History: Philosophy, although functioning in an always different, shifted temporality than the temporality of social, cultural, or scientific events, has its trends as well. Over more than two centuries ago, one would rather declare oneself idealist; today, it is obligatory to declare oneself materialist. And so, yesterday’s idealists are reinterpreted as raging materialists, who were so either unconsciously or because they were obliged to conceal their game; but since everybody is materialist, it is not clear how all this would make a difference. The philosophical life is sometimes made unbearable by this constant exchange of hollow words.
One of the philosophical trends of our time, appropriate for very numerous exchanges of the sort, is antihistoricism. Just as one thinks of distinguishing oneself from the golden age of German idealism by brandishing the “originality” of a materialism claimed by all one’s colleagues, in the same way, in order to soothe the haemophiliac wounds of a leftism that has been making up for it merely by autosuggestive drip-feeding for forty years, a password has been found to discreetly conceal this historical dead-end: antihistoricism. Since the deaths of Schürmann and Lacoue-Labarthe, and of Debord and Blanchot as well, you will not find one philosopher “that counts” who claims that the historical question is the essential point of his work. It is this claim that I adopt without the least reservation, a point stressed often enough by the SoN’s principal volume: Ontologique de l’Histoire. “Onto-logic” meaning: the logic of being, accomplished as event, yields the oxymoron of the catastrophic miracle that is History. As being accomplishes itself as event, History destroys the very possibility of all “ontology,” in the ever-accelerating haste of a being [un être] revealed always more disruptively.
The following formula sums it all up: “History is the alchemy that converts contingency into necessity.” Today, for reasons that can no longer escape the careful reader, I would put the word “necessity” in quotation marks. Why? Because these “necessities” are intrinsically parodic (see Irony). Through the evental and singularizing appropriation of the Laws of Nature and being [l’être], the appropriative, that is technomimetic being [l’étant] territorializes an infinity of supernumerary, i.e. conventional Laws. These Laws are most often delicate, for the obvious reason that they are “artificial.” And so they are just as often transgressed, something we intuitively recognize as “Evil.” But the deeper reason for which these Laws themselves “self-transgress themselves” in each generation, or in other words, change entirely from one generation to the next, is that the fundamental event is itself Transgressive: the appropriation of the Laws of being and Nature is their Transgression (see below). In turn, this yields the other primordial formula of an ontologic of History: Transgression precedes Legislation. The scansion of these supernumerary Laws that change constantly with the generations—likewise with trends and fashions, philosophical trends included—is what is called History, and this is why the rhythm of Transgressions accelerates as well, and has even reached a point of speed that presents, with respect to legislations, a new take on the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare.
Hence it is obviously not enough to place oneself arrogantly in the quasi-pleonastic wake of the great philosophies of History since Kant, Hegel, and Hölderlin, then Nietzsche and Heidegger (not forgetting Marx and Foucault), and finally Schürmann and Lacoue (not forgetting Blanchot and Debord). The adverb points of course to the conceptual caliber of the invocations, and also the fact of being epochally against the current. It is especially imperative that the proposed concept of History itself be entirely original with respect to those of the above-mentioned tutelary figures.
Man is self-evidently the historical-being1 [l’être-historique], because he is the animal of technomimetic appropriation. Technics and archive are the one and same concept. A cat, observing that it was itself brought forth as a kitten, and bringing forth kittens in turn, by inference, can guess that it has had grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. But she will never know what they must have looked like. This is why animal cycles are repetitive: a herd of cows from a million years ago and the herd of cows that I see through the window of my house in Corrèze are as alike as two peas in a pod. Nature, although dependent on an event—the miraculous emergence of life on earth—sediments this event in its own mode into repetition cycles that remain unchanged for ages. The event of technomimetic appropriation is that which has disrupted this articulation of event/repetition (see Event), making the cyclical repetition of Nature abnormal, and supernumerary technological exception the “norm.” This is history, and this is “culture.” But these norms change from one generation to the next, “fissured,” as Schürmann would say, at a rhythm that accelerates as History progresses, quite simply even, scanned by these ever more insane precipitations. This is what governs the set of priorities of a modern philosophical work, because the event of appropriation that condoned History, concealed, through two thousand years of metaphysical functionary work, the price to pay: monstrous, globally tentacular networks of expropriations of all kinds, for which we need the “political” neo-candor of the new-look2 metaphysician in order to hold, precisely, that they are simply “political.” The countless transgressions undermining these “norms,” which make these innumerable networks look like gigantic porous pipings of nuclear waste in the former USSR, proceed also from what the standard functionary work of metaphysics did not realize: the primacy of Transgression over Legislation. The Mosaic gift of Law comes after the original sin; Kant’s second critique is an abreaction to the unprecedented transgressive possibilities opened up by the French Revolution.
The other beings [étants], the other animals in particular, are incapable of wanting [vouloir] repetition, just as they are incapable of being capable [pouvoir] of it: of (self-)appropriating repetition. This is why they repeat themselves [se répètent] almost immutably, quasi-eternally, throughout the ages. Man is he who wants and is capable of repetition, and this is exactly why he repeats himself much less: he ceaselessly provokes the new, and with all his generational might, causes the expiration of that which was only yesterday considered the nec plus ultra. Derisory, and yet continually overexposed worldly phenomena, such as fashion, “hipness,” or “hype,” are in reality the microscopic reflection of an otherwise overdetermining processuality, that of History itself, once the scales of metaphysical maximizations fall from the eyes. Schürmann supremely asks: “What would happen if, instead of discrediting some single referent of beings so as to accredit another—instead of becoming tired of what is ‘out’ and getting excited over what is ‘in’ for the usual return to school this fall—our attention were to dwell on the tragic conflictuality that is being?”3 Those who heard him, almost twenty years after his death, can still be counted on the fingers of a mutilated hand.
This is the key point of the SoN: it shows how it is the aptitude for the doubling of what the other beings [étants] merely undergo that characterizes our singular eventalness. The repetition of repetition gives everything except another repetition: the event that is properly ours. The mimesis of mimesis, the semblance of semblance, etc.: we will see how what I call appropriation, as technomimetic appropriation, is the same thing as this properly human faculty of doubling. To repeat repetition is not to iterate it for an nth time, like the opening of a flower or the birth of a bovid. It is, precisely, to do what no other being does: to (self-)appropriate repetition. This appropriative doubling short-circuits the simple iteration in which results every other repetition, outside the anthropological closure, and always provokes a radical novelty. We will see more exactly how.
History is the alchemy that converts evental contingencies into necessities, into second natures literally. This is also the philosophical name of freedom. How are we to understand this?
We should know since Kant that freedom is indiscernible from what is considered its exact opposite in the common idiom, i.e. constraint.4 In other words: nobody obliges us to wear clothes, wash ourselves everyday, have an email address, etc. The only necessities of our biological lives are well known: eating, excretion, and sleeping. Through appropriation, we surround ourselves with entire constellations of supernumerary “necessities” which repeat the event by “eternalizing it.” Culture is an infinite network of parodies of necessity. Nothing obliges me, physically speaking, to dress up in order to go out and have a cup of coffee; none of the established natural laws, because we (self-)appropriated them. And yet, if I went there in my simplest Adam outfit, and ordered bleach instead of an espresso—everything that would not come to the mind of any animal, but whose transgressive phenomenality exudes from all the pores of the anthropological-normative closure—I would get myself into serious trouble. Freedom, which is nothing other than everyday life, which is nothing other than the being-historical, is the unconsciously overwhelming weight of all the “categorical imperatives” with which the human animal is crippled because of his “own” fault, both appropriating and expropriated. The being-communitarian—“hell is other people”—to which nothing obliges us, is the very name of freedom, that is to say, the countless and striated implicit constraints that weigh upon our everyday life.
This is why man lives in “the upside-down world”: every appropriation becomes expropriation, alienation in constraint, and every reappropriation which “puts the world back upright” appears, to the eyes of the post-evental conformism of man, as an anomaly. This is the purloined letter of the philosophical Sages—their most cunningly pleasant professional secret. Solitude is the normal state of the overwhelming majority of mammals. Man is the animal that puts itself in the insane situation of a henceforth global community (“communism” has always been there), in the consciousness of the existence of his six billion congeners. This insanity is that which passes off as “good sense.” A Bengal tiger certainly does not have the slightest idea of the existence of the African tigers and vice versa. He is conscious only of his environment, and not of the continents, nor of the fact that the planet is round, etc. The technomimetic animal, under the crushing weight of the constraints he self-inflicts, hence undergoes a kind of unbearable psychic depressurization: the tragic condition that is being as event.
Science has therefore the structure of a hallucinatory psychosis, and this is why only the human animal can suffer from psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia. The Spirit of Nihilism comes to overturn all the common prejudices of philosophy: for man, it is Evil that precedes Good (the Good is nothing but an invention meant to compensate the expropriatory atrocity resulting from the event of appropriation), madness that precedes reason (if we caught our domestic animals in an act equivalent to rubbing two flints together, sowing seeds or drawing, we would put them down, call the vet, or alert the media, shaking to the bone), Transgression (see below) that precedes legislation (every event has the structure of a Transgression of the given, and this is to convert (appropriative) contingency into (alienating, i.e. expropriative) necessity).
Let us come back to the philosopher’s cunning secret. The Sage is he who “returns to normal”: again the structure of apagogical doubling, the doubling of mimesis and parody, Irony (see below) and the impossible iteration of semblance. Where the ordinary mortal, ensnared by the “natural metaphysician in us,” hurls himself into the exhausting social life and gregariousness with a forced smile (hell is Edith Wharton’s world), passing off this supernumerary archi-constraint as “normality,” the regular metaphysician, who is quite often he who has rushed his congeners into this voluntary plebeianization, cunningly withdraws from the game in order to return to the harmonious normality called “solitude.” The hermit deceives his fellows by making them believe that his “ascetic ideal” is arid and painful, when it is the surest path to quietism and immaculate happiness. “Sooooolituuuuuudine amaaaataaaa…,” sings Seneca from Monteverdi’s wonderful opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea.
Likewise, the Chastity of the Sage, who appears in the eyes of his congeners as a holy exception, is in fact a doubly perverse strategy of return to normality: for the overwhelming majority of mammals, with the exception of a few of our close simian cousins, “chastity” is the normal state, and rutting, the exceptional event. Through the event of appropriation, technomimetic astuteness, man converts the exceptional event, rutting and coitus, into the daily “necessity” of having sex. The Sage, by perverting the perversion that has become second nature in his congeners, by short-circuiting the sexual drive which in reality is a self-inflicted constraint and a worldly reflexive convention, obtains a pleasure unknown to sex compulsives: beatitude, that is to say, a kind of return to mammalian normality … in the second degree, which is particularly parodic. His apparent idleness, solitude, and chastity, is no longer the pleasure of the cat that lies around in the grass all day long: it is the hard-earned victory over all the senseless constraints self-inflicted by humanity following technomimetic appropriation. Perhaps he then realizes Joyce’s dream: he withdraws from History and its truncated “eternities” …
There is no eternity, and all the less so because one accedes to it: because one accedes to “eternal truths” through Science, and especially logico-mathematics (see below). The SoN relentlessly shatters all the great hollow words of philosophy such as “eternity,” “Good,” “positive truths,” smug “universalism.” There is only an eternalization of the event of appropriation in “second natures,” in habits and customs, whose well-known cost is the exponentiation of expropriative pathologies that strike Nature’s transgressor animal. This “eternalization” is the exact opposite of the eternity claimed to no avail by thirty generations of metaphysical functionaries. It is an acceleration and a jeopardizing of that which is accelerated, suppressed-preserved-sublated. It is the conceptual oxymoron of the fact that the more eternity (self-)appropriates, through the logico-mathematical, the more the temporality affecting the appropriative being expropriates it from its fixed being-there: vertiginously jeopardizing it. This was already maximally the case with Nature, with its extremely precarious harmony subjected to the uncertainties of the cosmos, and running the risk of vanishing from one day to the next, upon the impact of a comet for instance; and this is maximally the case with the event of which we are the Subjects, i.e. technomimetic appropriation, which, even before it culminates in a threat of destruction for all the terrestrial harmonies, consists of a counter-cyclical precipitation of Nature, and this is History. While the herd of cows unconsciously leaves it up to the multi-secular stability of the natural conditions in order to persist as such without even knowing it, the event of technoscientific appropriation destroys animal iteration which is (re)produced from generation to generation. The more History progresses, the greater are the upheavals that transform each successive generation, if not “apocalyptic.”
The SoN hence destroys yet another one of the crudest prejudices of philosophers and common sense (the former quite often being the ideological dealers5 of the latter): it is not memory that preserves and forgetting that destroys. It is the exact opposite. Other animals survive through thousands of years and beyond (dinosaurs survived for millions of years …) by forgetting the preceding generations. Being unconscious of the laws of repetition that make up their consistency maintains them therein. (Self-)appropriating these laws swerves our being-there on all sides, in a kind of “ontological depressurization” and expropriative dissemination. Once again, it may be that the movie 2001, in its ending, roughly describes what awaits us, by dint of the blind and “Promethean” overbiddings on appropriation. Technomimetic retention, or in other words, archival inscription, destroys and transforms, and henceforth literally transmutes. Memory, the being-historical, is a precipitation of what is appropriated, a precipitation that is destruction in continuous loop. The more we accelerate the production of novelties, the more all kinds of appropriating events are multiplied because of the exponentiation of technological overpower, and the more we pile up a gigantic collection of waste with forever accelerating time constraints.
Up until the time constraint which could prove terminal: the SoN, like Schürmann, does not act as if we were not living the first ever century of our entire History in the knowledge that humanity, by its own fault, and by the very virtue of its metaphysico-Promethean hubris of the access to eternity and immortality, could die and vanish well before its time. If we had remained animal or primate, we could have lived for millions of years. The technologico-historical age, sublimated by metaphysics in the normative phantasm of the eternal and immortal, turns into the opposite of its promise: a vertiginous jeopardizing of our spatio-temporal life. The most gigantic spatial appropriation ever seen on earth, the appropriation of the complete technological stranglehold on the living, results in the most disastrous temporal expropriation ever seen (see Appropriation/Expropriation). Maximal appropriation through maximal expropriation, this is what we are living today.
The question is the following: the event, maximal intensive revelation of being, can it ever escape this fearsome proportional logic of appropriation/expropriation? This is one of the SoN’s lateral contributions to Schürmann’s tremendous undertaking: it demonstrates that the literal and always greater appropriation of eternity, infinity, and immortality results in the most sickly and pathetic expropriation ever borne on earth: due to a precariousness that could prove to be nothing but the most ridiculous evanescence, due to a finitude that is aggravated exponentially in pointless suffering, torture in all its forms and ceaseless exploitation, and finally due to the sole eternalization of death, in lieu of the “eternal life,” the eternal dream of metaphysicians.
In this light, there is not the slightest “eternal truth,” save for the pointless and hollow. The only genuinely interesting truths for a consistent, therefore atheist, in a word, contemporary philosopher is that the more interesting—i.e. evental—a truth is, the more it is jeopardizing, accelerating, and virtually devastating. Pending further information, expropriation always prevails over appropriation. It is by coming to know this one day, and assuming it politically that humanity will finally give itself the means to limit the damage, and—who knows?—finally enter the new age of a ludic and shared immanence, realizing here below what eschatologies of all kinds, including and especially “atheist” eschatologies, have promised in all kinds of the hereafter (see Play).