In an article that reported and commented on the double murder committed by Vester Lee Flanagan and the statements he made just before his passage à l’acte, when he declared, ‘I’ve been a human powder keg for a while … just waiting to go BOOM!!!!’, the Washington Post pointed out that, from the beginning of 2015 until 26 August 2015, the day after the murders, there had been 247 mass shootings in the United States: more than one per day.1
Shortly thereafter, various articles reported that in Palo Alto, the small but famous city in the northern Silicon Valley, ‘the 10-year suicide rate for the two high schools [in the area] is between four and five times the national average. […] Twelve percent of Palo Alto high-school students surveyed in the 2013–14 school year reported having contemplated suicide in the past 12 months.’2 Over the previous five years, eleven teenagers from Palo Alto threw themselves under the Caltrain that links San José and San Francisco.
On 9 November 2015, Paul Krugman published an article in the New York Times entitled ‘Despair, American Style’. He pointed out that the life expectancy of white middle-class Americans has been in decline since 1998, while the suicide rate has increased considerably, as has self-destructive behaviour involving voluntary intoxication through the use of various substances, including heroin:
Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America. […] There have been a number of studies showing that life expectancy for less-educated whites is falling across much of the nation. Rising suicides and overuse of opioids are known problems. […] But what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?3
The ‘American way of life’ is no longer what it was – and, in truth, its days are over: while the children of the wealthy inhabitants of Silicon Valley are haunted by suicidal fantasies, and are four or fives times more likely to act them out than those in the rest of the country, the white middle class, whose suicide rate is steadily increasing, consumes heroin, and in particular in rural areas, where this pharmakon can be obtained for ten dollars a hit.
Addiction to hard drugs no longer just afflicts those on the margins, or impoverished African-American populations, and this was a subject of debate during the run up to the 2016 American presidential election: ‘The explosion of [heroin] use – referred to in the United States as an epidemic – has become a public health issue and is being widely discussed in the American media. […] In September, Hillary Clinton […] announced a $10 billion plan to stem the rise of heroin use.’4 By 2011, there were already 250,000 medical emergencies ‘related to heroin abuse’. By 2013, ‘more than 500,000 Americans had reported using heroin in the last few years, an increase of 150% in six years. […] In Montgomery County, […] 127 overdoses were recorded in 2014 alone, and heroin-related deaths have increased by 225% since 2011.’5 After the ravages of more than a decade of the ‘conservative revolution’, and after the birth in 1993 of the World Wide Web, a new model of development began to spread across North America, and was then exported to the whole world with digital technology and its disruptive effects, knowingly calculated and implemented by the new entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.
While across the Atlantic inequality gaps not seen since 1929 were bringing the ‘American dream’ to an end, the European Commission, totally devoid of any understanding of the situation, tried to imitate this ‘model’. They failed to see that the United States was heading down a path to violence, notably racial violence, 2015 having borne witness to a succession of racist crimes, including by the police, but also of random killings, seemingly without ‘reason’. Nor did they see that this path would lead Europe itself into ruin, insofar as it did not possess the means to conceive and realize its own development policy for a digital industrial economy that would be non-destructive of social structures and psychic apparatuses.
In France, the few studies related to industry policy commissioned by President Hollande after his election were, on the whole, totally blind to this state of affairs – and in particular the Gallois report6 and the Pisani-Ferry report.7 The Gallois report had nothing whatsoever to say about the fundamental transformation of the economy by digital networks, and hence drew no consequences, and the Pisani-Ferry report was an incredible compendium of waffle of the kind that only France can produce, and for which it pays top dollar.
As for the Mission d’expertise sur la fiscalité de l’économie numérique, it does indeed identify the novelty of the situation.8 But as we have already seen, Nicolas Colin, finance inspector (and co-author of this report along with Pierre Collin, state councillor), has come to adopt, without distancing himself from it in any way, the perspective of the Californian disruptor – in the end defining himself as a ‘barbarian’.
In order to resituate these questions in the contemporary historical context, let us recall some figures that describe what has unfolded on our planet over the past two decades:
we have already emitted about two trillion tonnes of CO2, and, if we want warming to be limited to 2°C, we must not exceed an accumulation of 3000 billion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere: we do not have the ‘right’ to emit, in the future, more than 1000 billion tonnes of CO2. At the current rate of emissions, this quantity will be reached in less than thirty years. […] This means that we must not use more than 20 percent of our fossil fuel reserves (conventional and unconventional gas, petrol and coal) if we want to limit the warming to 2°C. We can see that this task will be difficult. It implies a profound change of our mode of development.9
11 September 2001 was the date that tragically marked the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, after a series of catastrophic initiatives undertaken in the Middle East by the United States in the last quarter of the preceding century. These initiatives were undertaken after the secret CIA policy in the 1980s that consisted in the attempt to support and manipulate Osama bin Laden, carried out in connection with Saudi Arabia and those who constitute what Fethi Benslama calls the petro-families in that country10 – the Bush family being itself such a petro-family in the United States.
On 25 July 1990, April Glaspie, the American Ambassador to Iraq, let Saddam Hussein understand that the United States was not concerned about his intention to invade Kuwait, which Iraq had long claimed was its territory.11 Nevertheless, following this invasion, George H.W. Bush entered the First Gulf War – thus giving the whole thing the appearance of being a trap.
After 9/11 – that is, after bin Laden had turned against the United States, which had constantly manipulated Islamist movements during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,12 and after he had turned against his native Saudi Arabia – George W. Bush, allied notably by the United Kingdom and Spain, made this a pretext to annihilate Iraq during the Second Gulf War, on the basis of the claim that Saddam Hussein had produced weapons of mass destruction.
It was later established that this claim, which Dominique de Villepin rejected during a remarkable speech before the United Nations General Assembly, was a lie – for which Tony Blair received much approbation in the United Kingdom. The military coalition involving twenty-two nations and headed by the United States thus destroyed a developed country that would then become a base of operations for Daesh. The latter coalesced via the regrouping of former Iraqi military and agents, the Naqshbandi Army, the Islamic Army in Iraq, and Al-Qaeda, ultimately leading to the formation of Islamic State in 2006. And it was during this terrible war that the prisons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib appeared, where American mercenary armies committed their atrocities.
After Iraq was totally disintegrated by this military coalition – which, thanks to Dominique de Villepin, France was wise enough to avoid, as was Germany, unlike the Spain of José María Aznar and the Britain of Tony Blair – the operations of Daesh shifted across to Syria, following the uprising against Bashar al-Assad and his subsequent retaliatory war against his people, in relation to which the French media had, for a long time, been denouncing the atrocities of the Ba’athist regime. In June 2014, Islamic State, henceforth named Daesh, proclaimed a caliphate in the Sham region,13 established both in Iraq and in Syria.
Daesh then established itself in Libya, a few hundred kilometres from Tunis. On 19 March 2011, encouraged by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was clearly engaged in electioneering, Nicolas Sarkozy attacked the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, as if trying to make himself appear strong in the face of massive public disapproval. Gaddafi was himself rattled by the ‘Arab Spring’, which, between the borders of Tunisia and Egypt, unleashed a war through which AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) was established. This war would soon migrate to sub-Saharan Africa, in particular to Mali, where, in January 2013, François Hollande in his turn decided to intervene, so that he, too, might boost his ratings in the opinion polls.
It was on the basis of these Western military interventions in the Middle East, Near East and Africa that Daesh, through a discourse forged by former Iraqi agents, managed to capture and channel the suicidal despair of young French minds.14 As for the hundreds of thousands of refugees coming from Syria seeking help throughout Europe, they are fleeing the immense chaos that has afflicted this region since 1990 – looked upon from afar by the United States, while observing the rise of the European far right.
As they have evolved over the course of the last ten years, all these catastrophes surrounding the Middle East, with their combined effects on a portion of French youth, and, more generally, on the moral state of France, must be seen in terms of a global context marked by an incredible combination of calamities:
The SYR [Synthesis Report] confirms that human influence on the climate system is clear and growing, with impacts observed across all continents and oceans. Many of the observed changes since the 1950s are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The IPCC is now 95 percent certain that humans are the main cause of current global warming. In addition, the SYR finds that the more human activities disrupt the climate, the greater the risks of […] long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system. […] [S]tabilizing temperature increase […] will require an urgent and fundamental departure from business as usual. Moreover, the longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost and the greater the technological, economic, social and institutional challenges we will face. […] As such, the SYR calls for the urgent attention of both policymakers and citizens of the world to tackle this challenge.17
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal […]. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen. […] Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.18
The long series of catastrophes that have struck the whole world since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and in particular France, have plunged every generation into a state of demoralization unique in the history of humanity. Never before has there been such planetary anxiety, turning little by little into dangerous despair.
Never before have scientists from all over the world made pronouncements – with rational arguments exposed to peer criticism and founded on logic and quantification, and without any tinge of ‘millenarianism’ or ‘apocalyptic prophecy’ – concerning the likelihood of the disappearance of noetic life on earth and a significant part of the planet’s biodiversity, that is, the disappearance of life in general – all this within a short period: on the order of a few human generations.
It is this about which Florian speaks. It is also in this global context that, over the years since the 2002 Nanterre massacre, we have seen the attacks in Madrid on 11 March 2004 and in London on 7 July 2005 that claimed hundreds of victims, and in Norway in 2011 the attack by Anders Behring Breivik, who killed seventy-seven people including sixty-nine teenagers, while in 2014 Maxime Hauchard, a young man from Normandy, who according to his neighbours was ‘kind, courageous and well-bred’, was ‘recognized on a video as a Daesh executioner’.19 On 7 January 2015, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi murdered eleven people including eight at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, among them Bernard Maris. On 24 March the same year, Andreas Lubitz steered the airliner he was flying, with 144 passengers and six crew on board, into a mountainside. Many other examples of mad behaviour occurred in France during this period, some of which were discussed above in §39. On 13 November 2015, nine terrorists attacked in Paris and Saint-Denis, killing, either by execution or by detonating explosive belts, 130 people – the first time that France had experienced suicidal attacks.
These are the worst symptoms of a world going mad that manifests itself in a thousand other ways, and that is possible only because we all increasingly live, like Florian, as bearers of a negative protention of a becoming without future. Unlike Florian, however, we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it.
In this absence of epoch, cynics practise the reflective madness that takes the maxim ‘after me, the flood’ as a principle – for speculators as for most electoral candidates, ruining any remaining democratic credit just as it does fiscal or public solvency. This is what I began to describe in the Disbelief and Discredit series.
As for the better-adapted deniers, they turn this misery into a spectacle by wallowing in television programmes, social networks and other systems designed to capture attention and retention. The desperate consume alcohol, anxiolytics, sedatives or other drugs, and sometimes commit suicide. As Carlos Parada has pointed out, ‘jihadism’, which often occurs after a period of using ‘hard drugs’, is also a kind of substitute for drugs.20
As long as there seems to be no hope of producing a future in a becoming that has, for everyone, everywhere, become overwhelming, from Palo Alto to Saint-Denis by way of the Carlton hotel, at least for those present who were merely ‘material’ in the eyes of ‘Dodo the Pimp’ as in those of Strauss-Kahn himself,21 there will be more and more suicides – even among children between five and twelve years old, including by blowing themselves up in the midst of a crowd.22
This is the case because there are more and more young people and parents who themselves think what Florian says, most of the time without admitting it, while at the same time the parents are less and less able to truly raise their children, being totally delivered over to a marketing that knows no bounds. This impossibility of educating and raising23 is clearly the key factor contributing to impulsive outbursts [déchaînement pulsionnel] of all kinds, and of the death drive in particular.
The growth of despair [désespoir], that is, of the loss of reasons for hope [espérer], and hence the loss of reason, amounting in the final reckoning to the growth of madness, is the inevitable result of factors that, when they combine, compound their potentials in a way that goes beyond every limit. Among these limits are the following:
Such a combination, where the pharmakon that creates suffering leads to the designation of a pharmakos that must be made to suffer,26 sets up a vicious circle and an infernal spiral of violence responding to violence that inevitably leads to a widespread feeling of a world going mad.
By creating a context in which the future can no longer be anticipated other than as inconceivable chaos, this turn to madness makes even those who still escape it crazy. It maddens [affole] everyone – by the most ordinary pathways as well as the most extraordinary, and also through that ‘reflective madness’ of which President Hollande is a kind of repulsive incarnation.
In fact, the measures to change the French constitution in response to the terrorism of Daesh are themselves examples of incredible madness, which in addition reflects very badly in terms of electoral calculation, and which can only institutionalize the spiral of violence, and sacrifice the future in order to ‘save’ a power that is totally discredited and widely held in contempt: Hollande beats Sarkozy hands down on this score. Both of them have alarmed [affolé] French society – which means that they have fundamentally weakened it, in a context that was already extremely difficult, and which more than ever requires, on the contrary, great clarity of thought.
How can one not go mad when becoming seems to bear no future, so that the world no longer seems to have any meaning? Going crazy, this mad becoming stems from an immense demoralization, itself aggravated by processes of denial of all kinds. Demoralization is what creates a loss of morale. And morale [le moral], which is also trust [confiance], is the condition of any rational action, given that reason is always borne by reasons for hope.
Global demoralization is a planetary loss of reason. It amounts to a new age in the history of madness – and precisely not to a new epoch, since it is the absence of epoch that provokes despair and the loss of all reasons for hope. Like Florian, we are all possessed by visions that are increasingly dark, and sometimes completely black: we have the feeling of ‘descending into darkness’.
This is so because – despite countless processes of denial, based on psychic repression mechanisms27 and systematic practices of subjugation and of the destruction of lucidity and will, through marketing as much as propaganda, with maddening ideologies and practices instituted as government methods – we suffer the effects of a negative causal series that we absolutely cannot see how it would be possible to reverse.
We do not ‘have’ morale. What is ‘morale’ anyway? And what are ‘morals’? What is morality? What is immorality? What relationships are there between a state of morale and a state of morality, if not morals or the absence of morals?
Bernard Maris, as I have already mentioned, suggested that the way the death drive functions in capitalism is its most daunting limit.28 The counterpart of the death drive, which Freud revealed in 1920, is the life drive. The life drive is what contains the death drive in the sense of limiting it. This is possible, however, only because the life drive is itself inscribed in a libidinal economy outside of which it itself becomes destructive, and where, in some way, it itself returns to the death drive, which it contains also in this other sense: it thus returns to this ‘selfsame’ that is death.
This is why Freud shows that the life drive also harbours the death drive, as, for example, in the case of sadism:29 the life drive is not the opposite of the death drive, but rather that with which the latter must compose so as not to destroy the being that contains it.
In this respect, the Strauss-Kahn case is perfectly typical of the terrifyingly generalized misery to which our absence of epoch abandons, in particular, the younger generations, in the face of the systemic unbinding of the drives. The latter is less a matter of the deviance, for example, of the former managing director of the IMF, than it is the ordinary, normal and perfectly demoralizing functioning of drive-based capitalism, which Strauss-Kahn unreflectively embodies, just as Hollande embodies its reflective madness.
Strauss-Kahn has shown himself to be a participant in the libidinal diseconomy, embodying its power30 and setting up the French stock-option system. Among the younger generations, the libidinal diseconomy induces disgust, disrespect and an incommensurable state of demoralization, leading to desolation, which renders this misery incomprehensible, that is, implacable.
This state of fact, which is one of immense suffering, increasingly manifests itself in ways of acting out [passages à l’acte] that involve more or less suicidal tendencies. To this we must oppose an increase of reason, that is, a new understanding of what, in the world, seems to lead to a befouled worldlessness [immonde].
I cannot deny all respect to even a vicious man as a man; I cannot withdraw at least the respect that belongs to him in his quality as a man, even though by his deeds he makes himself unworthy of it. […] On this is based a duty to respect a man even in the logical use of his reason, a duty not to censure his errors by calling them absurdities, poor judgment and so forth, but rather to suppose that his judgment must yet contain some truth and to seek this out, uncovering, at the same time, the deceptive illusion (the subjective ground that determined his judgment that, by an oversight, he took for objective), and so, by explaining to him the possibility of his having erred, to preserve his respect for his own understanding.31
This is exactly what Manuel Valls – who is like the orchestra conductor of the destruction of all reason, and, along with it, of all reasons for hope – cannot understand. After the crimes of Mohamed Merah, Gilles Bernheim and Henri Guaino claimed that monstrosity has no explanation. 32 On the contrary, we must always seek to understand those who would try to deprive us of our respect and our reason because they themselves absolutely lack respect and reason. Nothing is worse than giving in to the ‘sleep [sueño, which also means dream] of reason’.33
For if, by using such expressions, one denies any understanding to a man who opposes one in a certain judgment, how does one want to bring him to understand that he has erred? The same thing applies to the censure of vice, which must never break out into complete contempt and denial of any moral worth to a vicious man; for on this supposition he could never be improved, and this is not consistent with the Idea of a man, who as such (as a moral being) can never lose entirely his predisposition to the good.34
Here, a very difficult question arises: what meaning should be accorded to the expressions ‘moral being’ and ‘be improved’?35 And from what, in political societies, and in their ‘morale’, stems, not ‘morals’ – which designates a specific, bourgeois epoch of ‘morality’ – but the mores and virtues constituting moral philosophy, which proposes rules for retentions, contentions and protentions that allow these fundamental dynamic factors of noesis that are relations to life and death to be saved and economized? Such an economy is indispensable because, when these relations de-compose, that is, in Freud’s sense, diseconomize, these dynamic factors become outright powers of destruction.
Such a diseconomy, leading to such a demoralization, is systemically and systematically produced with the exasperation of the drives in which drive-based consumerist capitalism consists. The latter is characterized by neoconservative disinhibition, which replaces public power with marketing and thus realizes the functional and systemic arrangement of the drives of consumers and the drives of speculators – of which Strauss-Kahn is a kind of logical and pathological extension.
It is remarkable that it was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Lionel Jospin’s minister of economics and finance, who, in France, installed the stock-option system, which structurally binds the interests of top corporate management to those of shareholder capital, itself completely subject to the speculative capital born of ‘financialization’ in the wake of the ‘conservative revolution’ – in the name of a pseudo-‘modernity’ of the left that Valls now less elegantly reclaims.
Vincent Peillon wanted to reintroduce moral teaching into schools.36 This would doubtless also have necessitated introducing a new critique of political economy – at least if we understand Dostaler and Maris correctly: a new critique of political economy ought to inscribe moral philosophy deeply into its economico-political horizon, and vice versa.
Any new critique of political economy should constitute a new economy, not of the ‘morality’ of capitalism, as Sarkozy claimed he was doing (through one of those lures whose secret he knew – but this kind of secret quickly fades), but of morale and of the moral being to which, in fact, every noetic being amounts, that is, every non-inhuman being. For this, we should read Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, along with Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in the twenty-first-century context, that is, faced with what none of these authors could ever have known or even imagined – no more than could Foucault or Derrida.
Whatever prospects this may hold, to which we will return in the conclusion, how would Vincent Peillon – who is a philosophy graduate – have recommended that the teaching staff of his Ministry of Education respond, during the lessons in morality that he advocated, to some or other ‘digital native’ who inquired about the morality of the former head of the IMF, who was also a putative candidate for the 2012 French presidential election?
How would Vincent Peillon have recommended responding to questions that the younger generation would not fail to ask, faced with the flagrant lies of the French president throughout his five-year term, from beginning to end, and which constituted his very method of governing?
According to Condorcet, ignorance always leads to servitude. That this statement is a traditional teaching of academic morality is what inscribes every morality in the question of a will and a freedom that stems from this knowledge – will and freedom reputedly being unconditional.37 It is the in principle positing of this affirmation that distinguishes any moral philosophy from ‘morality’ as the bourgeois, hypocritical epoch of the submission of minds to dogma,38 which also becomes the justification of the confinements described by Foucault.
Moral philosophy posits that freedom, together with will and knowledge – outside of which a non-inhuman and noetic life is impossible – contain the drives. The contemporary language (pulsion, Triebe, drive) adopted here to describe an epoch of thought that did not yet possess the concept to which these words refer implies that reason, which stems from desire, and therefore from hope, inasmuch as it is the primordial condition of the noetic motives for living, is always an epoch of a libidinal economy – this epoch being composed of those collective secondary retentions that transmitted knowledge enables the younger generations to acquire.
The notion that there must be reasons for hope in order to project motives for living is not the prerogative of religious thought. The discourse of emancipation conceives itself as emancipation from religious dogmas and their degradation into the constraints of ‘bourgeois’ morality that, too, cultivates ‘reasons for hope’. These reasons, however, collapsed, one after the other, when the irreducibly pharmacological character of modernity and its epokhal collective protention – progress – was revealed.
The accomplishment of nihilism as the madness of purely, simply and absolutely computational capitalism is what the intrinsic toxicity of the Anthropocene reveals, which is itself an epoch of the organological condition of every form of noetic and non-inhuman life. This organology is itself the reality of exosomatization that characterizes hominization as the realization of its wildest dreams [rêves les plus fous]. These questions, which require a redescription of factuality in terms of entropy, negentropy and neganthropology, will be further elaborated in La Société automatique 2. L’avenir du savoir – where virtue, ἀρετή (aretē), strength, will seem to constitute neganthropological potential as such.
The will to knowledge and the freedom of knowledge are the conditions of this potential, and they must be cultivated as such. Hence they themselves require, not just the possibility of reason, but the imperative exigency of truth as motive of all motives to live reasonably – and as a motive that is, in its structure, in excess over the epoch that gives it its shape. This is something that necessarily ties the experience of alētheia to that of parrhēsia.
It is this exigency that constitutes reason, and it is on this basis that knowledge is the condition of freedom. It is only in its name that one can solicit the reason of one’s fellows, whoever they may be – including, more than anyone else, in France, the President of the Republic. It is this exigency that the most recent representative of this supreme function, François Hollande, will have betrayed, which is very bad news for the future of France and the French people.
The knowledge that stems from such an exigency is a knowledge in law: it is not, it has never been and it will never be a knowledge in fact. This is both because it is unfinished, always provisional and precarious, that is, ‘metastable’, and because, in fact, most of us ordinarily behave in a manner contrary to the imperative that it incarnates. In other words, it is intermittent, and this is the case not just for so-called ‘rational’ knowledge in the sense of reason understood as logical: it is also true of life-knowledge [savoir-vivre], that is, mores and morals in general, as well as of work-knowledge [savoir-faire, knowledge of how to make and do].
It is, however, at the level of so-called rational knowledge that the juridical character of knowledge in general is explicitly, thematically and interrogatively formulated (as an imperative to respond to what will always remain not only as a question, but as a challenge, a putting into question). Juris, here, means:
This difference is a process, and this is why Derrida describes it as a différance: it founds the state of law by installing a state of fact that is the constant collapse of this state of law, with no other horizon, ultimately, than its constant relaunching, reconstruction, rebirth or reactivation (Reactivierung) as anamnesis, which constitutes history in the strong sense, and the notion of which emerged some 2,700 years ago, on the coast of Ionia, on the Aegean coast of present-day Anatolian Turkey, 400 kilometres south of the Homeric city of Troy.
As a new era of noetic différance, becoming that noetic faculty called ‘logical’, the logos that is its condition is made possible by the tertiarization in letters of mental events.39 On the basis of this fact, such as it establishes a public, positive and ‘logical’ law, that is, a law governed by conflictual argument, a new way of life arises, founded on the constant search and need for alētheia. This search, insofar as the Greeks saw in it the convergence of the just and the beautiful, is also called ἀρετή, translated into Latin as virtus, and into French as vertu [virtue]. All this is concretized as the foundation of the polis. And it is all this that defines politics.
It is also all this that is being ruined by politicians who submit to the fulfilment of nihilism insofar as it reduces all values by dissolving them into calculability, even though they have value only insofar as they express and affirm an incommensurability that, having no price, can legitimate all commensurable values. These issues, which are generally related to the theory of money, are not reducible to it – and this is why political economy must be an economy of ‘moral sentiments’ that includes Bataille’s questions of general economy and Freud’s questions of libidinal economy.
Through digital tertiary retention, fully dedicated to the reduction of every trace of singularity to calculability, and, through this fact, to the disintegration of retentions and protentions, the fulfilment of nihilism makes the difference between fact and law totally vain, totally devoid of consistence. Such is the absence of epoch. Disruption multiplies legal vacuums, which amount to so many existential deserts. In so doing, it relentlessly systematizes and instrumentalizes this state of fact without law, through which it invades the world like a sandstorm raging across a desert within which centuries of civilization lie buried, ruining all credit and thrusting youth in want of idealization towards the mirages that this desert does not fail to elicit.
Hence there is a repetition, on a planetary scale, of what, at the scale of Athens, sophistry accomplished in the Socratic epoch – exposing the toxicity of literal tertiary retention and dooming the city to στάσις (stasis), that is, to civil war. It was in this context that Socrates continually reaffirmed that the character of virtue as ἀρετή lies in the need to make oneself compatible with what is true, what is just and what is beautiful.
In other words, the question of ἀρετή is the principal question through which philosophers will oppose sophistry. Having seized hold of the noetic pharmakon that is literal tertiary retention, itself conditioning logical différance, sophistry, according to Plato, reverses its virtuous potentialities, that is, veritative potentialities, by reducing them to efficiency, making them serve what Aristotle will call efficient causality. Aretē is on the contrary fundamentally constituted by final causality – whereby the protentions of noetic souls converge within what Kant will call the transcendental affinity between noesis and the world.40
In 1916, after Baudelaire, Flaubert, Manet and so many others in all the fields of what will become art’s modernity, Dada eventually establishes the vanity of bourgeois morality by teaching the emptiness of the ‘beautiful’ submitted to the lies of the ‘true’ and the ‘just’, which had become alibis of the crimes committed at that time, during the First World War, which, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, led to the revelation, for Valéry, Freud and Husserl, of the pharmacological dimension of knowledge itself in all its forms (not just in science but including, precisely, as Valéry states in 1919, the ‘moral virtues’).41
As capitalism becomes mafiaesque, it factually liquidates these bourgeois ‘values’, while the speculative art market ‘recuperates’ them by buying up all these inclinations to escape the ‘devaluation of all values’. The result is negligent carelessness, dictated by a financialization that shamelessly unbinds the mechanisms of the drives and amounts to the concretization of nihilism, of which Dadaism was an active and affirmative form (in the senses of both Nietzsche and Deleuze).
In the final stage of nihilism, which is the absence of epoch, everything that is ‘active’ is captured and channelled in order to divert noetic possibilities, that is, in view of their devaluation. This is what happened in France after 1968, and throughout the world.42 Lyotard conceived the history of modern and contemporary art starting from the category of the sublime rather than the beautiful, and after having long lingered over the question of the drives: that he did so is no doubt one indication that what is coming is not merely a new epoch, but another era – where, just as the beautiful is exceeded by the sublime, good and evil will be projected beyond their opposition, as that which, being good, is nevertheless composed of and with that which is bad, and which, when they are decomposed, that is, unbound, like the life and death drives, become in fact bad.
What Lyotard observes in the movement towards the sublime is that the experience of the beautiful as completeness and well-roundedness of form shifts towards that of the figure and sublimation as confrontation with excess and in default. This experience of excess, as what surpasses not just the understanding but the imagination itself, is also the experience of an irreducible madness, and it is this that Slavoj Žižek points to in the following:
in the Critique of Judgement, […] Kant conceives of the Sublime precisely as an attempt to schematize the Ideas of Reason themselves: the Sublime confronts us with the failure of imagination, with that which remains forever and a priori un-imaginable – and it is here that we encounter the subject qua the void of negativity. In short, it is precisely because of the limitation of Heidegger’s analysis of schematism to transcendental analytics that he is unable to address the excessive dimension of subjectivity, its inherent madness.43
But this excess is equally the experience of a default that itself constitutes the condition of the schematism of the imagination in the transcendental analytic:44 what makes the schema possible, inasmuch as it allows the data of intuition to be connected to the concepts of the understanding, is tertiary retention. Furthermore, the unimaginable is not a failure of imagination, but precisely its interminable condition (in Blanchot’s sense) insofar as it is always constituted by default – in that default of origin epitomized by exosomatization.
Art or the work are, therefore, this experience of the support, of its surface, its depth, its virtuality, its ‘interactivity’ or its ‘interpassivity’, as Žižek also says, and so on.45 Obviously, this does not erase beauty itself inasmuch as it is always well-rounded and delimited: it is what, in the absence of epoch, projects beyond this plenitude, a beyond where it gives itself in the infinite sublime of excess and the default (which is also Bataille’s question).
As long as the Western eras (tragic, Homeric, then pagan in Graeco-Roman antiquity, followed by monotheistic) had not been exhausted – completely devalued – by nihilism, it was on the basis of the rational convergence of the true, the just and the beautiful, which tie the epistēmē to individual and collective ways of life, that Graeco-Roman philosophy could be considered, well before Christianity, as essentially a moral philosophy, as this is conceived by Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault.
Now that nihilism has reached its own limit, this ancient conception of morality – as this praxis guided by techniques of the self that lie at the origin of the legitimate government of self and others – has become totally incomprehensible, because it is in fact reversed by a disruptive tendency to turn everything that has resulted from the realization of the noetic dreams of the West, as what Kant called the Ideas of Reason, into a desert. Today, the state of fact engendered by this new era of technological shock no longer seems capable of establishing the state of law in which the second stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling always consists.
During the so-called ‘Carlton trial’, what morale was possible for the Strauss-Kahn generation, who were subjected on a daily basis to details of the escapades, indiscretions and impulses [frasques pulsionnelles] of this former minister, former head of the IMF and former favoured candidate of the social-democratic left? And, furthermore, what morale was possible when the Cahuzac affair remained fresh in everyone’s minds,46 all of this unfolding as the symbolic credit of the French presidency is ruined by having an occupant of the Élysée Palace elected by default precisely because of Strauss-Kahn’s ineligibility, even if the latter continued to advise the prime minister?
On the basis of the moral and mental state resulting from all these infamies, of what ‘morality’ would this generation be in need – if we wish to preserve the kind of outdated terms that Vincent Peillon wanted to dust off? What did he himself think of Strauss-Kahn, this Vincent Peillon who had declared his support for Strauss-Kahn’s candidacy – Strauss-Kahn, whom Michel Rocard claimed was suffering from a ‘mental illness’ that prevented him from ‘controlling his drives [pulsions]’?47
There is every reason to believe that the Strauss-Kahn generation, which is also the generation of disruption, known as Generation Y or the generation of ‘digital natives’, can only with great difficulty accede to reason in such conditions – before ever having had a chance to lose it.
There is every reason to fear that this generation will no longer be able to accede to reason, insofar as the latter is always necessarily and firstly the reason to live and to hope in an almost miraculous way, given the counter-exemplary conditions provided by putative or actual representatives of the Republic, who have now totally succumbed to the drives in the most deplorable way.
To accede in a ‘miraculous’ way to reason, however, is to accede to it through divine revelation. We must go through despair, writes Kierkegaard, in order to reach God – but this despair affects the man who, having been able to access reason before having experienced the infinity of God, has passed through what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic stage, then through what he calls the ethical stage.48 This is what the Strauss-Kahn generation has never had the fortune to know, which means, perhaps, that they are precisely not a generation. Hence they struggle to project themselves as genitors, thereby giving rise to a harsh awareness of the fact that God is dead.49
It is distressing to observe that Alain Juppé, in whom many Frenchmen still hoped to find a buffer against the worst, found it necessary to declare: ‘I do not believe in exemplarity. No one is beyond reproach.’50 To admit this mild strain of cynicism, however benign it may be, is already to testify to the fact that we no longer understand in what education, transmission and ultimately ‘virtue’ consist. Nor do we understand in what politics consists, especially in the epoch of disruption, the stakes of which clearly escape the mayor of Bordeaux: exemplarity never meant purity, innocence or ‘irreproachability’ – quite the contrary.
The one who is exemplary is not beyond reproach, that is, without fault [défaut] and therefore perfect, but the one who struggles with his or her faults, and, as much as possible, turns them into that which is necessary – whether these faults are moral or organological, that is, tied to the condition of mortals, who are neither animals, whose own organogenesis completely escapes them, nor gods, whose power, represented by divine fire, is not pharmacological, a power that gives them, along with heroes, that is, demigods, the ability to mark out the stakes of the ἦθος (ethos) of mortals.
Perfection is the transhumanist fantasy par excellence, and the symptom of an immense moral poverty [misère]. In stark contrast to this moral vacuum, the reversal of the fault [défaut] into that which is necessary is both exceptional and banal: it stems from what Freud described as the libidinal economy that transforms the drives necessarily contained in each of us into social energy invested in a thousand ways, through the most ordinary dreams as well as the wildest ones – which, as we shall see in conclusion, are the condition of the effective exercise of freedom for the young Foucault reading Binswanger.
To defend exemplarity, to be exemplary, is to be ‘worthy of what happens to us’: it is not to oppose good to evil, but to extract good from evil by composing with it – and doing so, firstly, within oneself.51 This is what is meant by techniques of the self, and, more generally, the knowledge that stems from them, that is, that stems from a μελέτη (meletē), from a discipline, from a rule, from a μέτρον (metron), and which is conceived as all the therapies and therapeutics derived from these techniques insofar as they are also the condition of any moral philosophy – all philosophy being such a morality.
As for the example, not just as a pedagogical virtue but as what shows what cannot simply be demonstrated52 (and this is the case for any therapeutic prescription, which is why medicine is not a science but a technics, as Canguilhem emphasizes), it is not a substitute for rational exposition or a facilitator of understanding as regards the teaching of all that is moral: it is the index of the fact that only singularities can fully embody moral necessities.
‘Virtue’, in the sense of ἀρετή, always manifests itself in a singular way. And this is a fact that always constitutes an aporia for ‘morality’, in that it always tends, as a poorly understood rule, to prescribe an average norm that dissolves singularities53 – singularity being precisely what deviates from the average. Morality, as a body of rules, is in this sense always on the verge of betraying itself, that is, preventing the expression of the singularity that, alone, is virtuous. Ethics is what, in not compromising with this finitude of morality conceived as a set of mores followed firstly out of habit, always brings out the singularity of each ethical situation: of each ἦθος.
What since ancient Greece we have called λόγος, which we have translated as ratio, then as reason, is not some faculty located somewhere in the cerebral apparatus: tying together, as a logical necessity, a common series of elements that are not just discrete (as in mathematics) but singular (we have just seen why), it is through reason that the noetic potentials that are the psychic apparatuses of all non-inhuman beings can pass to the logical noetic act, which, since the Pre-Socratics, was something made necessary by the literal (lettered) stage of grammatization.
With the spontaneous analytic in which literal tertiary retention consists, logical reason sets up the duality of analysis and synthesis – where synthesis is the interpretative act (hermeneia) through which singularity is individuated, and reason along with it, that is, motive, whose function is to provoke a bifurcation in entropic becoming so as to affirm its différance.
From Phaedrus to the Critique of Pure Reason, the duality of analysis and synthesis organizes the economy of reason. This economy is the pharmacology of an exosomatic organology. This is what we can and must learn from disruption, but we can do so only by allowing ourselves to be carried beyond all our masters.
The series of noetic singularities that are formed through these masters as the ‘history of reason’ – whose work, that is, the process of collective individuation, will be theorized as logical and ontological analysis and synthesis firstly by Aristotle in the Analytics, then by Kant in his Transcendental Analytic, then by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit that, in effect, serializes reason – this series begins with Thales setting up the ἀλήθεια that we call truth, doing so as the regime of thinking in its becoming λόγος and imposing itself as criterion in all the ways of life of citizens worthy of the name.
Through what Husserl called the ‘we of geometers’, this series links together those who, if they do not ‘tell the truth’, as least dedicate their lives, from one generation to the next, to conforming to this criterion of any virtuous life that is the search for truth inasmuch as it has been conceived since the origin of geometry.
Truth, conceived and experienced in this way, cannot be confined to this or that specialty – physical truth, biological truth, social truth, juridical truth and so on. This division into isolated disciplines stems from the industrial division of intellectual labour and coincides with the Anthropocene as a separation of analysis and synthesis – which, arriving always too late, reflects the ill-considered risk-taking and legal vacuums generated by the process of disinhibition.
The experience of truth that begins in the epoch of Thales is transgenerational, and those who devote themselves to it – as citizens, jurists, artisans, parents, soldiers, priests, workers, athletes, builders, artists, activists and so on, as well as philosophers or mathematicians – remain in memory (more or less) as those ‘parrhesiasts’ whose memory marks education: as Bildung cultivating the love of truth insofar as it is above all a strength [force] – and, more precisely, neganthropic force.
The form of education that Western civilization will until recently have constituted – until the collapse of the ‘School’ in all senses of this word, including that understood by Vincent Peillon in his project of ‘refoundation’ – ensured the transmission of those therapeutic experiences that are the disciplines in all their forms insofar as collective secondary retentions are the carriers of protentions that are themselves collective, thereby constituting epochs, that is, common reasons for living and hoping.
Reason, therefore, is clearly and firstly a moral state, a motivation: it is this motive for living that, for noetic beings, in each epoch, in a singular way articulates subsistence, existence and consistence. Consistences bind the generations together, and it is by passing them on that one generation asserts its influence [conquièrent leur ascendant] over its descendants, amounting to what Blanchot described as a curvature, and thereby gives them the feeling that life is worth living, and is so in and as the right and the duty to seek the truth, in all things, and in all freedom.
The combination that destroys all reasons for hope is characteristic of the end of a geological era that will have been exceptionally short, and that we call the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene – these being the terms in which it is today publicly and centrally problematized, not as ‘resistance to innovation’ or denunciation of ill-considered risk-taking, but as a geological era without epoch, and through that the end of an historical era, if not of History – is what seems, in the very course of this thematization, to amount to an unbearable, unliveable and unviable episode, from which we must find an exit by all means possible – even though the careless and the cynics of all stripes have already given up on this in advance.
Today, we are experiencing this extreme urgency because we have discovered that the Anthropocene is an Entropocene – as Lévi-Strauss saw, when he proposed understanding anthropology as an entropology, but without drawing any neganthropological consequences. Faced with this reality, which has barely begun to be thought, the cosmic dimensions of entropy having hardly if at all affected philosophical thinking (with the exceptions of Bergson and Whitehead), reason is what proves to constitute a negentropic function.
This is what Lévi-Strauss could not think. Reason as negentropic function begins with the noetic faculty of dreaming that Binswanger observed and studied, and that is the faculty of realizing dreams. This realization is a neganthropology, that is, an organology bearing pharmacological alternatives. This seems to me – more than sixty years later – to be the hidden stakes of the reading of ‘Dream and Existence’, an issue that Foucault himself did not understand, because it was not comprehensible in his epoch or by his contemporaries, who had yet to live through the absence of epoch.
With respect to this lack of comprehension, insofar as it also bears within it the inability to anticipate the radicality of the leap involved in disruption, Heidegger amounts more or less to an exception: the neganthropological alternative, which can only consist in a bifurcation inaugurating a new era in the geological as well as the historical sense, constitutes the horizon of what the author of the ‘Rectorate Address’ will call, twenty-nine years after this text in which he also discusses Prometheus, the ‘turn’, or again the ‘leap’ of an ‘event’ that establishes an advent.
This is particularly clear in Identity and Difference – published five years before ‘The Turn’.54 Heidegger’s exceptionality in anticipating the absence of epoch, to which these texts bear witness, is not full and complete. It seems, therefore, to stop short before the turn that it proclaims: having never integrated the question of entropy and negentropy, Heidegger could only surround the theses characteristic of his late work with the obscure discourse of the ‘fourfold’ – which Graham Harman claims to elucidate in his book The Quadruple Object.55
In the hands of disintegrated psychic apparatuses (in the sense I have given to the word ‘disintegrated’ in Automatic Society56), technological but domesticated objects such as smartphones, computers and automobiles, or for that matter airliners, can also become as destructive as automatic weapons or explosive devices, as well as being able to greatly facilitate the latter’s transport and even manufacture. In such circumstances, pharmaka become massively toxic. Now, psychic apparatuses as a whole are tending towards this disintegration, which is not merely or even firstly psychic, but organological and social.
Without a more than epokhal turn, psychic and social disintegration in a disruptive and entropological situation will inevitably thrust the Anthropocene towards an enormous conflagration: the disruptive industrial model, as it is currently developing today, is based on the exploitation of this madness without precautions, without thought, without scientific discourse, without the elaboration of a new critique of organological and pharmacological reason, which alone could prescribe therapies and therapeutics capable of cultivating new reasons for hope.57
The epoch of the absence of epoch is above all the complete destruction of all symbolic power and every positive process of identification – identification having become a colossal economic sector, firstly with the culture industries and now, on another basis, with the ‘data economy’, and which, in both cases, results in filial and intergenerational dis-identification. In this way, the new form of barbarism glimpsed by Adorno and Horkheimer comes to assume gigantic proportions.
This disaffiliation engenders a negative identification that in its most accomplished forms constitutes the absence of epoch’s homicidal madness. Positive identification can be built only on the basis of a candour that always singularly embodies the harsh and wounding need to tell the truth of an epoch, and as the example of courage and of what is admirable in human existence in general. Only on the basis of such an admiration can ascendancy be conquered: positive identification is, in the West, what the historical power of παρρησία procures as the ‘courage of truth’.
The ‘courage of truth’, which Foucault made the subject of his final meditation, is not generally the strong point of the politicians of our time. Most of the time it is, more than anything, what they lack – just as do ordinary men and women in other fields:58 denial, malaise, submission and crudeness make up our quotidian existence. This is something that no one escapes. Clearly, it is something we mostly notice in others, and this is how it is bound to be. It is for this reason that we have need of others, when, as friends, they tell us our παρρησία.
As for deliberate lies, knowingly weighed, calculated, ‘reflected upon’, this has become the very method of governance in the absence of epoch. This attenuates Florian’s faculty of dreaming, and François Hollande will go down in history as the one who went furthest along this path that is infinitely perilous for all: he deliberately lied when, claiming in his speech in Bourget on 22 January 2012 that he would tackle the financial world, he gave hope that a courageous, which is to say normal, president would finally tackle the real issue. By arguing that the possibility of being deprived of citizenship [déchéance de nationalité] should be inscribed into the Constitution, he has taken this duplicity to the level of true historical betrayal – and he has, in a way, himself fallen prey [déchu].59
Lying is one of the worst moral faults, if it is true that, in principle, citizenship and the city within which it can flourish depend on the experience of that truth for which we must have the courage – which is the moral aspect of any political philosophy.
Foucault shows that modes of veridiction, and the regimes of truth that arrange them, characterize this or that epoch,60 binding together the government of self and the government of others. These arrangements generate the collective retentions and protentions that form the truth-based knowledge [savoirs véritatifs] of which political noetic life is composed.
Since the appearance of analogue then digital retentions, these arrangements have been unravelled and short-circuited in an industrial way.
It is in this still largely unconsidered context that, after Sarkozy, and between the deceits of Hollande and the indiscretions of Strauss-Kahn, politics is degraded, falls prey [déchu], in this way losing its soul, that is, its movement, its dynamic, its strength, its virtue – the great beneficiary of which is Marine Le Pen, who exploits every moment of this in a meticulous way.
The disindividuation that strikes the whole world – including and firstly Alan Greenspan,61 and ‘leaders’ in general – is obviously also shown by the sexual, moral and affective poverty [misère] of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, this man of power (in Pascal’s sense) who could be exceptionally seductive.
I recall admiring his smile and his twinkling eyes on the evening of the 1997 legislative elections – a period when I still watched television. I have known many people who admired him – and this must be borne in mind when we refer to admiration, which is also part of what seduction seeks, and is that through which it functions.
Any admiration – which is always a kind of dream – can turn out to be such a mirage. The immense disappointments these mirages can generate, such as the dreams dishonestly incited by corrupt politicians (by lies, by money, by both, by a thousand other evils, all this falling within a diseconomy of the drives), are what slowly but surely kill off all reason for hope. Incarnated by personages of high rank, the deceptive mirages of our admiration seem to demonstrate the vanity of reason without which no real hope is possible.62
The vanity of reason, which we experience in the ordeal of extreme desymbolization that is inevitably also a disidentification, is engendered by the immeasurable emptiness of that desert of nihilism that elicits the disease that afflicts Strauss-Kahn, bringing this oh-so-refined gentleman to the point of ‘possessing’ ‘material’, that is, sexual livestock furnished by a procurer known as Dodo the Pimp. But this disease is itself the symptom of another malady, one that is immensely contagious: that of a time with neither future nor past, the time of the absence of epoch, radicalized by a form of disruption that takes the process of disinhibition to its extremes, and founded on the industrial exploitation of the drives.
The Strauss-Kahn case is typical of this absence of epoch in which the unbinding of the drives is the state of fact that establishes the basis of ordinary madness evoked in ‘Aux bords de la folie’.63 Before Freud, ancient moral philosophy and modern ‘metaphysics of morals’ [métaphysique des moeurs] were already attempting to conceive the conditions that, as the binding of the drives, constitute the social bond. After Freud, the moral apparatus of psychic apparatuses turned out to contain a ὕβρις constitutive of the psyche, for which an economic conception of morality and mores was therefore required – ‘morality’ taking the name of super-ego.
From that point onwards, to consign moral questions to the archaism of ‘Christian morality’64 or ‘Judaeo-Christian morality’ becomes dangerously fatuous – opening the door for the negative sublimation through which the delusional suffer from a more or less criminal form of the extra-ordinary, that is, they are possessed by ὕβρις in its most destructive forms. To reopen the file on moral philosophy, as Foucault strove to do at the end of his life and work, nevertheless requires – for us, that is, in the ordeal of the absence of epoch – that we reconsider the question of the drives beyond so-called poststructuralist philosophy, a task whose outlines I attempted to sketch in Pharmacologie du Front national.65
Through the immense process of unlearning [désapprentissage] of which automatic society is the most advanced stage, we have unlearned the beautiful and the ugly as well as the good, the bad and the sublime. And only the sublime can reverse these terms and cause them to shift from one to another. As negative sublimation, which is the consequence of negative identification, this reversal can take place in two directions.66
We have unlearned the differentiation that is différance by confusing differences with oppositions. A society is founded on learning [apprentissages] that supports the capacity to make differences. These differences are the basis of organic solidarity as Durkheim understands and studies it, and they present themselves horizontally and vertically as affects.67
The unbinding of the drives is precisely a disaffection [désaffection] as well as a withdrawal [désaffectation] that generates disbelief, miscreance and discredit, that is, an uncontrollable becoming of societies of control and hyper-control68 – a becoming panicked that is inevitably a becoming mad, and that aggravates all attempts to deny the gravity of the situation via new extensions of control.
Western society has globalized itself as a process of disinhibition of which nihilism and the Anthropocene are the geopolitical and biospherical concretizations. By doing so, and by theorizing itself, after Nietzsche and Freud, via what is referred to on the other side of the Atlantic as poststructuralism, Western society has deconstructed the constructions that constituted the pharmacological basis of organic solidarity through which oppression and domination are legitimated. It did so by showing precisely that these are constructions, and not divine or transcendental givens.
All this was problematized in the twentieth century without ever really conceiving the possibility of the absence of epoch, despite the fact that the ‘Exergue’ of Of Grammatology says that ‘absolute danger […] can only […] present itself as a kind of monstrosity’,69 despite the questions raised in Heidegger’s late work and despite Deleuze’s late reflections on control societies.70
In 1998, after the Bosnia-Herzegovina wars and before 9/11, Jean-Luc Godard opened his Histoire(s) du cinéma:
For nearly fifty years, in the dark, people in darkened theatres have been burning the imaginary to warm up reality.
But from Vienna to Madrid, from Siodmak to Capra, from Paris to Los Angeles and Moscow, from Renoir to Malraux and Dovzhenko, the great directors of fiction were incapable of controlling the vengeance they had put on stage twenty times.71
We now discover that, unless we project ourselves onto another plane – which could only be the bifurcation of something genuinely new, as a motive formed by the future in becoming, beyond innovation that changes everything in order that nothing changes – the deconstruction of the constructions of différance leaves us abandoned in the desert of computational barbarism that ransacks the last vestiges of civilization, on whose outskirts the barbarians roam, those who no longer calculate because they are enraged – mad with rage – and thereby become themselves incalculable.
The critique of late Christian morality, which fabricates images of hell and paradise, and, still more, the critique of this morality become bourgeois, becoming the reality of nihilism and the object of deconstruction, is the critique of the opposition of good and evil. Good is constituted as good by being opposed to evil, while evil nourishes the good that contains it: the good is a trans-formation of evil, which cannot but be substantialized or hypostatized (as ‘good’), because it is pharmacological – such is the tragic condition of exosomatization. To be ill [malade], that is, to suffer from an evil, if not from evil: such is the constitutive condition of non-inhuman being and of its specific forms of malady that all stem from ὕβρις.
This is why, after quoting the psychiatrist Henry Ey, who posits that ‘[m]ental health contains disease – in both senses of the word “contain”’,72 Canguilhem summons up Thomas Mann:
Thomas Mann writes that ‘it is not so easy to decide when madness and disease begin. […] Never have I heard anything more stupid than that only sick can come from sick. Life is not squeamish, and cares not a fig for morality. It grasps the bold product of disease, devours, digests it, and no sooner takes it to itself than it is health. Before the fact of life’s efficacy … all distinction of disease and health is undone.’73
It is with Nietzsche that the question of evil becomes that of disease, which Canguilhem will turn into his thought of the noetic living thing properly speaking as the question of normativity.74 The opposition of good and evil denies this constitutive character by turning it into the fallenness [déchéance] of sin. Canguilhem’s reappropriation of Nietzsche, however, goes beyond ‘great health’ by introducing organological technicity into the condition of noetic health – where fallenness instead becomes the always threatening cost of the pharmacogenesis that is exosomatization.
What results from the organological dimension of noetic life realizing its dreams is that test and trial [épreuve] of the infidelity of those milieus that noetic life produces by realizing its dreams – a noetic life that constantly disadjusts from itself, constituting the chronic character of its disease and its pharmacology. It is this of which disruption is an unprecedented ordeal [épreuve]: the infidelity of the noetic milieu is brought to its highest culmination when it becomes automated understanding that overtakes reason as analysis without synthesis and as absence of epoch.75
As the trial and ordeal of the infidelity of the milieu and source of normativity, noesis is itself a kind of illness, and as such it requires a nosology and a nosography. Noesis, which always passes through synthetic and intermittent moments of ‘madness’ – which is also to say, here, of the dream, of dreaming that under the impact of analysis is thereby transindividuated – constitutes the circuits of transindividuation that tie the first stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling to the second, through which a new normativity is established.
The nosology and nosography of noesis as disease can also be practised as clinical questions of epokhality such that, sometimes, under the effects of the infidelity of the milieu, the epochs tied together by one form of reason or another find themselves exhausted, engendering the ab-surdity of life and thrusting them into the drive of destruction in all its forms.
As for us, the infidelity of the milieu, carried to its extremes as disruption in the Anthropocene, requires a leap beyond the illness of an age that still does not know how to locate its normativity, because it does not know how to think that new and immense question which comes to us on doves’ feet: the question of entropy, which in the twentieth century becomes that of entropology.