Desire: Desire is the propensity of the being [l’étant] to appropriation. There is more desire in animals than in plants, and more desire in men than in other animals. But the difference between human desire and animal desire is not an intensive difference: man does not desire “more.” In other words, he does not desire more “energetically” than animals. In this respect, it is easy to see that he rather desires less. This is because man is animal de-natured, or an emptied [vidé] animal. The evils that strike man, melancholia and depression, neurosis and psychosis, “the evils of the soul” as it were, result precisely from the innumerable advantages he has bestowed upon himself by technomimetic appropriation: by the fact of dominating animal life through the transcendental appropriation of the Laws of Nature which cause an infinity of supernumerary Laws to emerge, from politics to art, from daily customs to play.
Once again, I must recognize my immense debt to Rousseau-Lacoue-Labarthe with respect to this little breviary. Let us cite these noble men. Man, “compared to the ‘Beasts,’ is no less absolutely inferior for that. It is even precisely because he is inferior (in short, he is a sub-animal) that he can satisfy his properly animal or vital needs.”1 In other words (and here it is Rousseau speaking—I will emphasize): “living dispersed among other animals, and finding himself betimes in a situation to measure his strength with theirs (…), and perceiving that he surpasses them more in adroitness than they surpass him in strength, learns to be no longer afraid of them.”2
Lacoue: “[He] learns to be no longer afraid of them. (…) Techne, in the sense of the art of tropes or polytropes, is the genius of the human, his naturally a-natural gift, since it ‘supplements’ the lack of instinct.”3 Among the infinite constellation of mammal faunas, almost all of which are physically stronger than him (elephants, great apes and even the small, tigers, wolves and dogs, bears … whatever you like), man however gets the upper hand, and does so enduringly, by contracting the “supplementation” of “what has to be called survival, that is to say metaphysical life, or, it is the same, technical life” (still Lacoue). And meta-physical life is mimetico-physical life: Nature parodied.
Perhaps one of the ways in which the SoN intends to renew the thought of aufhebung, by proposing an entirely novel comprehension of the notion of parody, resides in the very facticity of the parodic such as it has been understood until now: the comic in general. In fact, what does parody understood in this sense, which is not the one I propose,4 do? The opposite of what was understood for such a long time by the post-revolutionary ideology of perpetual surpassing. The parodist, the impersonator, the comic in general are those who openly preserve what they reproduce … and who suppress it, as it were, merely in passing, as they undermine the imitated person. We know well that this is the comedian’s whole motivation. This consideration is fairly rewarding for our purposes; provided that we insist on the fact that our construction of the concept of parody exceeds on all sides its simply comic understanding. But it had to be said in passing: if, after many other philosophers, from Aristotle to Bergson, we have to stress the fact that laughter is proper to man, we do this in an altogether different manner than theirs: comedy, whatever its mode or register, always reveals one and the same thing: the fundamental incongruity in which the animal seized by the technomimetic event finds itself. Parody in the strictly comical sense reveals simply, and with what notorious ease, to what extent everything is originarily parodic, as far as we are concerned—one thing explaining another. What does the television impersonator of politicians do? He shows the fundamental incongruity of representational situations (see Representation) in which the technomimetic animal necessarily finds himself: we concentrate the bulk of power on ridiculous small bits of flesh and bone, with their manias and their purely presentational tics that have become profoundly incongruous under the exorbitant weight of the representational burdens and responsibilities with which these miserable little bodies are invested, because of technomimetic perversion alone: the sense-less excessiveness of technological appropriation and its terrifying effects of expropriation.
As Bataille knew well, laughter proceeds first from fear: it is perhaps nothing other than the catharsis of fear. The laughter provoked by the imitator at the expense of the politician, and by—en abîme—mimesis itself, is the exorcism of the ontological Terror in which he finds himself the animal of technological over-appropriation: the excessive concentration of force that technology has always allocated to an extreme minority, to the detriment of the extreme majority. Even an over-powerful animal such as the dinosaur, or today the whale or the elephant, have at their disposal not more than their “brute” force, localized in their strict being-there. They are unaware of the representational excess which becomes the over-appropriative prerogative of a unique species, which is the technomimetic species, and, within this species, the monopoly of only a few, still today, and still in our democracies. The dinosaur, the elephant, or Moby Dick terrorize, almost pleonastically, nothing more than the surroundings of their territory; whereas the ascendency of technomimetic “Monsters,” sometimes concentrated representatively in only two hands, can spread to entire continents.
As to purely alimentary Desire, we can settle the matter quickly enough (even though …): through technology, man can satisfy his needs, cutting himself off entirely from the predatory instinct. He thinks he suppressed the latter completely; and so he preserves it in the form of monstrous waste. But this is also what has taken the form of industrialization today, and makes man, more than need be, perfectly destitute in so many situations (a “sub-animal”): Deprived of all predatory instinct for having become the machine-animal of techne, the incredible number of famines that have always struck the human community explain why, “given the level of productive forces, the earth could here and now be paradise” (Adorno), and yet is a massive hell. It is because man is the only one to have provided himself with this presentational-representational over-shelter that is habitat (“in embryo” in animals’ nests or territorial markings), that he is also the only one to find himself literally on the street: there are no tramps among mammals. Stray dogs become stray dogs because, just as literally, we domesticated them first: inclined them to the rules of technological over-power. And a stray dog always shows astonishing survival resources, of which man and woman, since their fall “into nature,” that is to say, into the urban technological hell thousands of years ago, no longer show.
As we know, it all seems a bit more complicated with so-called libidinal Desire. Although … It is that in reality the “deferred/differed” [différé] that techne produces on alimentary needs and the one it produces on libidinal “needs” communicate. Here I will not go into the details presented in the entire Spirit of Nihilism, and in particular Being and Sexuation (all the same, see Appendix), but I will only cite the following passage by Lacan, who summarizes it all in an excellent as well as amusing manner: “On one side, Freud puts the partial drives and on the other love. He says—They’re not the same. The drives necessitate us in the sexual order—they come from the heart. To our great surprise, he tells us that love, on the other hand, comes from the belly, from the world of yum-yum.”5
First, this is because of what concerns the whole disrupted economy of affects (see above) to which technomimetic appropriation leads. This is because, against the overwhelming majority of ambient philosophical yes-manism, the SoN maintains that the being-for-event [l’être-à-l’événement] of the human animal is essentially due to the manner in which technomimetic appropriation is overdetermined by a relation to jouissance that is fundamentally “perverted” by this appropriation. Therefore, the two are, as they say in philosophical jargon, inchoative: which means “co-begin”, not in the strictly synchronic sense. Philosophy is often taunted for asking only questions of the following type: “which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” Philosophy pleads guilty here, without fear of ridicule (death by laughter, as everybody knows). It is even because philosophy asks this “type” of question that it elaborates concepts such as the concept of event: perhaps science will one day discover, empirically, which one, the chicken or the egg, precedes the other. Philosophy takes the lead in this matter, by thinking of the essential co-originarity of phenomena such as sexual chicken and technological egg. For instance, things as improbable, and yet literally crucial, as the co-originarity of being and event, event and repetition, techne and mimesis, etc.
From this point of view, it must be said that the most advanced thought on the question is not philosophy, including Spinozist philosophy, but psycho-analysis. There would be no technomimetic event if the event, for the most part, was not identified, and most often unconsciously, with sexual jouissance, which is the fundamental affect/6
It is the typical yes-manism of philosophers: “event and philosophy have nothing to do with jouissance.” It is the opposite that has proved absolutely right: the specifically anthropological being-for-event has everything to do with the singular libidinal economy overdetermined by the technomimetic impulse. Lacan liked to say that, for the Chinese, science was originally nothing other than a sexual technique; for once, I feel Chinese. But already, vital, animal and superlatively mammalian appropriation manifestly goes hand in hand with the appearance of sexuality as such. It is not because we are sexuated that we are maximally prone to appropriation; it is because, through an evolutionism of millions of years buried in the past, we have been destined for appropriation that we are sexuated. Through the technomimetic impulse, we maximize the “pleonexia” prefigured by the mammalian kingdom. All being-for-event is proportionate to being-for-jouissance [l’être-à-la-jouissance], this latter having become exponential through the technomimetic impulse; no affect without “pleonexia.” And the fundamentally evental affect is jouissance. This is exactly why the non-sexuated affects most related to jouissance are always linked to some event: some pleonectic triumph.
For reasons meticulously explored by The Spirit of Nihilism and recapitulated in the present opuscule: today all aesthetics (see Art) is null and void if it does not take account of this point; and it must be said that the majority of contemporary philosophical aesthetics smacks of rococo, for obliterating the fact that our “aesthetic nihilism” has the same root as plain and simple “nihilism,” which is the technomimetic mammal’s biased relation to sexual jouissance.
For instance, the “nihilism” of so-called “contemporary” art is often incriminated to what Duchamp7 did, based on which art is not only done “with whatever,” but becomes literally “whatever” (see Irony). For my part, I think this “nihilism” does not date back (only) to Duchamp, but to the sixties and the advent of sexual liberty. Here I can only refer to the third edition of Ontologique de l’Histoire, which is La forclusion, le vide et le mal. But suffice it to say that psychoanalysis, before the aforesaid liberation, made the ruthless discovery that the overwhelming majority of our “negative” affects were tied to strictly libidinal reasons. And the lucid realization that it is not with sexual liberation, the achievements of which cannot be denied, that things would simply go on improving. And the reason is: from the very moment the human animal repeats to no avail [à vide] the reproductive “event,” he wears it out in repetition and wears himself out by the same token. The curse that metaphysics and religion have always cast on sexual avidity is based on a slightly more clinical fact: we obviously need to get rid of the fairly corny “moral line” which continues to affect most philosophers: we have to make do with sexual liberty, and not give it up. We even need to go further—and this is what I do without the slightest hesitation—and claim that obvious “nihilism”—reductionist cynicism, what’s-the-use-ism, etc.8—this nihilism is preferable to the splendid petitiones principii that are generally put up against it. This is a much more interesting philosophical problem than the “problem philosophers” who agree upon eternal truths, immortal greatness, etc. It has the merit of examining closely that which metaphysical maximizations not only make it a point of honor to foreclose, but actually overdetermine by galvanizing, in the name of an irresponsible responsibility, the “pleonexia” inchoative with respect first to animal, then to technomimetic being-for-appropriation.
Therefore, it is no to the “moral line” of philosophers and priests. But it is no as well to the reverse yes-manism of those who think sexuality is just great, and do not go on to find out why—since times as immemorial as archi-transgression (see Transgression) itself—humanity has always had more than a problem with sexuality, today more than ever. And why does sexual jouissance lies at the root of all our troubles? The historial “superiority” of religion over philosophy is due to the fact that religion is always a singular, decentered and critical discourse of the knot—un-thought everywhere else (especially by philosophers …)—between the libidinal and the political: moreover this is the case not only in Judeo-Christian culture, but in all others as well. I repeat: in this respect, the stake of The Spirit of Nihilism is to give back to philosophy what philosophy has left to religion for so long, without understanding much about the underlying reasons for this counter-monopolization. The SoN urges to leave the immemorial yes-manism of the functionaries of humanity, to break the spell of metaphysical maximizations that are as promising as they are not only deceiving, but also the blind instigators of the worst evils, in order to look into the otherwise fascinating investigation—itself singularly proper to the concept—of the most trivial, technical origins of these maximizations that are at the same time emphatic, and so curiously, systematically, devastating in their effects.
Concerning jouissance, the originality of The Spirit of Nihilism is also to show that, on the subject, we need to make a radical distinction between the masculine position and the feminine position (see Woman, Man, Sexuation, and Appendix).
Like I said to Valentin Husson,9 in response to the admirable remarks on Rousseau with which he supplements Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on the same subject, the “dangerous supplement,” i.e. masturbation, because of which Rousseau torments himself in order to refrain from practising it in his Confessions, could actually not be a stranger at all to the intuition with which Rousseau founded our philosophical origin: auto-affection, tautology en abîme of the transappropriation of his “own” affect, and the exponentiation of this transappropriation, as technological expropriation: origin and basis of inequality between men.
That Rousseau should be the first ever not only to consider masturbation as the “dangerous supplement,” but that he should also be, well before Sacher-Masoch, the first to speak of the masculine masochistic drive in a western text, does more than point out the eventually blinding way: between erotic supplementation of which, by definition, only the prehensile animal is capable (he/she who does not have hands cannot masturbate at will—and will, subjective ipseity, is born perhaps nowhere else than there), and technological supplementation which then constitutes the properly anthropological event, there can only be a simple relation of familiarity. It is not a fortuitous “family resemblance” but rather a congenitality, I must say.
Subjective will, erotic repetition, and prehension would be inchoative: they would predispose to the appropriative, metaphysical, and mimetic archi-event as such: to the pleonectic animal that is redoubled [redoublé], and thus exponentialized in tentacular technology. Erotic supplementation is indeed a mimetico-erotic supplementation: ceaselessly repetitive. And technological supplementation is a mimetic supplementation, period: owing to the voiding [l’évidement] he inflicted on his instincts, the human animal thus becomes the weakest of physical mammals, in order to eventually “surpass his congeners more in adroitness [in technological astuteness] than they surpass him in strength.”
Now, everyone can try it out again here and now: erotic auto-affection is evidently what empties the simio-anthropological mammal of its instincts, because it ties together two phenomena which, raised to their (intelligible) “metaphysical” square, will hallmark the “exit” of the human animal from his environment; that is prehension and (erotic) repetition. Like Freud would discover much later: it is by way of this pretechnological void of repetition that instinct turns into drive. Drive is mimetically voided instinct.
In turn, the affectual force of the drives (the “violence of drives”) stems only from the deferred/differed void through which we modulate, and even “mathematize” our affects. If our drives are “violent,” this is because the technological deferred/differed is the very name of this violence, which has become global today: psychopathic killers are not beings of uncontrolled drives, but on the contrary, beings who command their instinctual “surges” with extreme mastery and coldness. The same goes for the great heads of state: one does not become a dictator by being “simply” a trembling neuropath. Hitler or Stalin were “crazy,” but they are so due to excess of mastery over their affects, and not lacking anything.
Manual prehension (still “simply” physical, as it moreover seems to have already existed in dinosaurs) becomes scientific appropriation; and erotic repetition (in the strict sense of at least possible auto-affection), mimesis.
There are several obvious conclusions to this.
•Every event is connected with jouissance, because the ability to (self-)appropriate jouissance is immediately a transappropriation, which is allowed by the simple fact of having a hand. We would not be technomimetic animals if we did not have organs of prehension: all other mammals and simians were right from the very start disqualified for the technomimetic stage of appropriation. Language [le langage] itself was probably nothing more than a sublimation of manual prehension, just as the logico-mathematical is merely the belated sublimation of the most archaic techniques.
•This transappropriation of jouissance empties us, affectually and physically. Contemporary “depressionism,” which sanctions the excess of sexual consumerism and related frustrations and/or exhaustions, in reality, merely displays, as Rousseau was the first to see, a process at work since the “simiform” dawn of humanity. Consequence: at this time Rousseau only caught a glimpse of it because he did not make the connection between the transappropriation of the “dangerous supplement” and the fact that man is the exhausted animal, it is precisely this primary ability for auto-affection, an affectual exponentiation which is equally a voiding, and therefore a de-instinctualization. In short, this dialectic between the excess obtained by repetition and the depressive lack which is its almost immediate price, is the reason why man becomes, in order to compensate, the animal of technological astuteness. Here as well, the Evil denounced by the philosophers and Church Fathers is the manifest condition of all Good. As a Derridean would say: empirical auto-affection is the transcendental of the scientific transcendental (of the empirical).
•The structure of the event, which is self-belonging in Badiou’s mathematized lexicon, is therefore so familiar to the anthropological structure of jouissance, which is the logic of transappropriation commanding thereby all the rest, that it conditions it entirely, by its very foreclosure. The prohibition of self-belonging means: to be in fact faithful to the structure of things (in the cosmic material world, nothing self-belongs; and in the biological, i.e. animal and then human world, self-belonging is never phenomenalized), but to ignore the logic that departs from this structure, by introducing unprognostic events to it, which are precisely vanishing and asymptotic logics of always greater transappropriations (starting with ABC: the appropriation of the vegetable by agriculture, of the animal by hunting …). The human animal, through sexual compulsion, becomes what he is by exhausting himself “uselessly”: he then has to compensate the resulting physical weakness, by racking his brain in order to simply live on. It is quite possible that auto-affection preceded even the flint and applied botany; that, in short, in the beginning was masturbation, which is mimetic transappropriation of sexual jouissance. With the same compulsion, he aims at an “eternalized transappropriation” which fails all the more to reach its purpose since it repeats itself compulsively. This transappropriation is revealed in its fundamentally expropriatory outcomes; its “successes” are due to its fundamental failure to persist, its “failures,” to the original “success” of its astuteness, unknown to other animals. I will not beat around the bush: as it is confirmed still today with the apes, notably the bonobos, the phenomenon of manual prehension is immediately what makes the simians our closest “cousins,” i.e. our ancestors in evolution—for being capable of what the good people call by the very fitting name of pignole:10 namely masturbation, auto-affection. Whoever has seen a mammalian cousin of ours, other than a simian, literally thrashing about only to reach jouissance—for instance a male poodle struggling for hours to masturbate against his favorite toy, in other words, making a physical effort which he would not even make in actual coitus—will understand even better what I am getting at, and how the exhaustion of baroque repetition that the technomimetic animal makes of the sexual act is at the very root of his being-for-science: religion’s original sin. If mathematics, and philosophy with its unconditional oath to it, want to know nothing of jouissance by which they are so manifestly conditioned, then too bad for them. This means that the philosophy which knows what it is conditioned by is superior to mathematics and to the philosophy which takes it as a model, precisely because it is less “pure”, like poker (see Play) is superior to chess precisely because it is much more impure as a game, which means it mobilizes a much more extensive range of properties in order to shine. Let us sum up: Badiou marks self-belonging as the impossible proper to mathematics, i.e. rationality. In Lacanian terms, impossible means: real. Therefore self-belonging, as the impossible-real of rationality, designates the event for Badiou. Then what my work in its entirety shows is that the principle of identity, the supreme principle of metaphysics, sublimates this impossible self-belonging into the last referent of the discourse. And what it also shows, this time more frontally against Badiou, is that, by the same token, it sublimates the fact of appropriation. We will see (see Mimesis) how one of the at least speculative innovations of the SoN is to envisage the principle of identity not as the ground of being [l’être], as the quasi-totality of the metaphysical tradition, but as a particularly singular event. Here, suffice it to say that the anthropological archi-event, technomimetic appropriation, has everything to do with sexual jouissance, rather than nothing. Religion, with its conception of “original sin,” saw this quite well (see Nihilism).
•As Kojève noticed, turning Lacan to his advantage, anthropological Desire is fundamentally mimetic (needless to wait for Girard).
Let us make a final consideration: the being-for-event, being-for-appropriation of the human animal, that is to say, of the mimetic Desire directed towards a repetitive jouissance which is transappropriated because repeated, and repeated because manually appropriated; this structure holds only for the masculine side of the technomimetic animal. Once again, this is a great Evil, what I shall call “originary rape,” for the sake of a “Good.” For we will see how the feminine side originarily knows nothing about this cleavage between desire and jouissance on man’s side: this is the fundamental inquiry of my Being and Sexuation (therefore see Affect, Man, Woman, Jouissance, Sexuation, and Appendix). And hence I call “masculine metaphysics” the metaphysics which accordingly discriminates between being and event; and “feminine metaphysics” those which “bring closer” being and event to the point where they can no longer be distinguished. Philosophy, overdetermined by what Derrida called “phallogocentrism,” and owing to its own foreclosed libidinal extraction, blinded to the truths that disappear as soon as they appear, and persisting in the world only by clinging to all the variants of the ascetic ideal, therefore put somewhat too much emphasis on the elective and rare event, like phallic jouissance itself, only to later on hypostasize all the better “ontology,” that is, the hallucination of a universal which is on principle positive. As The Spirit of Nihilism shows, nothing is less obviously “positive” than universalism, i.e. scientific appropriation.
So perhaps the time has come for counter-ontologies not uniformly “feminine,” which tend to confuse purely and simply being and event, but with more impure, tangential metaphysics that do not claim univocal ontological positions, but pluralize the study of the regions of articulation between being and event; in other words, a philosophy faithful to the plurivocity11 of these regions themselves, without failing to be what all philosophy must be: systematic.
A philosophy, metaphysically switch and queer, but nevertheless dressed to the nines and a trifle dandy.