Politics: As we saw, the other, singularly animal beings [étants] cannot will [vouloir] and therefore are not capable of [pouvoir] their own repetition. The event that singularizes us humans is the event of the transappropriation of our own repetition: a repetition of repetition, technological mimesis, which hence produces the alchemy of a whole catalogue of upheavals of what is “imitated,” in actual fact transfigured by this imitation. Mimesis is nothing other than properly anthropological, that is, techno-scientific repetition. The event “man” does not consist of a particularity of such and such characteristic organic features: it coincides, absolutely, with the mimetic impulse, the ability, unique in the entire known cosmic realm, to repeat repetition. To fictionalize identity [fictionner l’identité].
We might as well say that every appropriation is transgression (see below). The emergence of life is, always already [d’ores et déjà], a transgression of the “laws” of matter. In doubling the Laws of Nature by mimesis, we appropriate them. And such is our difference from our ontological congeners, the other appropriative beings [étants], animal or even vegetable. The latter, for lack of (self-)appropriating the laws of their own repetition, repeat themselves over very long periods of time, interrupted only by a change that is itself outside of their grip (a climatic upheaval, a genetic mutation, itself always taking very long to incubate). What happens when technomimetic appropriation, that is to say, the event of Science, the only event of which we are the decisive Subjects, occurs? We transgress these laws, in two senses of the word: in (self-)appropriating them, we dominate them; and we can “override.” This transgression of the Laws of Nature is not necessarily an abolition of the latter:1 the exponentiation of sexuality, which is a compulsive over-repetition of the instinct of … repetition, obviously does not abolish any biological law of procreation (even artificial implantation, contraception or biogenetic and clonic production by no means abolish the pre-given Laws of Nature): it “suppresses” them (parodically!) and preserves them all the same. More importantly: it surpasses them. In other words, it creates brand new Laws which, quite far from abolishing the old, perverts them and pushes them to the background. In the meantime, the operation always produces a waste, and such is Evil.
This emergence of new Laws is the birth of politics: that which doubled the act of the technomimetic appropriation of the necessary Laws of Nature and being, as soon as a primate discovered repeating the rubbing together of two flints. This means that this appropriation-transgression of the Laws of Nature is doubled, just as well and just as soon, by a new regime not only of Laws, but also of new transgressions. It is moreover these latter transgressions that everyday language means when it says “transgression”: crime, blasphemy, madness, etc. In my conceptual vocabulary, the first understanding of the word “Transgression” more or less overlaps with its ordinary sense. It even sheds brand new light on the concept of what we have always commonly understood by “Transgression.”
The “Laws” of politics are all supernumerary: having surpassed those of Nature, they become established in their lieu and stead, in order to organize (in one way or another) the human communities. The Laws of Nature, having been surpassed, that is, pushed to the background, all become agents of what is commonly known as Evil, the harmful, the diabolical, etc. Evil is born when I do in the face of the Law that which I automatically do prior to it. Natural laws, bloated by the appearance of the conventional “Laws” that overhang and dominate them, challenge the latter and become their literally automatic transgressions. The thwarted Laws of Nature take revenge for the sublation that scientific appropriation made them undergo. Besides, the cruelty and suffering that reign supreme in the animal kingdom are very probably, already, a “revenge” of the immutable Laws of matter on their biological sublation. Disappearance being the inevitable lot of every being [étant], whoever accelerates their being-there through transgressive appropriation, here the animal and already the vegetable, pays this appropriating acceleration by an acceleration of their disappearance: such is etiolation, drying up, extinction; such then is suffering, predatory cruelty, and death.
Politics is a parody of science, which delivers the negative truth of the latter, to which it has always turned a blind eye, with the complacent endorsement of philosophy. It wants to act “as” [comme] the shrewd discoverer, who equalizes the beings under the isomorphic regime of the Law he has (self-)appropriated. “As” the archi-scientist, which is already the one who rubbed the flints together or the first gardener, this Law throws the singularity (see below) that is appropriated, exploited by Law, outside the field of the exploitable. This is what gives the figure of the Tyrant, already found in embryonic form in the Scientist, at an earlier stage. But this is also what gives the singular Victim (pleonasm), at a later stage, the one being complementary of the other, as confirmed by the entire section of my work that constitutes a commentary on Agamben’s admirable notion of homo sacer. This notion is discussed at length in the first part of Ontologique de l’Histoire; in that book I show how this notion communicates with the first Heideggerian, then Badiouian, notion of “evental site”: the new event always comes from the discarded, the remainder that is singularized by an anterior event. This is the SoN’s version of the Nietzschean eternal return: every event of appropriation produces a waste, a singularity not captured by the positive universal; it is always this waste that is the site of the next event; when the latter takes place, a new singularization takes place as well, which in turn will give the following event, etc., etc. This is the vicious circle of History, since it would actually seem that the more we go towards the appropriative event, the more we produce “accursed” singularizations, that is, waste. This is, by all appearances, what detains every historico-political teleology since Marx: we can no longer see an end to this process, an ultimate event which would redeem all of a sudden the set of the singularities “damned” by the archi-event of appropriation, the technomimetic, or the original sin of Religion, which promises that redemption. Modern, i.e. German philosophy, because it is a laicized theology, still promised, with Kant, Hegel, and its Marxist vulgarization, such a final Reconciliation; today, Badiou is trying to piece together a prescriptive philosophy of infinite and unachievable truths, a kind of teleology without teleology, and Meillassoux lays cards on the table: only a non-contradictory God can still save us. The SoN rejects these solutions, and proposes to look into the roots of the Evil that the species has self-inflicted on itself since it raised itself, parodically, above the other species. The stakes should be extremely simple: even though we could rationally abolish all sufferings, why and how do we still and again do nothing but find pretexts, metaphysically fantasized by our inveterate “pleonexia,” to perpetuate them and make them worse?
Let it be said in conclusion: this one discovery of The Spirit of Nihilism alone leaves behind one of the most immemorial prejudices of philosophers, from Plato to Badiou, including Condorcet, Marx, or Althusser: for the “good” politics, the day it exists, Science cannot be of any use. Summoning any kind of scientific discourse in order to correct the “bad” politics by the supposedly “good” is the worst absurdity ever committed by philosophy. Science is the set of the appropriated laws of Nature. It is their mimesis. Politics is the set of the Laws resulting from this appropriation, none of which tallies by any means with scientific laws. Politics is, very possibly, the parody of the event of science and its “laws,” but this fact precisely aggravates even more the fault of philosophers, for condoning this belief of all tyrants in a “scientificity” of their being-there: philosophers themselves also parody science unconsciously, in administering the rules of “good” politics as if it were a matter of science, and like tyrants very mistakenly believe.
As to art (see above), it is the mimesis of politics, otherwise more faithful than science could ever be, no matter how little: every collusion of the scientific and the political—and philosophy for a long time has been nothing else—intrinsically leads to nothing but disaster. Art’s repetition of politics gives something else—which is precisely art. As anticipated by the most lucid part of twentieth-century philosophy, which is also the most “negative,” Benjamin, Adorno, or Lacoue-Labarthe, it is in the questioning of the link between the “laws” of politics and the “laws” of art, as their reciprocal regimes of “transgressions,” that resides the one and only chance of politics itself. The more you “harden” the truncated collusion of science and politics, pretending that the recourse to the first is the only panacea for the second, the more you play the pipe of Hamelin to humanity, pretending to want its Good. It is to the appearance of the scientific “Good” that we owe all political “Evil”—a pleonasm for the Son, needless to add any more. Yet this is what philosophy has almost always done. It is perhaps not too late put an end to the consequences.
Art has secretly always been the immense collection of preparations for the “grande politique.” Taking play as that which it has always been, the essence of art and its childhood, this politics could in fact finally emerge before us at the dawn of this century.
Now is the time for the discussion with a Master of mine, before Schürmann and Lacoue-Labarthe: Adorno, who, with his Aesthetic Theory, produced the twentieth century’s most powerful philosophical reflection on art, much in advance of Heidegger for instance. This thought is still too little known not to become what it is: untimely topical. “Art that seeks to redeem itself from semblance through play becomes sport,”2 he writes for instance. Adorno is the only one to have anticipated that art was unique in hinting at the utopia that politics could not fulfill; and that at the same time its modern self-destructive negativity was its ethical faithfulness. As long as the earth is not what it should be, paradise here and now, art must show both “the star of redemption” and its immanent abortion.