Expropriation: Needless to say, the philosophy of The Spirit of Nihilism has the sole objective of denouncing everything that seems to provide us only with “Good” and of unmasking all the ways in which philosophers lie or lie to themselves (which is always worse) in order to universally condone this foolishness. Expropriation is not the deed of some vicious fellow who, in order to get something out of it, exploits his own sort, themselves morally immaculate for the fact of being on the wrong side of exploitation. This does not come down to condoning the somewhat crude maxim by Scutenaire: “The chiefs are powerful [puissants] bastards, the subjects, potential [en puissance] bastards.”1 It certainly does not come down to forgiving the adipose CEO, the Saudi Emir swimming in petrodollars, the Tyrant of any kind, and preferring them to my friend Tonio the mechanic, one of the finest characters I ever met, or to my friend Patrick the construction worker who committed suicide, or to Nicolas the alcoholic cleaning boy with the looks of James Dean. Of course one must always side with the expropriated against the tiny and infamous minority of obscene despoilers. The SoN even provides a metaphysical arsenal, more disillusioned than any other, in order to tackle the question again at its roots, and eventually anticipate the new issues for the new century. Of course, ideally, the final stake of politics must be the abolition of private property.
And yet, historically, we no longer have the possibility (“exterminations still alive in our memories and planetary asphyxiations already in our throats,”2 says Schürmann) of not looking things in the face: “capitalism” thrusts its roots into causes much deeper than unfortunate but rectifiable historical contingencies. It begins already with animal “pleonexia.” This archi-appropriative trait, which marks the manifestation of being an event like a stigma, becomes abyssal with the technomimetic turning point. The Luciferian play of appropriation-expropriation is the indelible stigma of Religion’s original sin. And it is against all these excellent petitiones principii that philosophy “proper” remains fully religious, in the worst sense of the word, fancying about “final solutions” which would wipe out once and for all this stigma that is such an inextricable part of our condition.
For instance, what is “private property” or “Rights?”3 A secondary mimetic astuteness: a collective agreement to protect the second-degree egoity consisting of anthropological individuation, which has joined the massive regime of expropriation through the primary appropriation of technomimetics.
Once again, ideally, money should be abolished. The only attempt in this sense (save for Christ’s with the money changers of the temple, which was aborted as soon as it started), the one and only time, say I, when the abolition of money was actually carried out, was at Phnom Penh, around 1975. As Badiou would say with his usual humour: “It is the intention that counts …” In short: philosophers like to go on telling themselves wonderful stories where the suppression of all traces of egoism, in the anthropological closure, would always be the meekness that will reunite us in the best of all possible worlds. “Communism” is the preferred word put to use in order to sell the most dubious Ideal of the entire metaphysical tradition. Ten years of such mediatico-academic agitprop in this sense has remained remarkably ineffective.
“Metaphysical Lutheranism” means: the roots of Evil go much deeper than philosophers think, up to the abyssal caesura opened up by Rousseau-Schelling (see Nihilism). The SoN wants to go even a bit further in their archaeology than they themselves did, but certainly owing to the foundations laid by them. It removes the last casts and pokes the wounds. The pleonectic affect is—no pun intended, except the obvious—a pleonasm: it is doubly consubstantial with our conditions: as mammalian species first, as Subjects of technomimetic hubris afterwards. Evil is inchoative with respect to the most “ontological” of causes: being as event.
The SoN asks all the same whether the hagiographic figures of the revolutionary left are worth fundamentally more, and function fundamentally in accordance with another schema than that—consubstantial with and inveterate in human nature—of the always more hungry strategy of tentacular appropriations, even if they are not monetary. In what sense does the Marxist-Leninist tyrant, who monstrously imitates the functioning of tsarism or the old Chinese imperialism, and carries out exterminations in order to reach his proclaimed ideality, or the leftist star of the campus, playing the violins of equality all the while continuously reveling in his worldly successes and networks of influence, prevail in dignity over the adipose CEO or the Saudi emir?
To stick to the last century, the figures of political “sanctity” are evidently to be sought rather on the side of Benjamins or Debords: poets, players, and rascals: the outsiders.4 What do they want? The political ideal which must become ours: the catharsis of our monstrous regime of appropriation-expropriation; it is play (see below) and play alone that represents it. In other words, as we shall see, art that has really become politics, that has really become “regulation,” literally and in every sense, of the whole City. The abolition of every propensity to appropriation is not only the metaphysical crime par excellence, but a conscious lie. Political tyrants, and the petty tyrants of metaphysics who envy them, drooling, boasting in concert in the name of the definitive abolition of every pleonectic propensity, do so in accordance with the most ferocious strategies of the most impudently rapacious appropriation. Blackmailing with the Good, with eternal truths, with equality, etc., is a raving madness that has lasted only too long. Without technical appropriation and without pleonectic individuation inchoative with respect to our envoi, therefore absolutely “consubstantial” with our substanceless condition, no mathematics, no philosophy, no love, no family nor libido, no art, no City, and no Civilization: nothing. We owe everything to the pleonectic, for better as well as for worse. A unique word will designate what beauty could be therein, in the most profoundly aesthetic sense of the term: emulation. We shall later come back to this (see Play).
That said, the metaphysical blackmailing with the perpetual Good would eventually confess outright to the purloined letter: the terminal ontological Ideal that shows the tip of its nose behind this blackmailing with “eternal life” and the “Good,” is the literalized nothing.
The SoN plays for high stakes, but with the light-heartedness of historial responsibility: it intends to be done with the “final solutions” of metaphysicians, through the assumption of the dominant feature of expropriation which underlies all appropriative gesture. It sincerely hopes to contribute to the fact that, in a century or two, and if we are still present on earth, philosophical work will have done away with these sordid ravings once and for all. Especially, and less anecdotally, it shows that the play of appropriation/expropriation is not a contingent political model of anthropological functioning, but is unfortunately inchoative with respect to the very event that made of humanity exactly what it is. Even in the domain that should belong par excellence to those great and noble disinterested feelings, pleonectic ferocity is at work. In every love story, the logistic of appropriation/expropriation is, it must be said, most often relentless. And the solution to this violence does not lie in the soppy displays of misty emotions and complacent indulgences,5 but, as usual, in a formal sublimation of this pleonectic ferocity itself: in play, the organized catharsis of love as war continued by other means—which was figured out by the courtly lovers and refined libertines, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, sadomasochistic practices, or Sollers’ lived accounts. Erotic masochism, for instance, rests on a ritual regulated like a game, and which makes it into a parody of suffering: a suffering in the second degree, which plays with its re-presentation, and becomes a sensual delight. SM’s masochism is a catharsis of suffering, like in all art, and in its singular mode.
Even the most “innocent” drawing in a prehistorical cave represents—“cathartically”—Crime and suffering. Appropriation always expropriates—according to a very precise mathematics of which only philosophy is capable—something other than itself: that which is expropriated with the obvious benefit cashed by the appropriative being [l’étant], what metaphysics in its foreclosed candor calls “Good,” always “avenges” itself every bit as mathematically, and this is the concept of Evil, as developed by the SoN.
Once again, the appropriated being always comes to “avenge” itself in the most technical manner: for instance, the animals we exterminate collectively have “spontaneously” picked up the recent habit of endowing us with devastating viruses. The “mad cow” disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) and the “bird flu” (H5N1 virus) phenomenon, animal diseases transmissible to man, which have already killed thousands of people, but which, we are told, could even wipe out millions if there were epidemic, incidentally and precisely arrive from the two animals we eat most, and whose industrial treatment, especially in slaughterhouses and batteries, is literally atrocious. These viruses do not come from animals we treat “well” and do not consume, such as dogs and cats, but from those we torture and devour.6 Those we appropriate the most … “bestially,” we would say, had we not learned that Evil was actually not the proto-pleonectic predation of beasts, but the monstrous parody of this “pleonexia” in the tentacular extension of technics. Through these epidemics, would chickens, roosters, and cows be the “sites” which can “make event” only in the mode of an objective wrath, without “will,” a both biological and supernumerary eye for an eye, responding to the horror of industrialization, i.e. the human techne applied to the animal body? Lévi-Strauss did not fail to react to this phenomenon: one of the fundamental taboos of all civilization, but one which already holds for every animal species without exception, is the taboo of cannibalism—the particularly primary form of impossible “transappropriation.” By forcing animals to eat products made not only from the very flesh of their congeners, but sometimes from their own excrements, “Nature” dominated by technology avenges itself eventally.
Must we hope that these viruses become more powerful and exterminate us in our turn? We would rather wish that today’s “bioethical” trend manages to probe the profound metaphysical reasons for its righteous quests.