Ontological differend: designates a polemical doctrine of truth, with respect to the philosophical prejudices that seem to be unsinkable throughout the ages. It thinks that there is an inadequacy in principle between the universal, i.e. universalizing statements of science, and the singularities to which this universality applies, which are thus purely and simply scored out by scientific isomorphism. It serves as one of the spearheads of The Spirit of Nihilism; the one which strikes at the heart of the philosophical myth par excellence, today more than ever, the myth of an innate equivalence between universality and positivity. I truly hope that this conceptual specter will go on haunting the philosophical world for a long time: and for a long time will go on twisting the knife in that wound. It is blatantly obvious that the appearance of the universal on earth, the sublimation of technomimetic astuteness, is at the source of all horrifying evils. Even the “Good,” evidently incited by “the positive universal” of Science, has something of an ill repute: something always greedy, omnipotent, utterly peremptory, in short: ultra-appropriative, doubly pleonectic.
The more a science is “pure” (at the extreme end lies the logico-mathematical, see below), the more it is isomorphic. Singularity then appears as a monstrous incongruity in view of the empty transcendentalization that science produces by leveling things out based on their common form, devised in principle. Besides, in this sense, in my lexicon there is no singularity except subject to capture by science (see below). When the singular is made into the simple particularity of a universal that is valid, “eternal” always and everywhere, singularity is mortified by scientific appropriation: expropriated. The appropriation of the eternity of laws merely expropriates it towards a transgressive precariousness.
Therefore, the ontological differend is “my” doctrine of truth. It particularly specifies the singular task of philosophy, which is precisely the extreme care taken in the study of political singularizations incited by the isomorphic universal of science. It is a hypercritical doctrine, which shifts (and above all does not “surpass”!) Heidegger’s aletheiology just as well as Badiou’s doctrine of indiscernibles: every truth is conflictual, expropriative, bloodthirsty, torturing. Every positive truth conceals its bloody aspect. This is obvious with art which “remains content” to “cathartically” expose and sublimate Evil. Yet, as I show in Being and Sexuation, the “positive truths” of love follow from an originary violence, more precisely, from a kind of rape, immemorial and archaic: masculine violence precedes all amorous sublimation, all family, all City, all civilization. Radical Evil and Wrong always precede Good. To forget this systematically, as did the metaphysical tradition itself in its envoi (and the thousand-year-old “superiority” of religions over philosophy because of this1), is in turn to condone the unprognostic avalanches of evil.
Science is in its ground violence and expropriation. 2001: A Space Odyssey is for me the movie which, in terms of philosophical inspiration, is the richest of all time, and the most illustrative of my purposes: simians get hold of bones and make weapons out of them, with which they bring down other simian tribes and become the species that takes hold of power over the planet by slaughtering the others, and gallantly killing each other until “Law” and “Civilization” temper as much as possible the expropriatory apocalypse that coincides with the advent of technomimetics on earth. This means (see below): Transgression precedes Legislation, the touchstone of the SoN’s entire philosophical edifice. In Kubrick’s film, we pass directly from the apes—who, having discovered techne as means of trans-predatory violence never before seen on earth, become humans ipso facto—to spacecrafts: the ellipsis is exactly what the SoN brings to light, after—it must be rendered unto Caesar—Heidegger. The most advanced forms of Science, and especially “pure” Sciences, will never be anything other than sublimations (catharsis-aufhebung) of the most archaic techniques: hunting, war, agriculture, drawing, rape. Everything that metaphysics praises as sublimated maximizations is accomplished by technology in monstrous form, thus coming full circle. Initiatory “telepathy” becomes the Internet and the imminent neurotechnological paths, meta-physical immortality is on its way to being biogenetically realized. Monstrosity is the maintaining of that which was supposed to be surpassed, essentially animal singularity, in the form of sickly incongruity. As George A. Romero, one of the most lucid artists of our times, showed in his absolute masterpiece Diary of the Dead, the resurrection of the dead, promised to all by St. Paul, is concretely fulfilled in the waste of Science that is the Zombie. The latter is the body which, having abolished death, which also means having “surpassed” life, and preserving both as eternal parodic waste, achieves immortality.
Singularity (see below) is what Science (see below) has always traumatized, and it is this traumatism that metaphysical functionaries enjoy sublimating. What the ontological differend indicates is this always more sickly—and to say it all, dreadful—disruption between the peaceful isomorphism of the universal and the living singularity is captured by subsumption.
Following Artaud, the situationists, Lacoue-Labarthe and Schürmann among others, the system deployed by the SoN is fundamentally anarchic. It is the oxymoron of a system of anarchy, of generalized singularization: its concepts describe only the mechanism of what the concept cannot subsume. They conceptualize the adjusted [réglé] failure of the very function taken on by the concept: subsumption. Schürmann alone made the connection between political anarchism and the metaphysical concept that reinforces it: an-archy signifies the lucid thought of a caesured, tragic, literally disruptive origin. In Schürmann’s work, “the principle of anarchy” designates the characteristic of our age: the oxymoron of a principle of the absence of any driving principle whatsoever to guide our acts. On the other hand, Badiou is the archi-principial2 philosopher of our times: hence the hyper-normative (in his words, “prescriptive”) character of his philosophy. Which means that, were it enacted, it will not fail to create, in droves, countless monstrous singularities that satisfy neither principial ideality nor prescriptive legislation. Whatever Promethean efforts we make in order to try and stop it, our age will witness either way the principial triumph of the absence of principle: of anarchy, literally and in every sense.
Ontoligical differend, once again following the path cleared by Schürmann, indicates an an-archist doctrine of truth.