Catharsis: Not more than mimesis, catharsis is not specifically concerned solely with the aesthetic sphere. Its alchemy concerns in fact the minutest details of our most everyday and endemic conditions. Aristotle, much more essentially than Plato: the philosophical creator of catharsis was also the conceptual champion in terms of the great repercussions of the notion of techne, against the calamitous primacy of the Idea in his Master. The only thing missing in Aristotle was quite simply the link between catharsis and techne. We would have to wait for a very long incubation period, the Hegelian moment, the re-reading of Rousseau by Lacoue-Labarthe, and finally my unfolding of the latter’s ideas, in order for the primitive scene of philosophy, superbly illustrated by Raphael’s painting, to be replayed in front of our eyes, and for Aristotle to win a second time against Plato. The eidetic transcendentalization of the being [l’étant] by way of mathematico-logical purification (see below) is void, literally and in every sense. The unconditioned surpassings promised by Platonism right hand over fist, and left hand on the heart, is the metaphysical fraud with the most atrocious consequences that philosophy will ever have had to fight from within.
On this point, I open another parenthesis. Our post-revolutionary times were intrinsically Platonic, for having fulfilled the wish of philosophy’s Père Ubu, which had remained pious for a long time. The Spirit of Nihilism, especially in Algèbre de la Tragédie and Inesthétique et mimêsis, for the first time, takes the bull by the horns. But what bull? Well, a tremendous fact that nobody analyzed to this day: the post-revolutionary era, which, to a certain extent, is an era of accomplishment of Platonism (the Republic is realized: there is an undeniable Platonism in Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Just), also initiated the all too outrageously notorious era of “poètes maudits.” Until that time, poets were almost always considered citizens in their own right, integrated in the City and its functions, as accepted Poets; starting with the French Revolution, and in perfect blindness, we witness a curious testamentary accomplishment of Plato’s most famous prescription: the great Poet, the Homer of his time, is systematically banned from the City. The “poète maudit” becomes a cliché; but the fact of the matter is that Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Poe, Nerval, Artaud, Celan and many others would suffer exile, just like Plato wanted to condemn their professional ancestors to exile, and in general without the laurels. There are profound reasons for this fact and the decisive implications concerning our destiny (or the lack thereof) that the SoN questions here for the first time (see Algèbre de la Tragédie and Inesthétique et mimêsis). One of the “intimate” reasons for the break with Badiou is the fact that he was the very model of the philosopher who never says what he does (and this is his major ethical fault), and never does what he says (fortunately for us). I close the parentheses here.
The complex of mimesis-techne-catharsis-aufhebung does not concern merely the “monumental” turnstiles of global History, as Hegelianism would have us believe. It touches first and foremost upon the most trivial aspect of our immediate material environment. The table on which I write is made of wood. A tree was eliminated in order to make it. The tree is suppressed as a tree, but is preserved as wood. Wood is surpassed, all the while being preserved, in the form of “table.” Look at the slightest object surrounding you: for each one of them, you can apply the exact same processuality. Catharsis is not an operation that concerns us only in the case of art, which only essentiates its power. It is the smallest link on the basis of which absolutely everything that surrounds us is constructed.
You must of course have recognized here the teleological fourfold of the original great thinker of techne: the material cause, wood, is what the table is made of. The formal cause is what destines the tree technologically, and which is suppressed; the form of the table is that which is produced by the technological “surpassing” of wood. The moving cause, here, is nothing other than the technological impulse itself (however, in the motivity of physis, it will be of a whole other nature). The final cause, of course, is the productive aim of the whole process: the surplus value co-originary with the technological act as such. Last but not least:1 we know that Aristotle’s teleological definition of techne will be, precisely, that it is both the moving cause and the final cause of physis.
What had philosophical tradition forgotten until I adjusted this entire Aristotelo-Hegelian complex to my style? The waste. In the case of the wood, it is the wood chips, but implying in fact the destruction of natural harmony and the devastation of forests: the lack ensuing from the appropriation of the waste. The nihilating [néantisante] expropriation, in which “nihilating” is an adjective that must be understood in all its senses, but today, also and especially, literally.
Nothing touched by the operation of the complex of mimesis-techne-catharsis-aufhebung has remained intact on earth. This means that the price of degradation, execration, and excrementation, attains the fundamental form that is surpassed, as we know, by the event of technomimetic appropriation. Meaning: this first form of appropriation, of pleonectic archi-economy, that is life. Technomimesis is a catharsis of Nature, of primary biological appropriation. Meaning in turn that life is preserved, and not just surpassed, in the form of abominable waste. It is at this point that the terrifying Figure of Evil appears (see below).
Let us take the kind of phenomena which classical morality considers Evil: zoophilia. Transgression (see below). I often like to cite the following anecdote from an article that eloquently resumes the subject: “A sixty-year-old man who tried to have sexual intercourse with an elephant was sentenced to fifteen years of prison. Caught half-naked, perched on a wooden box behind the animal, Kim Lee Chong declared that the elephant was the reincarnation of his wife Wey. ‘I immediately recognized her by the naughty glint in her eye’,2 he said in trial in Phuket, Thailand.”3 It must be said that this kind of sexuality, one of the most widely practised in the world, is also never talked about. This event, formally, has all that is required of a true event. Here we must turn to a distinction made by Meillassoux, between an event of a world, i.e. the Big Bang, accretion of the earth, appearance of life on earth, appearance of consciousness, then technology … and an “intraworldly” event, which is nothing other than Badiouian: the appearance of a new species in the biological closure, the appearance of a work of art or a scientific discovery within the anthropological closure. It is there that the torsion lies, which is a torsion between physis and techne, nature and culture, and which is precisely the type of event that is never questioned by philosophy: the archi-event of techne consisting not in a simple “surpassing” of physis, but, always and each time, in a perversion involving the torsion of the relation between physis and techne. That is to say, in a transgressive parody of the former by the latter: and this is what the somewhat bulky example of zoophilia allows us to illustrate (and hence to pervert as well Meillassoux’s “simple” distinction between the “absolute” event of the advent of a world, and an intraworldly event; meaning, Badiouian). In fact, if an event such as the copulation between two different animal species (dogs and cats, cats and mice …) happened within the animal and biological closure alone (where things “bloom by themselves”: physis), we would take it as an intraworldly event of the utmost importance. But it is precisely through, and not simply in, the technomimetic closure, which perverts, literally and in every sense, everything it touches, that an “evental” phenomenon such as zoophilia takes place. It will be considered therefore as a parody of event: this is what the classical metaphysico-dogmatic morality will do, and it is in these regions (“depravity,” said Aristotle) that it will recognize Evil. Yet it is this absurdity itself that the SoN fights. Why? Because the archi-event, and therefore every real intra-anthropological (Badiouian) event, has straightaway a parodic structure: agriculture is a parody of food gathering, hunting is a parody of predation … including even the maximizations where flares the metaphysical megalomania which literally acts as a second nature in us, and turns mathematics into a gigantic parody of being, and logic into a gigantic parody of appearing … This is the problem of the classico-dogmatic metaphysician’s systematic forgetting of the essential moment, which is precisely that of parody. For us, there is no other event than the event of mimesis (see below, and see also Nihilism). This event always perverts everything. Zoophilia is not less of an event than a “great” love story or mathematics: it even sheds a revealing light on these “positive” events of traditional metaphysics which, because of deeply ingrained professional reflex, is always turned towards the unmitigated Good. What zoophilia, or any other “malevolent” and “diabolical” event forecloses through classico-dogmatic metaphysics, Auschwitz or Fukushima, is that every event is a catharsis of identity, yielding a monstrous singularization. As the story of the Thai illustrates both drolly and terribly, often what appears, from the outside, to be a simulacrum of an event, is in fact genuinely an event for the person concerned. He is put into jail for having monstrously singularized himself, just like they burned sodomites in the Middle Ages. This time, in the wake of a certain Foucault, the SoN explores this always perverting torsion of the event such as it is incumbent upon us: the “good” event is always illuminated by those events that are secondarized, calumniated, foreclosed by metaphysical functionary work. To hierarchize these events in the direction of the “Good” is always to prepare, with new consequences, a whole accursed region of monstrous singularizations. It is because there is the event of appropriation of the Laws, called Science, that an avalanche of perfectly arbitrary Laws comes on top of the Laws of nature and being appropriated by men. Yet, an overwhelming majority of these Laws expropriate, exploit, ill treat, torture and kill the overwhelming majority of men. Justice is just a belated notion, intended to compensate for the insane exponentiation of injustices pouring down on the anthropological closure due to the collateral action of Science. This is what we call “progress,” whose reality cannot be denied, neither the fact that our states of rights are heroic historical conquests over the expropriatory archi-evidence of the political facticity associated with human animality, in parallel to the benefits of techne. But even in these states, it is the transgressive margin as explored by Foucault that sheds light on civic legality itself, tells its truth, and not the opposite, as for the most part metaphysical thought. As the great poker player Fabrice Soulier writes:
I don’t want to hear about the tenacious image of poker’s immorality … I think a banker, who suggests a lame investment idea to a worker who slaved away all his life and put all his savings into a house he will lose, is a criminal. A businessman who, in order to save costs, chooses to sail a supertanker as old as Methuselah which, when wrecked, decimates the entire fauna and flora of a coastal region, is a criminal. A white-collar worker who, in exchange for a bribe, decides to validate an ineffective and dangerous drug that is sold as a miraculous cure, is a criminal. An engineer who decides to stuff shower gels with carcinogenic preservatives, is a criminal. The list can go on and on …4
It is our poor Thai who has been put into prison and punished for his “Transgression,” and not the overwhelming majority of “legal transgressors” exemplified by Soulier, to which we could actually add the list of communist tyrants who slaughter entire populations in the very name of Justice.
Bataille, Foucault, and Schürmann will have been the first to place emphasis on this paradoxical “positivity” of the transgressive over the legislative. The SoN takes the investigation further, even further than Schürmann, by reversing once and for all the order of precedence, by thinking no longer simply about the basis of transgressive margins but by showing that it is at the very heart of legislative appropriation, Science, that we need to look for the ontological core of Transgression, which is the counter-essentialist core of man, and explains why this core has always needed, and still needs, a whole infinity of normative phantasms in order to conceal the constantly transgressive monstrosity of its precarious “essence” (see Transgression).