This functionary, however; has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this how the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools. (…) I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect. (…) The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence. (…) The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. (…) The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter1
Affect: “Mathematical,” i.e. always very exactly proportioned, sign of appropriation (see below). It is possible to talk about a form of “affect” in plants, which appropriate water and light for themselves, and are thus literally affected. Yet it is with animal appropriation that we can talk of affect in the strict sense.
The soul is the body of sensation, Aristotle dixit. And sensation emerges only by an evental power of appropriation, a dunamis, which the mineral realm lacks absolutely, and which the vegetable is endowed with rather ridiculously compared to the specifically animal, and then even more singularly (in yet other words: eventally), human, appropration.
Human affects, that is to say, affects of the technological, i.e. metaphysical animal, are all “perverted”—we will see how—in relation to animal affects: technological appropriation aims at an exponentiation of jouissances, a supernumerary excess that is well and truly obtained. However, this appropriation also produces a lack, a deflation, all kinds of affectual voidings [évidements], which will have the heaviest consequences on the destinal constitution of what we call “humanity.” Hence this counterbalancing, which is at the ethical core of what The Spirit of Nihilism investigates, produces just as well a reversal and a torsion: an ontological perversion.
Would this mean that Spinoza is null and void? Everything in his system comes down to the increase or decrease in power quantified by the affect in every living being [étant]. I do not intend to play tricks with the indisputable “prince of philosophers,” an undying pleasure to read for anyone in love with philosophy. However, does he account for the fundamental torsion which the philosophy of Evil called The Spirit of Nihilism points at? When a cat cuts a lizard in half and enjoys the show, it is not for the pleasure of making it suffer. It is because the cat is amazed by this unprognostic faculty that it has not come across in other prey, and this derogation from the usual Laws, which makes the lizard keep moving even after what should have caused its immediate death. Predatory cruelty obeys a necessary Law which overhangs the predator; its jouissance consists of the one and only increase in power caused by ingestion, and not in the noetic delight at the victim’s supposed suffering. There is no torture in animals, because torture is a technical practice, in the most trivial sense of the adjective. Technical, i.e. metaphysical; that is why only the human animal practises metaphysical torture as well, literally and in every sense.
The presence of all these affects perverted by technomimetics, and their detailed phenomenological description in the SoN, show well enough that this latter is a philosophy of Evil which, in this respect, puts on trial the classico-dogmatic metaphysics, whose pinnacle is probably Spinoza. What is the always renewed presupposition of this metaphysics, or yet again of “dogmatic” philosophy caesured historically by Kant, which will finally allow, as we will see, a thought of Evil? It is that the being [l’étant], whatever it may be, cannot not want the Good. Spinoza’s conatus, universal Desire, recapitulates this point historically with excellence. And hence, from Plato to Spinoza to Badiou, Evil is nothing but an erroneous—and as such rectifiable—access to the Good (see Nihilism).
Everything is decided here. Classico-dogmatic philosophy, since its origins, has been a perversion itself. Since Good, as defined by classico-dogmatic philosophy, is conatus, the hierarchization of eros since its origins, philosophy obliterates the fact that already in its envoi it is a discipline measuring appropriative ferocity. It spiritualizes, sublimates this ferocity; philo-sophy which also means: appropriation of knowledge [savoir]. It has its driving force specifically in what constitutes the root of all Evil for religion (again see Nihilism). Spinozism would thus apply to the animal in us, if conatus could want nothing but the Good. Only the animal can “innocently” want the destruction of an other being [étant], the rational satisfaction of conatus. And yet, since Schelling, man is well and truly the one who perverts conatus, literally and in every sense, in technomimetic astuteness: he is the one who can want Evil as such.
The non-Spinozist torsion of human “affectology” is that technology, i.e. mimesis (see below) is what conditions the appearance of noumenal phenomena such as jouissance before the spectacle of the other’s suffering (originary aesthetic voyeurism, see Art), and even of the suffering one inflicts on another (sadism, torture precisely), jouissance as a torsion of one’s own suffering (masochism), but also the appearance of voided affects (“depression” in all its historical forms) or else affects that are much “fuller” than those resulting from mere animal instinctuality (philosophical beatitude, mystical ecstasy). See also Desire.
Man, from the very beginning, is the animal of technological affects. Predatory animal cruelty becomes torturing perversion; the affectual binarity of all other mammals, in the Nietzschean-Spinozist mode, where every being [étant] aims at an increase of power and avoids its deterioration (in short, joy and suffering) producing phenomena like masochism. This perversion obeys strictly logical laws, but their logic is not that of “pure” or “formal” logic: a strictly philosophical logic. In Nature, animal nature included, affirmations and negations obey the “pure” and “formal” transcendental logic; in the anthropological closure, affirmations and negations function in a perverted manner, and all the “nerve” of the conceptual syntax developed in terms of “general affectology” by The Spirit of Nihilism lies in there. The avowed stake being the creation of an entirely novel type of dialectics, the guiding sentence of the whole undertaking is the following sentence by Adorno: “Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.”2
Because of mimesis (see below) and repetition, human affect most often functions in the mode of “the more it is less, the less it is more” [plus c’est moins, moins c’est plus]. But why? Because, primordially, everything turns around the fundamental affect of sexual jouissance (see below). The mimetic appropriation of this jouissance, the fact of repeating it beyond reproductive necessity, aims precisely at obtaining a more, a kind of an originary “affectual surplus value,” an intensification. It obtains, in an unprognostic way, a whole avalanche of less: the catalogue of these subtractions, in the yet again mathematical sense of the term, constitutes the phenomenology that runs through the entire Spirit of Nihilisim. We would recognize the question of Evil (see below).
Double negation for instance, or apagoge, do not lead to the same results as those of “pure” and “formal” logic. We will see how as we examine each and every fundamental concept of the SoN.
Suffice it to remember the simple but essential innovation which constitutes the fundamental perspective from which The Spirit of Nihilism tackles the question of affect: there is no affect other than appropriative. Yet because man is the being [l’étant] of maximally appropriative affects, he is then immediately the being of maximally expropriating affects.
On this subject, I borrow an adjective quite brilliantly formed by an excellent scholar, Pascal Taranto, in a not less excellent collection of philosophical texts, gathered around the notion of ressentiment:3 pleonectic [pléonectique].
In fact, for all the passions where it is actually a matter of prevailing over the other, it induces a fundamental perversion of the rule, owing to the pleasure provided by the exception of self. We could call these passions “pleonectic,” after the Greek noun Pleonexia, itself formed after the verbal group pleon echein, and whose literal signification is “to have more.” If this Greek term originarily designates the immoderate desire for riches, and especially jealousy of the other’s wealth (but also of honours and power). Locke gives a more general signification which justifies this usage: “Pleonexia, ‘covetousness’ [convoitise], in the common sense of the term, signifies that we let ourselves desire that to which, according to the law of justice, we have no right.”
My work provides an even further, ontological extension to the signification of “pleonexia”: it demonstrates that the analytic of being as event cannot underestimate—as did the entire metaphysical tradition up to Heidegger-Schürmann, who disrupted it—the importance of the “appropriative-expropriative” play in all evental occurings. It will show just as well that the “fundamental perversion” is as originary as man itself, as the animal of technomimetic appropriation.
As Reiner Schürmann writes on the non-fortiutous subject of Luther: “He will be saved who confesses that he is rotten to the core with egotism.”4 The metaphysico-theological tradition which recently thought to have concealed its stench of sacristy by replacing the religious with the “laicity” of the word “political,” has always reckoned that to be done with the efflorescence of Evil, one had to cut off its roots, which is the ego subordinated immediately by technomimetic appropriation. In other words, by doing exactly what appropriation has been doing, from the very beginning: expropriating animal egoity in a “superior” subjectivation. We will see that the ethical outcome proposed by the SoN differentiates itself from the entire tradition, doubtless with the exception of Epicurus and Nietzsche, although in an entirely different mode from theirs. It is a matter of taking Luther literally, but how? It is through an unconditioned formal assumption of the indivisible pleonectic egoism, a figuration we will call play (see below).
Finally, my singular definition of affect, based on appropriation, would not be semantically complete if it did not refer to the other terms of the present lexicon (see below: Appropriation, Desire, Expropriation, Jouissance, Sexuation…) that echo it, affirming its full extent. Affect, since its emergence, which constitutes the animal stage, is an appropriation of space which becomes time. We will see right away how.