Art: The event that singularizes the human animal with respect to the rest of the realm of the living and the terrestrial, is the event of technomimetic appropriation, which is historically sedimented into what we connote by the name of “science.” This appropriative regime, which just as well tallies with what philosophers ingenuously designate as “Good,” ends almost immediately in a regime of generalized expropriation, which intersects with everything we designate by the term “politics.” It is also here that appears what must be called—beyond predatory animal cruelty—Evil (see below) proper, in all its forms: “dreadful strategies” (Schürmann) authorized only by the event of scientific—and neither biological nor animal—appropriation. What exactly is the place of art in this constellation?
Art’s envoi is always Attic tragedy. In other words: art is the public exposure of what politics overdetermined by science does, in an immanent way, to human animals; that is to say, art is the exposure of Evil. In modernity since Sade, this structure of what art is refined itself to extreme ends: the arts of the masses, allowed by technology itself, democratized all forms of what Artaud called the “theater of cruelty.” From Goya to Bacon, from Schönberg to Ligeti, from the horror film to “Gonzo” journalism, from rock ’n’ roll to rap, in short and at the end of the day: from Sade to the pornographic mega-industry, be it popular or exclusive, art became what it has always been in essence: an uncompromising, systematic, and complacent—it is sometimes said—exposure of pure Evil.
Art, as we know, is mimesis. However, the SoN demands taking a closer look at the question, and with new lorgnettes. What professional reflex could have so conditioned philosophy—whether it be in order to criticize (Plato) or to praise it (Aristotle)—that it originally identified what Adorno calls “mimetic impulse” with the sole domain of art, without even taking a second look?
In reality, the SoN shows that originary mimesis is nothing other than Science itself; i.e. techne in its infancy. Agriculture is nothing other than the imitation of food gathering. Hunting is nothing other than the imitation of predation. The SoN also shows that politics—at its most indivisible root—is nothing other than the imitation of Science. Art as such (as distinct from simple and identified techne, for instance, in drawing), when all is said and done, comes rather late. Moreover, and already with Lascaux and Chauvet, art itself already seems to do nothing other than what Sophocles, Christian art or Sade would do: sublimate Evil in its detached representation. The bulls were the ones to be slaughtered technically, the horses, those to be enslaved with no less technological excess-cruelty, up until the cold infamy of our horse races.2 And as we see with tragedy, it is nothing other than an imitation of this imitation that is politics, which is itself an imitation of science, which is itself an imitation … of “nature.” Mimesis of mimesis of mimesis of … it is in this infinite but never reiterative structure of mimetic doublings [dédoublements] that resides as it were in the “nerve” of my conceptual syntax: its dialectical mechanism.
We know that art is also catharsis (see below). From the gouged eyes of Oedipus to the Calvary of the Cross and the catalogues of Sade or Goya, to contemporary chain-saw massacres, art provides a jouissance from imitating that which—lived as direct experience—has got nothing to do with jouissance. Baudelaire, creator of modernity all by himself, resumed this situation with the simplicity of genius: “the flowers of Evil.” Once again, the SoN fully elucidates how it comes about, this age-old structure tied to art itself: but also why in metaphysical tradition this structure is assigned solely to the aesthetic domain, and why this error. But it is not by way of “art” as such, figuration and music, poetry and narration, etc., that we can understand all this, but by going to the very bottom of the link which ties together techne, mimesis, and catharsis (see below).
In order to understand this, we must pose the issue in terms of the fundamental Hegelian concept of Aufhebung (see below). It is with Hegel that modernity itself begins; that is, from the French Revolution onwards, all that counts will constitute a surpassing [dépassement]. As we know only too well, this is the mainspring of the Hegelian system: not only must one surpass incessantly, but this surpassing must be surpassed, and this surpassing of the surpassing must be surpassed, etc. In philosophy this was obvious: if you try to find a philosopher of the Middle Ages, or the seventeenth century who presents himself as the terminal surpassing of all the others, you are not going to find any. From Kant onwards, all philosophers presented themselves as “surpassers,” each more radical than the other: Fichte surpasses Kant; Schelling surpasses both of them; Hegel surpasses these surpassers; Marx will over-surpass Hegel, etc. Even Heideggerian deconstruction, despite its anti-Hegelianism and its anti-dialectic, will present itself as a gigantic surpassing of metaphysics; and Derridean deconstruction itself, as a surpassing of that surpassing. This philosophical moment of course served only to reflect what was happening in its time: and first and foremost, in politics. Politics lived on nothing but the concept of Revolution, for almost two centuries: from the French Revolution to May ’68, which designates the parodic involution of surpassing in politics, and to China’s Cultural Revolution, which counter-signed in blood and atrocity the saturation of the ideological scheme of Terminal Surpassing. In art, the modern, i.e. romantic program is the program of a revival of the entire tradition which would be a surpassing of the latter; in the twentieth century, avant-gardism would purify [épurer] romanticism, it would claim to surpass its surpassing, and the history of art in the twentieth century until the seventies will be nothing but the stenogram of the surpassings, and the surpassings of the surpassings, etc., each more radical than the others. For forty years now, this ideology is particularly involuted in parodic postmodernism (see Irony). As to customs and habits, it is just as obvious: the history of the last two centuries has been the history of overcoming old customs, the liberation of women, homosexuals, of “the” sexuality itself oppressed by the old metaphysico-religious collusion, etc. It is again with May ’68 that this “long march” against the moralizing oppression of the metaphysico-religious comes to a head, before being involuted more than ever in transgressive parody: the femen are parodies of feminist transgressive heroism; queer is particularly a parody of transgressive heroism in sexualities, etc. Once again, all roads lead to Rome: from Sade to Salò, we have come full circle. Pasolini, in his Teorema, still believed in the “subversive” virtues of sexual liberation; from the seventies onwards, he realized that the age of transgressive heroism, in sexuality as elsewhere, was over, and that the becoming-commodity of sexual transgression as art could deliver, at worst, nothing but monsters, at best, nothing but parodies; if not monstrous parodies. We are still there. In philosophy, a precisely monstrous anachronism of Badiou’s is to be the last and the most radical philosopher of perpetual “surpassing”: for him, event designates the absolute surpassing of what precedes, without ever preserving [conserver] anything of it. It is entirely caught within the twentieth century avant-gardist ideology, of which he constitutes the most eminent philosophical reflection; without even realizing that this ideology has been stuck in its own parodic involution for forty years, and that this obstruction in its turn has absolutely no chance of being surpassed. We need to look elsewhere and otherwise.
In other words: not to condemn the post-revolutionary age of unlimited surpassings, which has brought about invaluable positive outcomes in all domains: in the philosophical domain of course, in the salutary liberation of daily customs, the innumerable productions of masterpieces in romantic and then avant-gardist art, in popular uprisings,3 and finally in the Promethean achievements of Science (in which case we can simply no longer ignore that they give birth to just as many abominations). It is a matter of showing the fact that this sequence is over, well over for almost half a century now; and not, as in Badiouian philosophy, of dreaming of restoring what preceded this half of the century, that is to say, the heroism of perpetual surpassing, but precisely, of thinking this half century itself in its apparent “nihilism”: to draw its philosophical consequences, according to the famous paradigm of the Owl of Minerva; to make its retrospective philosophy, which alone provides a viable forecast on the century opening before us; and therefore not attempts at a regressive Restoration suggested by the supposed Žižeko-Badiouian “Revolutionaries.” And henceforth philosophy cannot but ask the one question not asked by Badiou and Žižek, who remain ideologically stuck at that point: in what way is the ideology of perpetual surpassing shipwrecked for fifty years?
Since then, art, emancipatory politics, but at bottom even science—until then very poorly regarded by religious authorities, precisely for suggesting unprognostic “surpassings”—and finally sexuality, for almost a century and a half have lived on surpassings, each more radical than the other. Hegel has triumphed; he was truly the very great philosopher of that period and, for not coming across a philosopher to match him since, we are still there. In other words: “heroic” philosophies which will have attempted a radical surpassing of the Hegelian moment of perpetual surpassing, like Deleuze and Badiou, will have been defeated for good in assuring a hegemony comparable to Hegel’s in his time. What is the reason for this failure? What is the reason for the “victory” of those philosophemes that are apparently so opposed to the “affirmationist” philosophemes of our two heroic French philosophers? Why will the concepts of “nihilism,” Nietzsche and Heidegger, or of “postmodernism,” Lyotard and Baudrillard, have qualified modernity with infinitely greater pertinence than these two “positive” and “affirmationist” philosophers? It is this question that The Spirit of Nihilism tackles.
Aufhebung is the word Hegel chooses, for all sorts of reasons, in order to translate the word that would later become “event” (see below). One would have to wait for Lacoue-Labarthe (whose work I merely extend systematically) to understand that Aufhebung designates such a solid conceptual complex that, as soon as it is enunciated, it abandons the domain of the pure concept, in order to get infused, as it were, “to the naked eye” into reality: the mimesis-techne-catharsis complex, at work since the dawn of humanity, but displaying its planetary triumph in our age alone. Very plainly Aristotle, rather than Plato. The system of The Spirit of Nihilism wrestles with nothing other than this complex: aufhebung=mimesis-techne-catharsis.
Therefore Hegel, with the concept of Aufhebung, made a breakthrough, and perhaps delivered the essential concept not only to understand modernity born with the French Revolution, but also to act on this modernity. It is impossible to grasp it without getting to the bottom of the archeological inquiry into this concept. It is precisely because for almost fifty years the concept has exhausted all its practical-speculative resources that philosophy can finally give an exhaustive account of it.
In actual fact, I think the influence of Hegelian dialectics, through this concept, has gone well beyond all possible evaluation. The dialectic of Aufhebung is the dialectic of surpassing. And, after Hegel, all modernity has in fact lived on the fuel of the categorical imperative of surpassing, and the surpassing of surpassing, etc. The entire history of art from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, but also all the history of the sciences and philosophy, all the history of the modern subversion of daily customs and sexuality gives itself to be read as the history of biddings, overbiddings and over-overbiddings on the most appropriated surpassing in a given historical moment.
This acceleration, like all acceleration, comes to saturation at a given moment, in other words, to a precocious exhaustion. After a century and a half of surpassings, some more so than others, things involuted in less time than what was needed to say it: the dynamics of perpetual surpassing began turning to no avail, proving to be parodic. I date this turning point back to the sixties and especially the seventies. Some will qualify this turning point as “postmodern”: these best of the thinking heads will be Debord, Baudrillard (see Irony), and Lyotard.
Should a motive be needed throw light, other than ethical, on my violent break with Badiou, it is based on the fact that his philosophy is an off-beat philosophy of perpetually compulsory surpassing, more brutal even than Hegel’s: it is a philosophy of an absolute and fanatically puritan aufhebung, which suppresses all that precedes it, and preserves nothing of it, in whatever domain it is applied. This is the absolutely truncated aspect of the Badiouian conception of the event.
And it should go without saying, but is better to say, that the long ideology of perpetual surpassing has also been a fanaticism of the perpetuated event: Avant-garde in art, mass political party, or enlightened groupuscule in politics, Promethean upheavals of the world by science. Starting with the sixties, the avant-garde is exhausted in art and goes round in circles in the postmodern blink. The politics of emancipation is exhausted by totalitarian planning and media-parliamentary resignation.4 And, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the doubt cast on scientific positivity by people like Rousseau, Nietzsche, or Heidegger begins to be heard: scientific Prometheism could indeed lead us to the catastrophe. Postmodern melancholia consisted in witnessing the spectacle of reflex surpassings in their involution, their turning around on themselves to no avail. The becoming of art showed it with a nihilism more frank than any other. This is why art constitutes the key point for understanding what all this is about, provided that we really agree on what is called art. And I maintain that the supreme form in which art is historically destined to accomplish itself, is play (see below).
Hence the SoN’s entire ethical stake consists in taking note of the accomplished decline of all ideologies of surpassing as categorical imperative of modernity. Postmodern means: the surpassing is terminally surpassed, without ending in a superior dialectical “outcome” in the operation of doubled auto-negation. I grant this point to the postmodern diagnostics without reservation. But this philosophy—mine!—does not concede point to postmodern melancholia, which shares a latent Platonism with what it fights, that is to say, an implicitly eidetic conception of the being [l’étant]; which deems that there actually is an original, and that its generalized parody or simulacrum is parody and simulacrum. The SoN proves that there is no such thing, or rather, that one has to overturn all accepted orders of metaphysical precedence, including those reversals that praise the reversed precedence of simulacrum, mime, and parody, like in the works of Baudrillard and Lyotard but also, on an altogether different level, Deleuze. It was good to start with. But I go a bit further than that, showing that in our singular post-evental situation as technomimetic animals, original and parody are one and the same thing: For us, everything starts with the parodic, which is the only original. This is what art will have always told us.
Once again, it is the domain of art and the domain of art alone, in its modern deflationary nihilism, that indicates the life-saving avenue for us, which is, very simply, an unconditioned assumption of the parodic as our most originary condition. There is no eidetic archetype that holds, other than the archetype of mimesis. The whole life of the technological animal takes place, by definition, under the sign of parody. This implies that one should dismiss equally the obscene (and most fortunately for us, obsolete) philosophical prometheisms that condone the criminal prometheisms of science and politics; and postmodern melancholia, which in fact grieves for something that has never seriously taken place. There has never been a first degree with respect to which our time would constitute the irreversible decline into the second degree. Even the most criminal of Promethean metaphysical maximizations were parodic in their essence. For us, human animals, everything has always been in the second degree, as soon as a primate dared to repeat the rubbing together of two flints.
Philosophy’s original sin (yet another one!) is well known: All regionalized forms of the City must be excluded as “art” in order to establish the perfect art of republican politics. Therefore philosophy, right from its envoi, is defined as that which suppresses art in favor of politics, through the intervention of science. Philosophy is that which presents science to politics, by sacrificing the bad scapegoat that is art’s complacent presentation of Evil. Even art’s postmodern deflationism is a manner of deploying this complacency: to ironically promote the null, the insignificant, the mediocre (see Irony) is a manner of promoting the “not Good,” by making a philosophically oriented5 long nose (see Irony).
Actually art could have never been done with avenging itself for the—criminal—error in diagnosis philosophy made on its subject right at its very origins. From Schelling and German Romanticism to Nietzsche and Heidegger to Deleuze and Derrida, philosophical modernity would make a few efforts to correct this originary error in diagnosis. The Spirit of Nihilism differentiates itself from all those philosophies, by not doing—as they did—with art what Plato and so many others did with Science: endow it with an inspiring precedence, the status of a paradigm. It merely examines how art is the exponent [l’exposant] of an error which dates back to the birth of metaphysics itself, and which is not the belated philosophy, but the technomimetic act as such.
Thus, this philosophy—of the SoN!—dreams of a relationship between art and philosophy which would be characterized neither by competition nor by a tag-along. That art cease to be, more or less consciously, a perpetual reprisal to the prescriptions of philosophers, from Plato to Kant; that philosophy be neither an originary condemnation of art, nor an archi-aesthetic which does with art what Plato did with Science (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze … each in their own way assigned to Art the status of an inspiring Paradigm which Plato assigned to Mathematics).
As a matter of fact, The Spirit of Nihilism is a method that holds art, science, politics, eroticism, law in its unthought grounds [fondements], history, etc., at equal distance. It produces a critical discourse, in the strict sense, on all these domains, which thus countersigns its autonomy as philosophy. It does not proclaim, in a dishonest reckoning, “being at the service of truth procedures” (Badiou). On the contrary, it asserts itself as a truth procedure in its own right, which consists in extracting from other processes (a word I prefer to “procedure,” which is too bureaucratic for my liking) the truths which these processes want to know nothing about. As such, it is more originally useful to these processes—not only to politics, science, art, and love, but also, as we will see, to play, Law or the thought of sexuation and an erotic without love—than the philosopher, falsely modest and disinterested, “simply” pretending to hold the candle to truths that are external to him—logico-mathematical isomorphism, archaizing “love,” politics of extermination in the name of “equality,” and post-Romantic and post-avant-gardist ultra-elitist art.