eros and Thanatos – which are the life drives and the death drives. What remains deficient in these extraordinary speculations, however, is any account of the fact that non-inhuman life is technical life in Canguilhem’s sense.
The emergence of technical life engendered, especially starting from the Upper Palaeolithic, an intense proliferation of these inorganic yet organized forms that are tertiary retentions, and that, from the beginning of hominization some three million years or so ago, constitute as such (as memory21) an exosomatization in which the relation between death and life, that is, between entropy and negentropy, is replayed from beginning to end in the artificial organs that are produced by desire as a dream capable of realizing itself.
Such a libidinal economy is constituted on the noetically and exosomatically inflected basis of what Derrida called différance, where life defers its entropic disappearance via the play of mnesic traces of all kinds: biological, psychic, social and technical.
Reason then becomes the question of the constantly challenged conditions of the play of such a différance, when, noetically, it is conditioned by a tertiary retention that is also a pharmakon, that is, an agent of both entropy and negentropy, this fundamental ambiguity22 constituting ὕβρις as such, that is, that which, contained within the jar of Pandora as the condition of all protention, and freed from all restraint, can only precipitate the end that it was a matter of deferring.
I discovered André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech by reading Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. This grammatology, which from the outset Derrida declared could present itself only as and in a ‘monstrosity’, is built upon the foundation of two of Derrida’s other texts, written firstly as a response to an invitation by Jean Piel for the journal Critique, one on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, the other a review of the two volumes by Leroi-Gourhan published as Le geste et la parole (Technique et langage and La mémoire et les rythmes), along with two other works on the history of writing.23
I read these books between 1979 and 1980. At that time, I lived at Saint-Michel prison in Toulouse, where I had been incarcerated since June 1978, after having been arrested for armed robbery. I was not exactly a barbarian, but a delinquent, that is, an ‘outlaw’ [hors-la-loi]. Sentenced to eight years, I served just over three in the Toulouse prison, followed by a little under two years in the Muret detention centre.
For me, these years were, not ‘redemptive’, but salutary: they saved me from a dark fate (without ‘redeeming’ [racheter] me from any slavery whatsoever24). When I was arrested, my body and mind were seriously run down. I was rapidly descending down a dangerous slope, which terminated in this madness: robbing banks – in a manner that could hardly be called ‘professional’.
Reading Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology, I encountered his description of the process that Derrida would himself refer to as a ‘monstrosity’ – the analysis of which would lead directly to the hypothesis of a coming disruptive state of exosomatic organogenesis – around two years after my arrest. I was at that time ‘under review’, as they say in prison. From time to time I would be ‘extracted’ from my cell to the courthouse, where, with my lawyer, I would go to see the judge who was reviewing the file on the basis of which the criminal court would rule on my case. It was while I was observing the work of republican justice, between my arrest and my trial, that I would discover how the Greek notion of ἀλήθεια (alētheia, truth) is tied to the notions of δίκη (dikē, justice) and κάλλος (kallos, beauty).
I remained in prison until February 1983. During that time, I converted – not to a religion, but to a noetic disposition derived from a philosophical method: that of the ‘conversion of the gaze’ conceived at the beginning of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, based on what he called the phenomenological reduction through which it becomes possible to get past the ‘natural attitude’. Husserl describes this phenomenological reduction in his first great work, Logical Investigations, published in 1901. At that time, he called it the eidetic reduction, referring to the Greek question of the eidos (εἶδος).
Eidetic reduction consists in identifying the εἶδος of a phenomenon through the imaginary variation of this phenomenon. The eidos of the phenomenon is the invariant nucleus25 that, however much the appearance of the phenomenon may vary (for example, the phenomenon of the flower, which can present itself as a poppy or a daisy, as a button closed in upon itself or as a pistil surrounded by its corolla of petals, and so on), is maintained as that which the phenomenon each time aims at, in each of its instances (as this or that flower, for example).
Hence eidetic reduction consists in reducing the flower to its ideal traits, which form what Mallarmé called ‘the one absent from every bouquet’:
I say: a flower! and, outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any contour, as something other than the calyx, there arises, musically, as the same, sweet idea, the one absent from every bouquet.26
The Husserlian eidetic reduction attempts to access the conditions of experience and thought – that is, of what, since Kant, has been called the transcendental. But it requires and implies a phenomenological reduction that passes through a radicalization of Cartesian doubt: for the undoubtedly possible accessing of the transcendental dimension of what presents itself firstly as empirical experience, I must be able to suspend belief in the world around me, in order to vary phenomena solely on the basis of what necessarily remains, of what remains irreducible, and that I cannot eliminate without eliminating myself, as that ego that, for Husserl, constitutes the transcendental condition of the world, which he will consequently call the transcendental ego, the subject of what he will call egology.27
This exceeding of the ordinary, which enables access to the experience of the extra-ordinary called the transcendental, where the extra-ordinary is the hidden and forgotten condition of the ordinary, consists in practising the phenomenological epokhē, that is, the suspension of belief in the world.
I myself practised just such a phenomenological ἐποχή, but initially without being aware of it, in the silent void of my cell, where, by accident, I literally dis-covered the extra-ordinary layer that conditioned what had hitherto been the ordinary course of my existence. This cell, which thus delivered me over to an experience of the extra-ordinary, became a laboratory in which – thanks to books, which in this silent void had not disappeared, lingering in my desert like the vestiges of a world now absent – I discovered the works of Husserl.
My reading of Husserl passed through Mallarmé, who, when he writes, ‘I say: a flower!’, provokes in the silence of reading an event that is not just ‘innerworldly’ in the sense that Heidegger will give to this word (that is, originating from the world) – because it makes world. The Mallarméan text opens a world, for example, that of flowers: as a language, not of communication between two speakers, but of poetry inasmuch as it makes appear ‘the one absent from every bouquet’, the poetic milieu that idioms form for those who ‘dwell poetically upon this earth’28 conditions the emergence of a world that presents itself to them as a constant succession of phenomena.
Later, and indeed quite quickly, I went on to encounter, in passing through Derrida, the question of writing,29 such that, as trace, it itself conditioned my experience of poetic language as the extra-ordinary condition of possibility of the ordinary course of noetic life – that is, thoughtful, spiritual and intellectual life, which has, since Aristotle, defined the condition of possibility of non-inhuman beings. But it also defines their ‘condition of impossibility’, that is, the possibility of their inhumanity, and does so as pharmakon.
Through this reflection on writing that presented itself to me first and foremost as an experience and experiment of reading,30 which for me it continues to be, I came to the conclusion that, beyond writing in the Derridian sense, technics, of which writing is a specific case (constituting a hypomnesic tertiary retention31), conditions the formation of the preindividual funds of all epokhal experience.
In passing through Heidegger, I then generalized the question of the epokhē to that of history inasmuch as it is composed of a succession of epochs, in which technics regularly provokes, as changes of technical systems, upheavals that generate noetic activity on the basis of which, as the ‘doubly epokhal redoubling’, an epoch properly speaking is constituted.
Today, thirty-three years after my release from prison, I try to think and to think care-fully [de penser et de panser]32 about what makes Florian suffer, and I believe that it is the epoch of the absence of epoch that, precisely, erases the possibility of acceding to the possibility of considering the one absent from every bouquet, that is, that effaces, annuls and annihilates the possibility of acceding to ‘consistence’ – of flowers, gardens, cities, of life on earth, of others, of the κόσμος.
This systemic obstruction of consistences, provoked, for example, by the automatic generation of protentions, prevents the projection of singular desires, which always aim at consistences. This systemic obstruction, which disruption installs everywhere, is bound to lead to an ever more murderous madness. It is this that invades the world, today in one way, tomorrow in another, and, in so doing, leads to the world’s becoming befouled [immonde] – that is, strictly barbarous.
During the three years I spent in Saint-Michel33 prison in Toulouse, then, I discovered that a prison cell can, under certain conditions, become a phenomenological laboratory where the practice of the reduction enables one to make genuine discoveries about oneself, and where this is possible insofar as this ‘self’ harbours what, in 2003, when I wrote Passer à l’acte, I called myself-an-other [moi-l’autre], which opens its arms to the world, including and even especially when it is absent, which is very rare.34
After some months of almost total prison silence,35 that is, without speech, still not knowing who Husserl was, I encountered the ‘epokhal’ virtue of my cell, where I almost always lived alone (at the cost of some struggles with the prison administration). Nevertheless, in the silence in which nothing is uttered, speech never just disappears, and so this constituted a new experience of language, quite close to madness, but one that gave access to the extra-ordinary, in the first place as highly singular mental phenomena, which in some way effect a spontaneous conversion of the gaze upon the world become absent – as the ‘one absent from every bouquet’ – but, at the same time, and at the same stroke, all the more consistent.
At the end of weeks and months, progressively penetrating into this experience of the extra-ordinary, the experience of being imprisoned ceased to be painful and became, instead, an adventure, which I sometimes truly experienced as good fortune: there really were moments of joy. It was the fortune of my life – as the epokhē of my life, but also, in this epokhē that was a ‘conversion’ of my life, in the discovery of what, thanks to Joë Bousquet as read by Gilles Deleuze, I began to practise as the meletē of quasi-causality.36
It was on the basis of this experience, through which I became the ‘quasi-cause’ of my ‘punishment’, through which it became my chance, and as my great epokhal experience and experiment, that I came to understand ‘stoic logic’ as the trans-formation of necessity into virtue, ἀρετή – I had to turn necessity into virtue – and that I began to think the défaut [fault, default] as being that for which we must do what is necessary [ce dont il faut faire ce qu’il faut].
This condition – being by default – soon seemed to me to be that of the exosomatic being spoken about in the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Ἀρετή (aretē), which we translate as virtue (from the Latin virtus), and sometimes by excellence, then becomes the passage from the potential (dunamis – δύναμις) of the default to the act (energeia – ἐνέργεια) of that which is necessary. This can no longer be an ontology, as it was in Aristotle, but amounts rather to an ethics in the Greek sense of this word: the discipline of an ἦθος (ēthos) founded on αἰδώς (aidōs) and in view of δίκη (dikē). I will return to this question in the final part of this work.37
Much later, that is, over the last ten years, I went on to discover that Michel Foucault himself had investigated these questions a few months before his death, which he knew was coming, and, some twenty years after his work on the history of madness, had engaged in the study of techniques of the self, government of self and others, care for the self, the hermeneutics of the self and the courage of truth.
This journey, which continued after I left my laboratory and still continues today, thanks to many friends, including Gérard Granel, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, this journey to the limits of the world and the worldless [immonde] was possible only by working, and by working hard so as not to go mad.
This was possible from the very first days thanks to the constant and unconditional help given to me by Gérard Granel. Granel had been an occasional companion of mine in my nightlife prior to prison. He became a friend by guiding me in the darkness within which I was groping about, within memory that was becoming my milieu: my memory of the absent world, and the memory contained in the books that accumulated in my cell, with which he could supply me because the examining magistrate had granted us the right to use the visiting room reserved for lawyers. I learned to read these sometimes very difficult books with the help of the magnificent professors who taught at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, whose courses I could follow thanks to remote-education programmes.
The principal materials of the laboratory were, on the one hand, my psychic retentions, and, on the other, the protentions that haunted my dreams – all this being sustained, revived, channelled, filtered, and so ‘reduced’ in a sense that was not strictly Husserlian, because what I began to observe was that all this was transformed and ultimately transindividuated by what I would later call tertiary retentions.
The literal tertiary retentions (written à la lettre) that allowed me to orient myself in what would otherwise have remained a noetic desert were:
I have previously discussed some aspects of this in Acting Out.
My prison studies began not with philosophy, but with linguistics. Early in my adolescent years, between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, I had the luck to meet Alain Bideau, who at that time was friends with my brother Dominique. Alain had himself had an important encounter, at the Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis, some years prior to our friendship, with Jean Marcenac: Marcenac was his philosophy teacher, and also a poet who had come out of surrealism, a former communist member of the resistance and an editor of L’Humanité.
Through Dominique and Alain, but also thanks to the French Communist Party press, which they themselves read, and which I began to read through imitation and ‘secondary identification’, I was aware of discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre, structuralism, Roland Barthes and many other thinkers – in particular Derrida and Saussure. And I purchased some of these books, as well as Plato’s Republic – which I acquired from a great bookstore that supplied literature and essays to the ‘grand ensemble’ of Sarcelles, where I had lived since the age of seven.38
During my pre-prison life, I had never succeeded in reading any of these works – having, moreover, left high school at the end of the classe de seconde39 in the spring of 1968 – with the exception of the beginning of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which I had begun in the early 1970s, and which I found quite exciting. I had also begun to read many twentieth-century novels. Prior to that, my mother had encouraged me to read nineteenth-century novels – something for which she herself set the example. When I was sixteen, I read a little Lenin and Marx, just prior to May 1968. Ten years later, I was in prison.
Having made a detailed study of my copy of Saussure, which Gérard had sent me in what was thus to become an extra-ordinary cell of the conversion of the ordinary, I then also read Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Théorie de l’ensemble – published by the Tel Quel group,40 who also published a journal under the direction of Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva – Roman Jakobson’s linguistics, the poetics of the Russian formalists, and Revolution in Poetic Language, which Kristeva dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé.41
At the same time, every morning at dawn I began to read a poem, or some prose, by Mallarmé, having acquired the La Pléiade edition of his work, as well as his published correspondence, collated by Henri Mondor. After a short time, I decided to enrol in philosophy at the Université du Mirail, on Granel’s advice and with his assistance. To do so, I took and passed the university’s special entrance examination: I was not a bachelier.42 The chance to sit this special exam had been introduced in 1968.
From Saussure to Tel Quel, I came to read ‘Différance’,43 Dissemination44 and Writing and Difference45 – after having read Of Grammatology, which, in addition to leading me to Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, led me to Heidegger’s Being and Time,46 and then to many other works by this pupil of Husserl, and in particular to An Introduction to Metaphysics.47
After reading and rereading two short texts, Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’ and Derrida’s introduction to his French translation of Husserl’s text, I began to simultaneously, passionately and systematically study the Greeks, and firstly Plato and Aristotle, as well as everything by Husserl that had been translated into French – being unable to read German.
From there, I began to make my way through what was then called the ‘history of metaphysics’, which I studied systematically, and by going backwards in time, passing through Hegel, Kant and Descartes – Nietzsche constituting for me a special case, belonging in some way to my present, while the great thinkers of modern ‘metaphysics’ already belonged to another age. On this path, I finally discovered Foucault and Deleuze.
I began to think that what we were then living through (between the 1970s and 1980s), arising fundamentally from this age that we call the ‘present’, was already, perhaps, no longer presenting itself quite as a present, which is also to say, as a given [don] – as what Jean-Luc Marion calls givenness [donation].48 It seemed to me that these were the vital, existential and political stakes of the ‘deconstruction of metaphysics’, at the time of what, in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer had described as a new form of barbarism, while in 1969 Maurice Blanchot investigated the ‘change of epoch’ in a text that remains misunderstood: ‘On a Change of Epoch: The Exigency of Return’.49
Now that the trial and ordeal of the absence of epoch imposes itself as such, I have come to believe that the withdrawal of the present as given was already the issue at stake in the pronouncement by Hegel, then Marx, and especially by Nietzsche, of the ‘death of God’.
In the course of these peregrinations, and without ever forgetting what had so struck me in Leroi-Gourhan’s analysis – that man is the technical form of life (and, much later, I would find this formulated in another way in Georges Canguilhem), producing an exosomatic organogenesis that, through that very fact, generates a type of memory that does not exist in other forms of life – I gradually forged what would become my doctoral thesis, and the constant motive of my work.
This thesis was supervised by Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1992. It posited that what is sometimes called ‘phenomenological’ time, that is, time lived in the specific mode of what Aristotle called the noetic soul, appears conditioned by, and hence constituted by, technical exteriorization, in return forming a process of interiorization, and, in this, a process that transforms the one who exteriorizes and ‘exosomatizes’ his or her existence. It was not until 1986 that I would discover, during a discussion with François Laruelle, that Simondon is the philosopher who allows us to think this transformative interiorization as a process of individuation, a process always re-exteriorized, and, through that, transindividuated.
According to this thesis, it is through this loop – which passes through exosomatization, and which, as organogenesis, trans-forms, through the artificial organs that it generates, somatic and psychic organs and social organizations – and only through this loop, that noesis properly speaking, that is, thinking, is constituted. This is what led me to write in Symbolic Misery, Volume 2 that noesis is a technesis.50
Such a point of view inevitably leads, however, to what is not just an enigma or a mystery, but the very limit of the thinkable [pensable] – and, according to L’Impansable, that which cannot be healed [pansé], treated, overcome, ‘saved’.
For, following anthropological, historical and archaeological studies, but also contemporaneous technological studies of what was then in the course of being established as the analysis industry, an industry based on using computers to treat automated data, what Maurice Blanchot called uprooting [arrachement], change of epoch and impersonal powers,51 arising from and towards the ‘terrifyingly ancient’,52 was bound to continue as the end of the Book,53 and all the way up to the inconceivable point of what, now, in our day, thirty-eight years after the beginning of that epoch of my life that was the epokhē of my existence, we are calling disruption.
Eighteen months after my release, Thierry Gaudin, then director of the Centre de prospective et d’évaluation of the Ministry of Research, part of whose team was following the seminar I had been giving at the Collège international de philosophie since 1984, entrusted me with the task of studying the theoretical and practical consequences of what we were at that time calling ‘new technologies’.
In this seminar, I tried to articulate the materials of the ‘change of epoch’ and the ‘end of the Book’, on which Blanchot meditated, with Derrida’s main theses concerning what he called the archi-trace and the supplement – for which he drew from zoo-anthropological perspectives that lead, as in Leroi-Gourhan, to the most extreme stages of exosomatization (of which the ‘Derridians’, for the most part, have understood next to nothing).
I submitted my report to the Centre de prospective et d’évaluation in 1985.54 It was then presented at the Château de Vincennes to some fifty people, among whom were artists, writers and scientists I’d interviewed during the inquiry that accompanied this work, as well as philosophers from the Collège international de philosophie, including Jean-François Lyotard, who was at that time its president, Pierre-Jean Labarrière, who was rapporteur for my studies, and Jacques Derrida.
This day – which turned into a kind of symposium – was to have numerous consequences for the continuation of my adventures, since, a short time later, the Centre Pompidou invited me, in the context of its tenth anniversary and for the Bibliothèque publique d’information, to design an exhibition, which opened two years later in October 1987, entitled Mémoires du futur.
Throughout the years that followed, and until today, I have tried to think this ‘impansable’ by always examining the ‘change of epoch’ induced by the ‘impersonal powers’ of writing, that is, ‘technics in all its forms’,55 above all through reticular digital writing, and by relating it, in more or less intermittent and uncertain ways, both to what in a 1949 lecture Heidegger called Gestell, and to the great question of nihilism opened by Nietzsche in 1882.
In the last few years, these two notions, Gestell and nihilism, have come to dominate my work. Gestell is a way of reflecting on what I am here calling disruption. And nihilism is what leads, today, faced with this ordeal of Gestell – and as purely, simply and absolutely computational capitalism – to the question of the madness that unleashes, and that is unleashed by, barbarism.
More recently still, I have initiated an effort to clarify these perspectives, after reading a key article by Rudolf Boehm56 that had hitherto escaped me, in conjunction with reading The Shock of the Anthropocene.57 I have thus begun to reinterpret the texts of Nietzsche and Heidegger from a perspective of what I am here referring to as neganthropology.58 It was at that point that I encountered Florian’s parrhēsia – his παρρησία.
At the beginning of February 1983, I learned that I was ‘to be released’: the sentencing judge had signed the order for my conditional release. In prison, I had made friends with a man named Jean-Luc (who became a reader of Bousquet), and it turned out that he and I were to be released on almost the same day. We were to find ourselves thrown back into the world that had thrown us into prison. How would we cope ‘on the outside’?
Both of us had the good fortune to have family and friends who had not abandoned us. We had a fair idea where we would sleep when we got out, and of course we were excited by the new perspective from which we would need to relearn how to live.
On the Saturday preceding this return to ‘freedom’, as intoxicating as it was terrifying, sitting on the lawn of the Muret detention centre,59 I began to warn Jean-Luc of the great difficulties we should expect.
The return to freedom was going to be very hard, not just because we had unlearned the elementary gestures of the current world,60 not just because we were returning to the world like ghosts from confinement, if not as the living dead, but because nihilism, whose accomplishment was accelerating with what Derrida presented as monstrosity, was only going to continue to worsen.
The world to which we were about to return was much tougher than the one in which we had lived prior to entering prison, and we needed to know it, that is, accept it (which in no way means to submit to it, but rather to make this necessity into a virtue – or what Nietzsche called active nihilism).
As a general rule, and as difficult as it may nevertheless be, it is easier to arrive in prison than it is to leave. More than that, however, I told Jean-Luc that all that noetic life had learned since the beginning of hominization, which we call knowledge and culture, all this was being crushed by what I began to describe to him as a great rolling machine.
What I today call disruption is the concretization of this discourse – inasmuch as it unleashes not just a new form of barbarism, but a new form of madness. In early February 1983, I told Jean-Luc that in the future, in our freedom regained, we would need to remember the struggle against madness that was our relationship to philosophy and literature during incarceration – which is the carceral absence of the world and its epochs, if not, strictly speaking, the absence of the epoch of the world.
Ten years later, in 1993, I lived in Oise, thirty kilometres from the Université de technologie de Compiègne, where I had been teaching since 1988, partly thanks to the success of Mémoires du futur, which had involved engineering students from Compiègne, and partly because Patrice Vermeren, whom I had met at the Collège international de philosophie, recommended me to Gérard Pogorel, who had freed up a position there.
One evening that year, I was with my children, Barbara and Julien. They were by then already adults: twenty-three and nineteen years old. We had had a party the previous day, as we occasionally did, together with a few of their friends and some of mine. We had indulged in a few excesses, and we found ourselves in that vaguely ‘epokhal’ state which results from the ‘disturbance of the senses’ that any real party always somehow aims at reaching – something described in a singular way by Alan Sillitoe in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.61
The morning haze on Sundays of this kind sometimes reveals ghosts and hauntings – revenances of the subterranean life of the mind. Out of the blue, Barbara asked me why it was that I was always sombre and silent. I was surprised and embarrassed. The question challenged me as a father to take upon myself, to assume, the absence of a rule when faced with the problem of answering genuine questions, which those whom we engender alone can address, and know how to address, to their parents, establishing the intimate and familial genre of veridiction.62 Without taking the time to reflect, I tried to offer an unreserved answer to this question that was asked without reserve.
I told Barbara and Julien that now that they were no longer children, even though they were still my children, I had to speak to them on another register, that of their becoming adult. And I told them that, in fact, Barbara was right: I was often sombre, and often silent, not because prison had cast me into gloom in the way that ‘ex-cons’ are often portrayed in movies, but because, on the one hand, I had encountered gravity in general, as what confers upon the world its weight, which is also its price, including and especially in its absence, and, on the other hand, because I had learned that we are heading towards a great trial and ordeal concerning what would be the gravity of our epoch – or of its absence.
I then explained to them what I believed then, and what I still believe, to be my duty. My duty is not to repress or deny the conviction I acquired in my improvised phenomenological laboratory: we are heading along a path towards the worst, towards a turning point, a shift, one about which we cannot be sure whether it can be overcome – and this moment is not just coming but constantly accelerating its approach.
I also told them that, confronted with this indeterminate but certain deadline, I had resolved to live in such a way that:
I am often taken to task on the basis of holding two opposing discourses. Some ask me why I am so ‘pessimistic’. Others ask how I can be so ‘optimistic’. The first lot refer to the virulent and radical nature of the critique I am constantly making of what is happening today – in the wake of Adorno, Horkheimer, Polanyi, in some respects Blanchot, and so on. The others refer to the proposals that, since 2005, I along with Ars Industrialis65 have presented as a future made possible and necessary by disruption – which has led us to assert, as a condition of ‘active nihilism’, the necessity of what we call a positive pharmacology, based on an organology inscribed in what we have more recently begun to call a neganthropology.66
To these questions concerning the pessimism and optimism that some purport to see in my work, I reply that, ever since I have tried to reconstitute my former prison laboratory in everyday life, a quotidian existence regained less as freedom than as generalized demoralization, this demoralization has sent many of my contemporaries deeper and deeper into madness, in particular across the following sequence: 1990 (first ‘Gulf War’); 1993 (onset of ‘digitalization’); 2001 (9/11 and second war against Iraq); 2008 (financial crisis).
Contemporary demoralized madness is first expressed in the modes of denial and disavowal,67 which constitute ordinary, everyday madness in the twenty-first century,68 but also in more exceptional and clearly devastating modes. It is in these contexts that, after having been liberated, and having practised philosophy in a world that seemed to me to be, and to be for most of my fellows, a lost world, I never gave up struggling against optimism and against pessimism, which are two forms of ordinary madness, two forms of denial.
It is obviously necessary to specify what is meant by what I am here calling ‘ordinary madness’ – given that madness is always in some way extra-ordinary, and it is firstly in that that it has a relation to ‘reason’ when the latter turns to its ‘conditions of possibility’, which, too, are always extra-ordinary. Foucault’s History of Madness turns around these questions, which will also form the heart of Part Two of this work.69
I here call ‘ordinary’ a madness, usually collective, that consists in denying the obvious by taking to an extreme level the denial that lies at the heart of the relationship to the end that Heidegger calls being-for-death – or being-towards-death, Sein zum Tode – which I have named, here, archi-protention.70
In such circumstances, optimism and pessimism are unworthy, indecent and cowardly. As forms of denying the obvious [dénégation de l’évidence], and as the disavowal of the situation that this evidence puts on display, these are also ‘soft’ (ordinary) forms of madness: we have to be crazy to continue to live as if nothing is happening, while at the same time knowing, but without wanting to know, what is underway everywhere. This includes, first and foremost, the fact that the official Paris conference of the United Nations in November and December 2015 needed to provide in principle responses and a programme of action without delay (but failed to do so).
Like optimism, pessimism consists in living as if nothing has happened. The pessimist uses his negative fatalism as an excuse to do nothing: everything has already played out – it’s all too late. Optimism, too, does nothing, because it postulates that, ultimately, nothing that happens is anything but completely ordinary.
Optimism and pessimism therefore tend to reinforce one another by enclosing themselves in denial, which, as we know, can lead to the unfurling of what psychoanalysis describes as rationalizations, that is, lies perfectly constructed so as to conceal reality. Pessimism and optimism both deny the obvious, namely, the imperative to be, neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but courageous.
This criminal denial occurs with the support of an immense apparatus dedicated to encouraging pessimists and optimists in their denials of every possibility and necessity of taking action – an apparatus that consists, on the one hand, in the technologies and corporations that liquidate the will, and, on the other hand, in the disruptive systems that establish public impotence.
Optimism and pessimism deny and disavow to such an extent that they lead, like antechambers of madness, to pathological radicalization processes that in turn lead to the reinforcement of denial and disavowal – by installing terror and the panicked reactions to it that always bring out the worst.
It is to this that I, along with my friends, try to oppose the individual and collective ability to generate reasonable and rational statements, confronted with the ‘shift’.
Pessimism and optimism are emotional states – states of the soul. To think rationally, that is, to think the conditions of possibility of acts capable of opening a future always yet to come beyond becoming, is to transform these states of the soul into critical resolutions, forged in public debate. And it is to do so against every process of denial and every process of precipitation, in which, ultimately, always consists that temptation to the worst that is the drives unbound.