Nihilism: Contrary to what the title of the undertaking seems to indicate, and therefore to what we hastened to think we understand, the SoN is not a “philosophy of nihilism,” which, after so many others, would come to diagnose our age as the age of “accomplished nihilism.” The SoN is not only a deconstruction, but a destruction of the concept of nihilism. Indeed, as a great philosopher1 said in an unpublished lecture, the Algèbre de la Tragédie comes first of all as a “Homeric” crossing of contemporary “nihilism”: not only the being-for-parody [l’être-à-la-parodie] which we so thorougly talked about, and which constitutes, de facto, the sophisticated spirituality of what I provisionally called “democratic nihilism”; but, on the very inside of democracies, not to even mention the horrors still perpetrated in 80 percent of the planet, how this spirituality of compulsory sarcasm and derision results in new sufferings—shorthanded well enough by the words “depression” and “suicide”—in ever-increasing factual inflation in our affluent western democracies. But at the end of the crossing, nihilism appears to have been nothing but the pet name of a much deeper and older concept which classico-dogmatic metaphysics never wanted to know anything about: the concept of Evil. Let us go over the essential outlines of this deconstruction-destruction.
Philosophy, already in its Platonic envoi, is haunted by a specter: the specter of Evil. More precisely still, it defines itself, literally and in every sense, by the making a specter of Evil: the phantomizing, irrealizing of it. This is the famous myth of the cave which would rule over almost twenty-three centuries of philosophical a priori: Evil is no longer considered as a form of the “less good” [le moins bien], an anthropological illusion that bars our access—by the degrees of the better [le mieux]—to sovereign Good. Evil is no longer anything but the hierarchical terracing of simulacra in the direction of the Best [le Meilleur]: it is considered solely with respect to Good, all Evil being nothing but a degree of the “less good” in the direction of the decisive qualitative difference of the final Good. It is in The Republic that the chips were down, and now for almost twenty-three centuries, from which we are only barely coming out.
In the exact same movement, that is, in the primitive scene of the Republic, philosophy is defined purely and simply as that which must come to replace Religion. The exclusion of the Poet and Tragedy from the ideal City has ultimately no other meaning than that. Art (see above) is attacked on the account of the civic Religion it conveys (sanguinolent paganism). Philosophy is not there just to be simply the parallel rival of Religion. It is not a question of putting philosophy and religion, glaring at each other, cordially hostile but democratically compatible (hence, also, the foreclosure of Democracy), each in their proper place. No: philosophy actually is that which must come to replace Religion. What Plato solemnly declares, in Hegelian terms avant la lettre, is a death duel. One of them must win without remainder; and the other must disappear. This is the originary project of Philosophy. This is what philosophers almost always forget, even while we live in an age where, more than ever, the question asserts itself with the final violence. The “return of the religious,” in the form of monstrous global parodies (see Irony): Islam in Islamism, Christianism in Evangelism, Judaism in Zionism.
Plato historically failed. Philosophy did not suppress Religion in its deadly struggle with it. It is Religion that “Hegelianized” the struggle: It is Philosophy that lost in the conflict. Religion, as the Hegelian Master, consented not to suppress Philosophy without preserving anything of it: it consented to spare Philosophy’s life, provided that it becomes its ancillary, just like in the Hegelian struggle through which humanity begets itself as such. The slave becomes the Worker, therefore that which shapes Humanity (St. Paul: “we are all God’s workers”—beginning with philosophy); the slave, instead of dying really and disappearing, becomes a symbolic death, a valet, a living instrument. The technomimetic animal is also he who transforms the other animals, and most of his kind, into technological means, and that is one of the figures of Evil.
Ciceronian, and then especially Augustinian-Christian Romanity, will take on the task of putting the bit between the teeth of the philosophical scapegoat for the benefit of the Master of Religion: what Plato wanted to do to Religion (artists merely standing in place of it), Roman paganism and then Christianism did to philosophy; but as in Hegel, in the mode of parody. The slave is the one who pretends to die, who shows to the one who defeated and can destroy him that he accepts his death provided that his life is spared: from then on he will work for the one who humiliated him in battle. For almost eighteen centuries, Philosophy, which would have had itself as the historical succession of Religion, has been nothing but its docile, hypocritical, and spineless soubrette.
My hypothesis is that the two moments are in profound solidarity with each other, and that this point has gone unnoticed until now. What is the difference of—first Tragic, then Judaic—Religion from philosophy? Religion was not less of a thought than philosophy. Today philosophy must have the minimal-unionist humility to recognize that it has historically lost to religion. Recognize, but what? That Religion did think the question of Evil, without trying to irrealize it. It is the genius of Aeschylus and Sophocles among the Greeks, the genius of Judaism with the doctrine of original sin. In the first (Greek) philosophical archive, it is impossible to find a single concept of Evil: one must turn to the Bible and Tragedy, and then, at the moment of birth of the philosophical, which is defined purely and simply by the foreclosure of the concept therefrom, to the “philosophers” who subordinate their practice to Religion, Paul, or Augustine.
What does this latter, but also the tragedians, tell us? The exact opposite of what Plato says. Let us come back to the myth of the cave: Plato tells that art, as vehicle of the religious, is wrong to present Evil everywhere (these are the “shadows” of the cave), and that in order to get rid of these hallucinations, one must draw inspiration from Science: epistemological positivity and transparency proper, in particular, to mathematics. With this done, philosophy will secure a wholly rational Politics for the City, where everybody is happily assigned to their appropriate place, a Politics that Religion plainly failed to organize. Therein Evil is therefore conceived as a simple accidental hierarchical “delay” over Good: as simply “less good”; and therefore, ultimately, in light of the sovereign Good, the supreme principal mensuration, as nothing. Thus the concept of “nihilism,” right at the outset, is a concept prepared by philosophy: that is why Nietzsche, in putting the surpassing of the division between Good and Bad forward as the supreme surpassing, cannot help repeating despite himself the most originary metaphysical gesture. Philosophy, having nihilated Evil, eventually attributes to the latter, under the pet name “nihilism,” its own responsibility of nihilating the donation, the positive, the affirmation (that is to say: the natural metaphysical drive in us all). Not a Hegelian, but a para-Hegelian move: it is by nihilating (transcendentalizing) the purely given difference (physis) that metaphysics, unwittingly, will have created an infinity of not only “positive” (the Good, the Immortal, the Eternal, etc.), but also long accursed differences, insisting as a malediction in all the figures of deadly singularizations and transgressive incongruities that have haunted History like the nightmare it did not want to awake from (to paraphrase Joyce).
Now Religion said something completely different, which made it prevail historically, and whose diagnosis remains more than ever overwhelmingly legitimate (this having explained, and explaining with completely new consequences, that): Science is not only the source of positivity, technical and cognitive appropriation, overwhelming supremacy of man over the other beings (the philosopher never ceasing to be ecstatic over it), from Plato to Descartes’ “man as Master and Possessor of Nature.” Science, i.e. technics, along with all the Goods it provides us with, also brings about a trail of abominations and sufferings unknown even to the realm of animal cruelty and predation. No slavery or torture without chains and swords, without iron; no Auschwitz or Hiroshima without railroads, gas, and nuclear power. Evil is the Creation of abominable sufferings, non-necessitated by Nature alone. An animal cannot give up predation without disappearing. A tyrant could give up war and oppression and an executioner could give up torture, without jeopardizing their biological survival.
Learnedly, philosophy did not stop playing deaf. Starting with the seventeenth century, especially with Spinoza, philosophy does, once again, want to subtract itself from Religion. However it still wants to come clean, and does not yet call into question the Theory of God. Most of all, it perpetuates the great blindness that is co-originary with it. In Spinoza, Evil is nothing but a deprivation of Good, an imagination, an imperfection of human understanding, absolutely impervious to the divine understanding to which leads the Sage’s reconstruction of this understanding. The same also goes for Descartes, then for Leibniz, and his famous “the best of all possible worlds,” so readily taunted by Voltaire. To say it dryly: there is an originary inanity of philosophy, the inanity of its blind confidence in Science, in its contract with the latter, renewed indefinitely in full fiduciary blindness. More geometrico, and eventually it will all turn out for the best. In an unpublished seminar, Pierre-Henri Castel makes a good summary of the move. He evokes a famous letter in which Spinoza makes exemplary use of his negation of the question of Evil, and
has this hard-hitting formula: for Nero to put a dagger in his mother’s chest is never just an act determined entirely by the order of causes; it is all the natural power of Nero’s arm that expresses itself, and it so happens that it is in the breast of his mother Agrippina that it thrusts the blade. We see how an act—precisely for someone like Spinoza—can be presented as something that only poses a problem for those who believe in the free subject. However, in the order of Nature, the Sage has absolutely no reason to feel concerned about what our imagination comes to cut out [découper] there, such as someone hurting someone else. These are things that fall under the imagination, come from an imperfect knowledge of causes.2
What would the Sage have to say to us about Auschwitz? Answer: there is no need to resurrect Spinoza himself, when technology will allow us to do it one day. Today it is enough to read the Resurrection of the Classico-Dogmatic Sage that is Badiou in order to find the same age-old rationale, which has very fortunately become perfectly untenable for us, as has all metaphysical necessitarianism (pleonasm). Jean-Claude Milner, speaking with all the facts, was able to say that modern Platonism could only be accomplished in Sadism.3 As to Pierre-Henri Castel, he shows that Sade would not say anything else than what Spinoza says:
By definition, the only act is crime, because it is the void which will succeed in making emerge these two points of intensity which are the two sides of the same jouissance, in other words, extreme pain/extreme pleasure, and because crime, moreover, never manages to be criminal enough to be as criminal as it should be, and be equally creative of acts; and where, at the same time, one affirms that anyhow it is in Nature, and since everything is in Nature, there is no crime.4
The simulacra and the shadows of the cave—Evil—are not, as Plato thought, the stigmata of a defect of Science. To take the example of a very “cavernous” animal, the mole lacks absolutely nothing, and certainly not scientific “light.” Animals are unaware of Evil because they are unaware of science. They are unaware of its “goods” of course; but they are unaware of its atrocities as well, which only technics, from ancient slavery to Auschwitz, enables to perpetuate. (They eventually get to “know” something of it, passively, in our industrial batteries and slaughterhouses.5)
In this respect only, but in this respect entirely, Luther, for instance, is, and always a length ahead, a conceptual creator as important as Descartes, Spinoza, or Leibniz. This is because he, in an extraordinary manner, sets out to rethink original sin and demonstrate how humanity is marked by it as if by a stigma. He philosophizes Evil, although still in a religious manner, and changes the world more decisively than the hopeless eudaemonism of philosophers. It is in a Protestant country that Spinoza, a renegade from Judaism, would find refuge. Renegade, in this context, means renegation of any intelligibility of original sin. Evil is still not falling under philosophy; when, with the arrival of Leibniz, philosophy claims to make a “concept” of it, it is as astonishingly flat and grossly inane as all the philosophical concepts of Good and Truth are thoroughly elaborate. No matter how Badiou continuously wants to distance himself from Leibniz, there are few metaphysics of the past that are as close to his as the Monadology; that is to say, the perpetuation of the Platonic error, which explains all the rest. The original, the empirical being [l’étant empirique], is passed off as a confused parody of mimetico-mathematical purification; while this latter, the child-king of metaphysical mimesis, is passed off as the Original of which the real being [l’étant réel] is no longer anything more than the declining degradation (monstrously incongruous singularity). Henceforth, all the forms of Evil, in their turn, become merely confused representations, duplications of the intelligible divine, exempt from those regrettable confusions that disturb the professional metaphysician’s peaceful tranquility.
With modernity, that is, the French Revolution, things begin to creak. Kant, the guiding philosopher of democratic laicism to date, for the first time ever, assigns to philosophy and religion their respective and tight limits. However, the move is not radical enough, because Kant’s historical teleology, as project of universal moral noumenon and “project of perpetual peace,” continues to think Evil as a transitional patch of the Good. As Pierre-Henri Castel says: “what we see here is the emergence of a theme destined to a terrifying posterity, is it not, after Kant: it is that every thought of History implies the elimination of pathos. To think history, is always fundamentally to cease looking at the atrocious misfortunes, the crushed bodies, the massacres, etc., thinking it would be unbearable.”6 For the first time, with Hegel, Evil and Death are thought in philosophy in their immanence—because Evil is a living Death, as Auschwitz would provide the overwhelming proof. The words Nietzsche would later popularize, but which are a paraphrase of Luther, “God is dead,” teaches Hegel, and us all, that henceforth we must think Death otherwise: as an incorporation in the living, which defines man as such. Historical man is a constantly deferred/differed death; it is this infinite differentiation that is described in The Phenomenology of Spirit. But it is made, yet and again, so that the question is resolved at the end in the eschatology of Absolute Knowledge, that is, with the perpective opened up by the French Revolution, of a City of Universal Law [Cité du Droit universel] where the dialectical synthesis of Master and Slave gives the Citizen that is free and equal, in rights as well as duties, to every other. In short: in the usual philosophical happy ending7 of a sovereign Good, here below. Marx would only pad it out. They were the secular equivalents of Augustine’s Heavenly Jerusalem.
It is with Hegel’s two friends of youth, Hölderlin and Schelling, that things would finally fissure for good. Hölderlin, with his brilliant reflection on the Tragic,8 which would lead him to madness, discovers that the entire History is a catastrophe, that the French Revolution risks not living up to any of its promises, that the irrealization of Evil, always reabsorbed within the One and the Identical of philosophers, is the oldest of their illusions. Even more radically, Schelling, with his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, for the very first time in the history of philosophy, finally puts forward a concept of Evil. Heidegger would consider this text as the major accomplishment of German speculative idealism, and an anticipated refutation of Hegel. We must give the full extent of this estimation, which is nonetheless the greatest moment of world philosophy since the Greeks. Man is free because he is capable of Good and Evil. If man was not capable of Evil, he would quite simply not be what he is; he would still be an animal [ani-mal] among countless others. A philosopher pays a price for attaining the acumen of the most ambitious speculation since the Greeks, by coming to this unpleasant conclusion. For this very reason, after this book was published, Schelling would cease all attemps at editorial manifestation, without ceasing to keep writing. He would let his friend Hegel, who owed him so much, conquer all Europe (his simplifier Marx would conquer only in the next century): today, as yesterday, the philosopher is the one who must not “make Billancourt despair.” Schelling caught a glimpse of an abîme; his philosophy, unlike Hegel’s, could no longer promise a worldly paradise of any kind.
Before all those glorious Germans, inspired by the grandiose caesura of the French Revolution, there was a cursed precursor: Rousseau. And he happened to be Swiss: a Protestant, although he tried hard to be unaware of it. By localizing all Evil in the caesura between Nature and Culture that is man, it is Rousseau who laicizes original sin for the first time. By the same gesture, he revisits the Aristotelian caesura between physis and techne. A thought that is greatly distorted still today; yet a thought that would yield all the most radical revolutions of our age, politically of course, but also philosophically (Kant and Hegel would not have emerged without Luther; but they would not have been able to come up with their founding concepts without Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin as well), literarily, and artistically (modern lyricism, Romanticism). It is also with Rousseau that, for the very first time, philosophy learns to beware of Science. Thus, anti-Rousseauists such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, who would also become relentless critics of the philosophical Ideal of Science (a pleonasm since Plato), owe to Rousseau infinitely more than they think.
After Kant, Hegel, and Marx, it is the end of at least one thing: the historical teleology in philosophy, the positive eschatology that tied it to the religious. No more Heavenly Jerusalem, no more rosy futures. Schopenhauer introduces philosophical pessimism; Nietzsche promises us a beyond Good and Evil, an assumption of the world in its injustice and cruelty; Freud locates an implacable source for human Evil in the unconscious; Heidegger destroys the very possibility, for a modern, of founding a positive practical philosophy.9 Benjamin, after Hölderlin, will think History as an endless martyrology; Bataille will talk only of Evil; Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, and many others will no longer turn a blind eye to the Platonic counter-blindness, that of the phenomenal hegemony of Evil. Except for Badiou …
However, none of these philosophers would propose, like Schelling, a concept of Evil as sophisticated as what the Classics built, in terms of conceptual cathedrals, in praise of the unadulterated Good. When Arendt evokes the “banality of Evil,” the one thing she fails to do is, yet again, provide us beforehand with the concept. Such is, still today, philosophy’s schizophrenia: either we read and write philosophy “classically,” meaning, always trying to find a eudaemonism in it, which can almost always be found, without looking at the each time specific conditions endorsing it, which is an always methodical and obsessional foreclosure of Evil. Or we recognize the blinding obviousness of Evil, but then philosophy is blinded in the second degree, in considering itself free from the obligation to propose its concept. At best, it is fought or limited; never really explained (this is true even for Adorno, who merely finds sociologico-political explanations for Evil).
The last philosophical eschatologies, the Kantian, the Hegelian, and the Marxist, would nevertheless give the illusion, for almost two centuries, that philosophy would finally succeed at that which Plato failed: suppressing, supplanting the religious once and for all. This was particularly obvious with Marxism. And it is, without the slightest coincidence, since the patent collapse of the latter that Religion prevails once again in the world, over a philosophy beaten hollow, indeed practically fallen into the state of being just another cultural and consumption practice, more marginal and folkloric than all the others.
The last and monumentally anachronistic attempt at erecting an entirely “positive” philosophical cathedral, laically devoted to the maximal Good, to unadulterated eternal truths, to fully lived Life, to triumphant Immortality and Eternity, is Alain Badiou’s. For this reason, he has to repeat the oldest error, while amplifying it, in other words, making it monumentally gross and inadmissible for us: Evil is nothing but a category of theology, or of morality, which is a degraded theology; death does not exist; the Chinese Cultural Revolution is a creation of eternal truths; Pol Pot is Robespierre; Auschwitz is not a subject for philosophy (and furthermore, it is “anecdotal,” like everything that comes from Evil), etc. The undertaking is crowned by success and he becomes the most read and translated author in the world, and, despite the abyss separating their respective conceptual geniuses, this triumph is essentially not very different from the success of a Michel Onfray10 within the limits of the French scene. Philosophy is yet and again what comforts us, guides us, turns us towards the better, through the sophisticated irrealization of Evil. Philosophy is, yet and again, a eudaemonism whose sad fate is to serve as a “shrill” cultural leisure, whether it be the case of Žižek or Badiou.
One of the very rare authors to display a conceptual genius almost equal to Badiou’s, although of a quite superior philosophical lucidity, is Reiner Schürmann. As opposed to the Frenchman, Schürmann aggravates the problems, removes the casts, destroys our most self-assured beliefs, brings us—dumbfounded—face to face, perhaps without recourse, with the disaster that is ours, on the edge of the twenty-first century. Never had philosophy been so dark, so implacably lucid about our conditions, so cleverly lacking in the illusions that professional metaphysicians of all ages had strived to build. For this very reason, he is still very little read, very little known, even if, twenty years after his death, the rumours are starting to spread about his greatness: the greatest philosopher of Evil since Schelling; Broken Hegemonies, whose scope is comparable to that of The Phenomenology of Spirit or Being and Time in their day. Must we wait long in order to understand why we are reproducing, here and now, and in a weaker version, the occultation of Schelling by Hegel?
Someone formulated the problem to me in the following way: since Nietzsche, we had been thinking that the question of Evil was “settled,” belonging to a somewhat outdated past. After Auschwitz, the question returns with a traumatic force. Problem: in Nietzsche himself, the foreclosure of the question of Evil, its atheistic elimination (the anti-Darwinian “Darwinism” that says the big fish is “right” in eating [a “raison” de manger] the small; the overman, in crushing the last of men; the Master and Genius, in using and abusing the slave, “the weak and the failures shall perish,” etc.), returns as all foreclosures do. Nietzsche’s “nihilism” is the specter under which the death of the question of Evil, seemingly buried by its perpetrator, returns to haunt, like the bodies buried alive in the short stories of Edgar Poe. From then on, it will haunt all modernity, to such an extent that among the majority of philosophers the question of nihilism will take up even more space than the question of Evil. Nietzsche recognized in the Jewish and Platonic double envoi the Origin of nihilism; antisemitism in general is nothing other than the attempt at exorcizing the people through which the thought of Evil historically constituted us, westerners, in the conception of original sin. Auschwitz, in the last instance, will have meant nothing else: the huge “pagan” technological sacrifice to get rid of original sin, by immolating its historical representatives.
As to “nihilism”s Platonic envoi (according to Nietzsche), today we see a striking effect: the self-proclaimed and legitimate resurrection of Platonism called Alain Badiou, the most sophisticated and grandiose attempt at rebuilding a total prescriptive metaphysics of the Good and the positive True11 [le Vrai positif], through a just as sophisticated irrealization of the question of Evil, thus does not cease to recognize nihilism absolutely everywhere. Contemporary poetry and art are nihilist. Democracy and capitalism are nihilist.12 Most of the other philosophers are nihilists. The overwhelming majority of western citizens are nihilists. You and I will always be presumed nihilists even before we open our mouths, not to mention after … with the exception of his own philosophy, Wagner, and Mao Zedong, the inflation of the nihilistic vision of the world is even greater in Badiou than in Nietzsche or Heidegger themselves! Which is obviously no small thing; and shows that this was what remained problematic of Platonism in Nietzsche himself.
I take this opportunity to make a genuine call for tenders to the Anglo-Saxon public. In France, the challenge was “taken up” only by the courage of a unanimous Law of silence, and indeed first of all on the part of the person concerned. We saw above (see Mathematics) what I think about the “ontological” scope of the theorem of the point of excess. Here, the call for tenders will unfold certain consequences, and will give, in a funky13 manner, a panoramic view of my differend with Badiolism, and hence of my hostility towards the pompous revival of Platonism, that is, together with the prejudices of every classico-dogmatic metaphysics that have become untenable.
I would like to know first of all, of course, whether representation’s excess on the presented is well and truly an ontological law that applies always and everywhere, eternally, to every being [étant], or whether it is only a matter of a typical law of anthropological “transcendental schematism” alone, to talk like Kant, as was conceded to me by all those mathematicians I talked about. In other words, of a faculty, as infinite power of division, that is perhaps actually confused with technological power as such: the power of inspecting the being, literally and in every sense, and opportunely, re-presenting it in a “pleonectically” convenient manner, allowing us to instrumentalize it.14 In short, I would like to hear once and for all whether this famous excess is an effectively intrinsic law of the being [l’étant] or a purely instrumental (and therefore anything but “innocent,” as Badiou says) anthropological projection onto the being: I am at the disposal of anyone who would like to discuss this.
Then, since the excess of representation is an ontological law for Badiou, and one of the other names he gives to this representational excess is the State, I would like to know how, say I, Badiou can only claim—with his stereotyped Marxism15—that the State can be abolished in the political order, since it is an ontological Law that thus applies eternally to every being, the sun as well as the earth, a black hole as well as a kitchen sink, and that hence there is not the slightest hope for abolishing the State anywhere. This is the case, by definition Badiouian, except (a miracle!), he says, in the anthropologico-political closure! Once again, I am at the disposal of any brave volunteer who would like to discuss and explain this to me. Because, evidently, the result is the complete negative of Badiolism’s wobbly “construction”: Nowhere is the State an ontological Law of any being [étant] whatsoever, not even animal; it turns up only in the anthropological closure. It is the monstrous maximization, across the communitarian organization, of its singular aptitude to re-present things by abstract divisions16… Henceforth the abolition of the State could only mean: to uproot the representational drive in us, extirpate the pleonectico-techno-mimetic root within. We might as well talk about birds without wings, or aphonic sopranos.
Finally, and because, on the one hand, the State is ontological, hence eternal, except, it seems, in the anthropologico-political exception that Badiolism (“inhumanism”) precisely does not consider to be an exception, even if we all know—including up to the most well-informed—that, on the contary, the State is the crushing and omnipresent reality of our mere human being-there. I would like to hear someone say, knowing all this, what these could actually mean, these incessant considerations of Badiou’s on the fact that there be an inextricable link between State, Representation, and corruption, what I call Evil; and this, even while Badiou, always in line with the metaphysico-dogmatic traditionalism, considers that Evil has neither being [être] nor existence, while at the same time thinking that almost everything is reprehensible, corrupt and, last but not least,17 “nihilist.” I beg the Anglo-Saxon reader’s pardon for the convolutedness of this latter sentence, but it is the subject matter itself that is so, and not a regrettable writing defect on the part of its author (hoping the rest of the book proves to be the exact opposite for the reader). In other words, we see clearly that in Badiou corruption is eternal and universal, which is much worse than the Evil and Sin of Religions—which circumscribe moral corruption where it should be, in the human adventure—because, in Badiolism, it is an inextricable predicate of Representation, the eternal essence of the being of every being [de l’être de tout étant], even if, on the other hand, it does not exist. On the one hand, everything is corrupted, and on the other, everything is innocent; on the one hand, the State is an inexorable ontological fatality, on the other, we can abolish it tomorrow, in the sole anthropological closure.
In sum: I would like to know whether this compossibility of all these contradictory and self-refuting considerations are not the indication of pure and simple schizophrenia, and can drive the reader crazy as well, under the pretext of the most unassailable rationality which, according to its author, ever existed. In this case, perhaps the author in question should ordain “purifying” charity, starting with himself. Once more, placing myself most faithfully at the disposal of anyone who would like to sharpen the arguments to settle the debate, the question I ask is indeed the following: how can a philosophy that claims to be so puritan, namely fanatical on the question of purity and purification, can ultimately, fully in line with the most inquisitorial religious puritanism, end up seeing Evil, ugliness, and mediocrity absolutely everywhere, even while denying their existence on the other hand.
And it is on this point, under the sole pretext of the gigantic symptom that is Badiou—like Wagner in his time—that I could conclude the call for tenders, returning to what is formulated by the present chapter: the still “nice” hypothesis which says that classico-dogmatic metaphysics had been incapable of thinking Evil, hence its humiliating defeat against Religion, thus makes way for a “wicked” hypothesis. Classico-dogmatic metaphysics would in reality be much more directly responsible for Evil than supposed by the “nice” hypothesis of a semi-involuntary omission, conditioned by the professional atavism inherited from Plato: Badiou, with his fanatical will to stick to this classicism, furnishing the proof through reductio ad absurdum and schizophrenia: the omission of Evil would be both voluntary and innocent. Following the untenable speculative antiphrases we just reviewed, we come to a crude casuistic oxymoron: dogmatic classicism in philosophy, of which Badiou is the “giant” and colorful caricature, considers all in all that Evil is nothing but a phase [passe] on the way towards the Good (this is self-evident with the Hegelian dialectical machine). On this, I am in fact very close to agreeing with him.18 But I cannot, because what I criticize, in the last instance, in the philosopher’s originary gesture, is well and truly the effacing of the traces of the crime (something even Hegel no longer did exactly, not to mention Schelling and Hölderlin). Nietzsche said of Wagner that his deadly weapon was the “magnifying glass”: “(…) one looks through it, one does not trust one’s own eyes—everything looks big, even Wagner—What a clever rattlesnake! It has filled our whole life with its rattling about “devotion,” about “loyalty,” about “purity”; and with its praise of chastity it withdrew from the corrupted world.—And we believed it in all these things.”19 Each word here coincides disturbingly with what I experienced in my “Great Alliance” with the philosophical Redeemer of the German musician. Our contemporary speculative Wagner uses a similar magnifying glass, and blows the dogmatico-classical process of the effacing of traces to absurd dimensions never reached before. A speculative exponentiation, at the moment when it is no longer possible to obliterate the overwhelming proofs.
The crime, the Evil, resides not so much in the fact that it had been necessary to overbid on the crime which was not yet a crime (i.e. predation), but well and truly in the operation of obliteration. Thus dogmatico-classic metaphysics from then on will have to answer for its direct responsibility in the perpetuation of Evil: by the fanatical, let us dare say psychotic,20 denial of the latter. This is what (with Badiou taken as the “magnifying glass” of the classico-dogmatic tradition of metaphysics) we thought had been expired since Kant and Heidegger. Plato could still obliterate “innocently” the fact that, in order to build the Acropolis, thousands of slaves had to be martyrized. Spinoza, who brought the principle of metaphysics, that of real necessity, to its peak, perpetuated the tradition in attributing all evils to an imperfect comprehension of the chain of causes, which disturbs the too nearsighted view of imperfect understandings upon the necessitarian perfection of God. This is in fact why Sade and Spinoza say strictly the same thing: everything is rational, hence necessary; Evil is not a concept of Nature. And this is also why, contrary to the clichés, it is not Sade but Rousseau who is a philosopher of Evil. In this respect, he is still the “Newton of moral philosophy,” as Kant recognized in him. Sade sticks to a last referent, a principle, that the Middle Ages had already made extinct: Nature. It is this ultimate referent that Rousseau precisely caesures: what I call archi-transgression.
Schelling fissures the edifice even more decisively: if Evil is one of the proofs of freedom qua human, it is because it does not come from any real necessity. And it is on this point that the most recent, “Platonic” attempt at obliterating Evil turns out to be not only desperate and anachronistic, but, by a curious twist, in complicity with the capitalist ideology it claims to fight: on the one hand, obliteration of Evil by the Laws of “ontological” necessity, namely of the logico-mathematical,21 which for the latter make death, torture, horror into simple cases derived from the universality of the concept, and hence non-beings [non-êtres] just as well; on the other, the Leo-Straussian ideology of the White House, Reagan, or Bush, which coolly explains to us that the injustices, inequalities, and finally abominations of expropriatory facticity are nothing but a consequence of the Laws of Natural Necessity. In our terms: it is said that techne is hardly more than an extension of physis, which ultimately changes nothing to it. As in Spinoza or Sade, facticity comes under necessity. The expropriatory injustice which arises from the technomimetic closure remains “Darwinian”; the strongest crushes the weakest; “the big fish eats the small,” said Mao, saying the last word on his Idea of communism.
The fact will always remain that it is wrong. Man is the one who can know that the avalanche of expropriatory injustices and atrocities that poured down on earth because of his “fault” had in fact nothing irreparably necessary about them. That is why Schellingian freedom, which is properly born in its ability to do Evil, discovers afterwards that it is capable of Good.22 An animal can by no means “surpass” predatory cruelty without self-suppressing himself. We could renounce exploitation, expropriation, torture, the atrocities without self-suppressing ourselves. Evil is a non-metaphysical philosophical question, because it does not fall under any real necessity: it is tied to the contingency of the event of technomimetic appropriation.
And under the invocation of the great negative philosophies born in the twentieth century, Benjamin and Bataille, Adorno and Blanchot, half of Heidegger and half of Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, Schürmann and Lacoue-Labarthe, the only ethical question of coming philosophy should be the following: why does man, who could rationally pull himself out of suffering, in other words, who already can do it, not want to do it? Why does he waste his energy with trivialities, some theological, others metaphysical or biogenetic, for wanting to be more eternal, immortal, and infinite, and thus perpetuate the abominable sufferings, by turning away from them over and over again? The ethical superiority of negative philosophies over the most sophisticated positivisms and eudaemonisms lies therein: it asks the right question, recapitulated by Adorno: “Given the level of productive forces, the earth could here and now be paradise.” Here and now. Then it really is these negative philosophies that hold the only stone of non-despair worth something on the edge of our century: because, unlike classico-dogmatic metaphysics whose “great” revival today is Badiou, they know that Evil is by no means an insurmountable fatality. But because, in the latter, the hallucinogenic deluge of “nihilism” comes to compensate this classico-dogmatic foreclosure of the question of Evil—including even in its “truth procedures” where the atrocious sufferings of Cantor, Gödel, or Grothendieck, of Schönberg or Beckett, of the originary erotic situation called “archaic rape,” and of the fact that 90 percent of the “loves” in the world are but simulacra conditioned by social convention, and therefore sufferings that are in most cases gratuitous, and finally of course the monumental sufferings Mao and Pol Pot inflicted on their peoples in the name of their Good, appear to be nothing more than the negligible prices humanity has to pay in order for the comfortably bureaucratic Good of the philosopher to arrive—then the spectacle of the metaphysician, the tobacconist of the Good, who now has only to put his feet up on the tabula rasa and count the “eternal truths” like stamps, by nihilating the insane stock of sufferings and the eternalized, non-necessary death they cost, this spectacle appears finally as it is: as comical as little Wagner in his fuchsia silk dressing gown. Only for a little while did the magnifying glass manage to pass a mouse off as an elephant.
“Beyond Good and Evil” was not a triumphant conquest of Nietzsche’s, but his final drama: because in lieu of this “surpassing” comes the insurmountable “nihilism.” Which recapitulates well enough the SoN’s undertaking: not to propose another surpassing, after two centuries of surpassings of all kinds involuted into “nihilism,” “postmodernism,” “spectacle,” “simulacrum,” parody, but: to think surpassing otherwise, to live it otherwise. Philippe Descola’s great book of anthropology, Beyond Nature and Culture,23 gets caught up in a similar impasse: he thinks to “prove,” with the description of primitive cultures, unaware of the “western” caesura of Nature and Culture, that this caesura can be “surpassed.” But the question is not even broached in this book; that is to say, Rousseau’s thought, in terms of modernity, and, historically very prior to the latter, the Greek, and especially Aristotelian caesura of physis and techne. Every attempt at “surpassing” this “old” cleavage is doomed to failure, but why? Because our concept of surpassing thrusts its roots nowhere else but into this caesura. The caesura of physis/techne (hence: Good/Evil) cannot be surpassed, because our historial concept of surpassing is this caesura itself.
What the SoN shows, owing to the brilliant discoveries of Lacoue-Labarthe, is that the “modern” concept of “surpassing,” carried by Hegel to its speculative perfection (see Aufhebung), was nothing other than Aristotle’s catharsis, in other words, the mimetic operation that separates physis from techne. So when one claims to surpass this disjunction, it is always by means of this disjunction itself: and the squaring of the vicious circle always closes on its perpetrator, Nietzsche or Descola. The latter’s design is praiseworthy: in a way, “ecological.” He proposes, somewhat more than in-between the lines, to inspire us with all these primitive wisdoms in order to change our relationship to Nature. But in the end he only irrealizes the latter in a brilliant relativism … cultures who live on that side of the Nature/Culture caesura think an essential continuity (for instance: animist, or hylozoic) between the two. He reproduces Nietzsche’s impasse, who, with the concept of “nihilism,” rediscovers, exactly as in the metaphysics that was supposed to be surpassed, a hopeless inflation of non-being in lieu of the appropriative “Good,” which in Nietzsche functions as a kind of voucher of innocence, delivered with brand new consequences, to man’s pleonectic rage. Where dinosaurs were, it seems, the “champions” of purely animal pleonexia, man is the dinosaur of spiritual pleonexia, meaning: of Spinozist conatus perverted by the technomimetic. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche wants to prove the innocence of conatus that is supposed to be universal, without wanting to know anything about the pleonectic perversion produced by the birth of man as such: technomimetic astuteness, the unthought root of the process of irrealization that classical metaphysics labels as negligible “Evil.” When, according to Nietzsche, Geniuses and Tyrants should always and everywhere triumph without remainder, on the contrary, it is that which keeps the human pleonectic from resulting in a happy ending that triumphs: the victims of pleonexia and their strategies, the slaves (and the Jewish thought remunerates it according to Nietzsche), the losers, the weak: “nihilism.” In other words, the same inflation of non-being that classico-dogmatic metaphysics dismisses as unreal “Evil,” yet latent everywhere, in the dreadful becoming-nihilist of the world.
Thus, as proved a last time by the Badiou symptom and its overbidding on “nihilism” in lieu of irrealized Evil, “nihilism” actually was the very last, and the most sophisticated, of the ways in which philosophy irrealized Evil all throughout its history. Following Nietzsche and Heidegger, several generations of philosophers and writers would rack their brains in order to find the Holy Grail of the “surpassing of nihilism,” and each time come back empty-handed. The solution was very simple: it was necessary to stop considering “nihilism” as a facticity, and dismantle piece by piece the mechanism whereby Nietzsche reconstructed the very question of Evil there where he thought he had eliminated it.
The views of Hölderlin and Benjamin, their embryonic, spectral philosophies of history, sent to us like bottles to the sea, allow us to do without the historial thesis of nihilism by Nietzsche and Heiddeger. There is no golden age, neither before, nor after, neither Roman, nor Renaissance, nor Belle Epoque. There is no Heavenly Jerusalem, no rosy futures, and neither is there a non-contradictory God. All ages have been wretched, all successes and “Civilization” have been constructed on the obnoxious ground of ultra-majoritarian existential failures and martyrdoms, and “barbarity” that is always denounced as the opposite of the civilized world, without being amazed at the fact that it arises only in this world, that is, in the anthropological closure. Then only disconsolation remains, Schürmann’s, Lacoue-Labarthe’s, or mine. Yet, even so, the energy that animates these philosophies, which know that theirs is henceforth the most urgent task of turning the concept against that which it is usually made to serve, the artificial paradise of the maximal Good, so that Evil is not perpetuated with too much impunity, holds the only true glimmer of hope. Despite appearances, only those philosophers are not desperate, for envisaging the situation in its epochal gravity, and for being the only ones to become aware of the means of escaping it at least partially. To limit the damage would be already a much more significant and ethically upright victory than to assign humanity yet one more time to the Promethean tasks of universal work for the Good, which will result in nothing but another case of collectivized enslavement.
This is why The Spirit of Nihilism is the only attempt at rising to the outrageous challenge issued by Schelling and Schürmann: philosophy must radically change its basis and priorities; if it wants to have the slightest chance of finally prevailing over Religion, it must take over that which the latter made into its thinking [pensante] area of specialty, Evil; it must do as did all the great metaphysics of normative foreclosure, from Plato to Badiou, including Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza, and put the positive universal at the bottom of the ladder, and singularity (for classico-dogmatic metaphysics, the trivial root of all “Evil”), at the top. It must propose as rigorous a phenomenology of Evil as the Platonic phenomenology of Good, or the Hegelian phenomenology of the spirit. To that end, it must deconstruct the concept whereby we obliterate the question of Evil: precisely the “nihilism” whereby we diagnose our age. I showed that when we go all the way, up to the utmost limit of the diagnostic resources of the concept of “nihilism,” the concept falls apart: the essence of nihilism has nothing nihilistic about it. Contemporary “democratic nihilism” is nothing but the ultimate form—and hardly the most violent—of a much more immemorial question, which is the question of Evil.
We must say in conclusion: philosophers, make one last effort if you want to bring down both Religion and the “nihilism” of contemporary laicism at the same time (the two being dialectically complicit, as we see every day). Be truly brave, even sacrificial, in a word, heroic. Stop lazing around in the prescriptive, in eudaemonism, in more or less tempered utopia; following Rousseau, Schelling, or Schürmann, tackle the root of contemporary “nihilism,” a question even older than the question of the “Good” of philosophy that arose from an error in diagnosis: the question of Evil. Thereby we would stop both selling false promises—the only point whereby we will have been the immemorial and ever submissive accomplices of the religions—and comforting ourselves. But we would, perhaps, contribute to avoid what these false promises, and especially the diagnostic errors that made them, resulted in: a definitive catastrophe, absolute and irremediable, which, for the first time in all History, has become an actual possibility, already happening before our very eyes.