Aufhebung: As in all the literally crucial points of my work, it is to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe that I owe the present conceptual elaboration. The much-lamented Lacoue-Labarthe’s brilliant find is that the famous aufhebung of Hegelian dialectics, which we translated above as “surpassing” [dépassement], which I translated elsewhere,1 with reference to the classical period in music history (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), as “resolution” [résolution], and which Derrida also translated as “relève” (relief); this well-known concept of that which suppresses all the while preserving what is suppressed, which implies casting into the suppressed that which has become useless—caduc, Arafat would say—and preserving only that which feeds the progress of History and Idea—well yes!—this famous and very influential concept of our modernity in which originates for instance all of Marxism, whether speculative or real; this concept is in fact a pure and simple translation derived from Aristotle’s catharsis. And catharsis is the no less famous artistic operator par excellence. This has tremendous consequences, since in that case mimesis itself, the originarily mimetic being of art, is the condition of purifying catharsis; catharsis which, in Tragedy, suppresses the negative affects such as terror or pity, and at the same time preserves them, sublimating them in a higher stage of the spirit, in the aesthetic jouissance of Tragedy precisely. It is the same principle with the two fundamental tragic affects pointed out by Aristotle, as with all directly lived painful affects of reality: if burglars take me hostage all night, beat me up and finally blow my brains out, none of it would be a pleasant experience (and let us keep in mind that this sort of situation is at once typically anthropological, mimetically amplifying simple predatory cruelty); if the same thing was represented to me in a movie, I would feel the sensual delight of what is called “suspense.”2 By eternalizing painful or dreadful situations in indefinite technological repetition, art in the broad sense removes the brute intensity in the affects of painfulness proper to technomimetic life, purging them from their very painfulness.
In reality, no one likes feeling Terror or Pity (see Affect); once art gets hold of an apparatus, History or an event which gives rise to Terror or Pity, once it imitates a situation that produces Terror and Pity, well then, Terror and Pity are at once suppressed, they cease to be the painful affects they usually are, they become absolutely liberating and pleasurable [jouissifs] affects, and at the same time they are preserved, since it is nevertheless Terror and Pity we feel in tragic imitation, before the fate of Oedipus or Antigone, and this is what catharsis is: the successful sublimation of completely negative affects, at once suppressed in their negativity, and preserved in their intensity through artistic mimesis in general. “Purified” (“purged”) [épuré], is how Lacoue-Labarthe translates this on his own behalf. “Cathartic” alchemy suppresses the negativity of literally deadly affects in order to preserve nothing but their intensity, that is to say, it converts them into affects of vitality, as voluptuous as the vital affect par excellence: sexual jouissance. The connection between the transferential intensity of death and sexual intensity was not made yesterday.
Now, we saw what philosophy claimed to be in its originary envoi, and so many contemporary philosophers, whether consciously or not (as lesson-givers always in charge of the Good, although almost always in the greatest blindness) want to set the same table for us: philosophy is the aufhebung of art in politics, with a “good” comprehension of Science as mediator, that miraculous placidity that is the very definition of “philosophy.” The philosopher is the one who, starting off from a superior comprehension of Science, suppresses art in favor of the “good” politics. Art is suppressed by this good understanding of science, yet preserved as politics: and this is the unfortunate originary definition of philosophy.
No doubt, everything proceeds from an erroneous understanding of the very notion of mimesis. Plato not only identifies art as bad mimesis, but mimesis itself as bad. This is to place the act of philosophizing, right in its envoi, in a sort of vicious circle of the autophagous Ouroboros. Nothing in philosophy that can not be mimetological, because nothing in science that is not mimetological, and as to politics, we can say that it is by definition the domain where mimesis spreads most severely its ravages. Moreover the proof should not cease to overwhelm the philosopher, whose function is to willingly set up models, and to set himself up even more willingly as a universal model. Not only does scientific, i.e. strictly technological mimesis precede by far properly artistic mimesis; not only is politics itself immediately the monstrous mimesis of Science; but moreover, it is actually because of the originary Platonic error in diagnosis that political mimesis appears historically, as if from very afar, the most devastating of all; in other words, because of philosophy. All in all, we will say that art is, from its tragic envoi to Sade, an absolutely correct mimesis of the mimetic horror that is politics with respect to science.
Morality of aufhebung: “after postmodernism,” that is, after the archaic Prometheism that postmodernism will have surpassed, sometimes melancholically sometimes sarcastically: all surpassing must preserve what it suppresses. Postmodernism was merely the acknowledged receipt of a saturation of the model of perpetual surpassing: an involuted, parodic surpassing of surpassing. All in all, it was this, rather than the ideology of which postmodernism was the death certificate: the ideology of thoughtless surpassings, which preserve nothing of what they suppress, and which generally lead to nothing but this final “surpassing” which is, opportunely, death.3 Catharsis does not make do with suppressing death in aesthetic spectacle; it preserves it as well, and this is how it is for the extended catharsis that is Hegelian aufhebung. Moreover, Hegel knew better in terms of phenomenological descriptions of the modes in which death persists in human life. Heidegger, Bataille, Blanchot, Derrida, Schürmann, Deleuze, Lacoue-Labarthe, Adorno … modern philosophy will no longer act as if death, in the technomimetic closure, did not live a second life. The SoN not only remembers this, but renews the investigation. The first time I felt I had become a true “philosopher” was the day I knew that I had a concept of death, therefore of human life, which was entirely my “own.” Every modern philosopher is defined, purely and simply, by the original concept he makes of specifically human death, without which it is impossible to understand anything about the life of the technomimetic species.
Because the operation of the extended catharsis-mimesis-aufhebung complex is fundamentally techne, the appearance of the technological beyond life, the “suppression” produced by the first forms of technomimetic event—such as agriculture or hunting—over what they “suppress”—natural efflorescence or biological natality—must be immediately parodic: always the parody of suppression. What is suppressed must always persist: without biological life that mimesis-techne has surpassed, no mimesis-techne at all; and the same goes absolutely for all domains where the specter of aufhebung extends its operations, that is, all domains of anthropological life.
Hence the programmatic aufhebung of our times consists of two points: to renounce the deadly ideologies of terminal surpassing; to turn the page of postmodernism—the depressive incorporation of these ideologies we know to be deadly—once and for all. And this is to be done by the assumption of what postmodernism only falsely assumes: the originarity of parody itself (see below, Play).
In short: not to propose an nth surpassing, but to shift the thought of surpassing.