Science

Science: The ontological differend, the absolute and universal principle of inadequacy of Science and what it appropriates, universalizes also the Hölderlino-Heideggerian style figure of “the further away it is, the closer it is.” Translation: the more a science is said to be pure, the more its effects are impure; the more a science is impure, the more its effects are “pure.” In order to clarify this point, I will cite an excerpt from an open letter I wrote to the young philosopher Tristan Garcia:1

At this point, I tell myself perhaps there is a rather extraordinary theory of knowledge that would have to be produced on the basis of a dialectics which would cross your two very strong theories of the compact [le compact] and the comprehending [le comprendre]. Besides, this is why I do not consider Badiou a dialectician. In this regard, for me the guiding, brilliant, recapitulating words come from Adorno: “Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.”2 And we are fully there. I really find it very powerful, the manner in which you basically “shift” the prohibition of self-belonging into a radical impossibility of self-comprehension [l’auto-compréhension]. That which would comprehend itself maximally (there is no self-comprehension except as tendentious [tendancielle], never absolute), such as the stone, the compact, would be precisely that which would appropriate the least possible something else, and would be the furthest from all “knowledge” [savoir]. The thing that almost absolutely comprehends itself, the compact, would precisely be that which would be practically incapable of comprehending anything else. Then the thing capable of comprehending the maximum of other things would be the most incapable of comprehending itself, despite its claims notably, the human thing. Here “Platonic fiduciarism” receives the deadly blow: Mathematical “certainty” is precisely never as certain as when it applies to that which is furthest from itself. This is moreover why the more a science gets “closer” to ourselves as object, as in the case of biology, or surgical science, the more it is hesitant, uncertain, groping, blurred, perhaps hardly-a-science. The prehensile (vegetable, animal), and then appropriative (cognitive, epistemological) being [l’étant] loses in self-comprehension as it gains in comprehension of something other than itself. Thus it would seem that you have laid out the basis of a spectacular reversal of the evental dialectics inherited from Badiou, on the basis of self-belonging. And besides this is the key of my own quietus: the “mystery” of self-belonging, of the event as “miracle,” is entirely literalizable as a dialectics of appropriation. The Platonist, for want of comprehending things, takes refuge in the forms; he comprehends things only as forms; and first and foremost because he does not comprehend himself as thing. Yet this is the banal condition of the human thing, and precisely his singularity. The Platonist, through his tendency, is simply the one who does not want to know that man is—because he appropriates formally the maximum of things and hence comprehends them—the thing that pays the price, the price of being less and less capable of comprehending itself, of being compact. Yet again, I had felt that you attained something like a quasi-ontological theory of the unconscious. You told me you did not read psychoanalysis. What a shame! You should study Lacan’s counter-cogito, which your theory (your ethics) of comprehension terribly reminds me of: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.” If you wish, I will find the seminar where he develops this most in depth, it would most certainly appeal to you.

Science is nothing other than the maximization of the pleonectic. Indeed, even the word “philosophy,” for a long time translated somewhat syrupily as “love of wisdom,” seems to have meant much more literally: “appropriation of knowledge.” In other words, once again, this quasi-pleonasm is also the pure and simple synonym of the pleonectic.

It will then be said that the SoN, for being anti-pleonectic, is to be put away on the shelf of “anti-philosophical” accessories. But one would be wrong: the (evental-technological) archi- and hyper-appropriative essence of the human animal is not something to be “fought,” otherwise we might just as well become one of those “anarcho-primitivist” philosophers who think that even the Neolithic Era was the beginnings of a long decadence, and that in short we must go to the Paleolithic, in other words, destroy every trace of technological civilization itself: return to its fossil. This somewhat manic Rousseauism is not ours. The SoN is not an “anti-philosophy” either, but the suggestion of a radical revolution of the narcissism whereby philosophy draws its ethical postulates. According to the SoN, the pleonectic as such is ineradicable from the being [l’être] of man (metaphysical Lutheranism). It attacks the philosopher’s narcissistic foreclosure, whose very title indicates that he is, in a way, the “champion of the pleonectic.” The tragicomic manner in which he gives big lessons on the best means of destroying every appropriative trace of the anthropological closure can therefore, historially, no longer be seriously defended: the meta-fairground spectacle that is the network of academic discourse contradicts every word pronounced therein. The SoN promotes the assumption of the pleonectic, a surpassing of capitalism, which does not picture itself as the final suppression (yet another “final solution”) of the universal play of appropriation-expropriation that constitutes historical humanity as such. It fights the performative contradiction that philosophy has been to date. It wants to cure philosophy of its casuistic infantilism that has remained deep-rooted, until now.

Science produces a vertiginous alienation [extranéation] of the being [l’étant] which (self-)appropriates that which was not itself. There is an asymptotic logic, a yet coherent paradoxy of appropriation as logic of the impossible self-appropriation [auto-appropriation]. As I point out to Garcia, in terms of tendency, the stone is much more in (self-)possession of itself [se possède elle-même] than an animal wasting his being-there hither and thither, flapping his tongue around. But the logic lies exactly there: because the stone is maximally in self-possession of itself, what Garcia calls the “compact,” it self-appropriates nothing that would be external to it, and therefore in the end does not (self-)appropriate itself either. The maximum of self-possession, “compactness,” in the being-there, coincides with the minimal degree of pleonectic propensity. It is in this sense that Hegel’s famous Lutheran saying, “only the stone is innocent,” must be conveyed. Conversely, the being [l’étant] that comes out of itself, and thus (self-)appropriates that which is not itself, vegetable and then animal, paradoxically ceases to be entirely in “self”-possession of itself, in perfect blindness to this uniquely tendentious, never absolute “self-belonging” (a full self-appropriation would be the living contradiction of a God that would have nothing external to itself). Appropriation is all about expropriation. With specifically scientific appropriation, we may say that man appears to have come closer to the maximum a being is capable of, and, for this very reason, for the fact of (self-)appropriating what all the other beings are unconscious of, for the double infinity of space and time, he self-inflicts a dispossession that the other beings cannot know either. His purely material being-there is crushed by the insane mental alienation [extranéation] that is scientific knowledge, and he henceforth becomes the exact opposite of the stone: the maximally expropriated being, and he becomes so in the pathetic knowledge of this expropriation that costs him the positive knowledge itself of science, from the consciousness of cosmic infinities to universal Laws of Logic, from the consciousness of evolution and History to the quasi-butcher’s-knowledge of his organic interiority as psychic: and there are no literal butchers among cats.

The material being-there vertiginously relativized by the exaltation of learned, i.e. expropriated appropriation is what the SoN calls Singularity (see below). Singularity is the being [l’étant] seized by science, which science makes into the particular of a universal. Hence, everything that is not included in the subsumption of the abstract universal is as if it were not [comme s’il n’était pas]. The metaphysical tradition for a very long time incorporated with blind confidence—fiduciarism—this processuality of Science. For instance, the third part of Ontologique de l’Histoire includes my “great” discussion with Hegel on this point. For him, singularity is literally nothing but the force of pure negativity destined to be reabsorbed in the play of the terminally positive Universal. There is a very strong intuition in this schema, but which is exactly like the other side of what I am trying to systematize. In my work, the singular is rather the “negative” that falls from scientific isomorphism which reduces the beings whose laws it draws to interchangeable particularities, as indifferent instances of these Laws. Concrete difference, scored out therein by the “positive” universal of science, hence transmutes into what the SoN determines as singularity: negated, and as such negativized difference. To say it in as demagogical a manner as possible: the Singular is the Difference that is purely and simply victimized by Science. The unbearable paradox, whose ceaseless defense is the cause of the whole tragico-horrific condition of the technological living being, is that without this victimization singularity would have never appeared as such. Art exposes it in all its purity; yet, without the primitive crime of Science, never would have art had at its disposal its somewhat primary matter, which is, as we saw, for this very reason quite often the Evil of a same movement.

Thus “negativity” should be understood in two senses here: not in the sense of a “dialectical motor” that implicitly considers every singular to be precisely nothing more than a particularity destined to be reabsorbed in the positive Universal according to a scientific model, but in the simplest sense of the manner in which the being suffers from expropriation. Hence “negativity” in this sense overturns Hegel’s: it points to the above-mentioned “as if it were not,” in the following sense: the appropriation of the isomorphic laws condemns the singularity subsumed by these laws to non-being. The singular is that which, of the different, inexists to scientific isomorphism, or isotropism. The being-singular [l’être-singulier] becomes a simulacrum, a semblance, the shadow of its “true” being said [son « vrai » être dit] by the “positive” universal of science. The pathos of this traumatized singularity is, of course, often the “motor” of events, but events always play for very high stakes by (self-)appropriating something new: always costing new expropriations. Therefore always new sickly modes of singularizations; such is the anti-Hegelian dialectic of the SoN, and such is also its version of the eternal return. History is the squaring of this vicious circle, whose dialectic is unfolded entirely in the Algèbre de la Tragédie. The SoN asks whether we are capable of pulling ourselves out of this historical vicious circle (awakening from this nightmare, Joyce said): appropriation of the universal=reduction of the beings to subsumption which makes them into the particulars of a universal=production of singularity as waste, expropriatory negativity of the immemorial anthropological process of ferocious appropriation.

Be that as it may, the original epistemological consequence necessarily follows: the more a science is appropriatory, such as logico-mathematics, the more it is expropriatory; the less it is appropriatory, such as medicine or biology, the less it expropriates. In other words, the more a science is pure, the more it is impure; and the more it is impure (empirical, approximative, etc.), the more it is pure. The more it applies itself to the near (medicine and biology again), the more the near proves distant; the more it applies itself to the distant, such as mathematics or mathematized physics, the more it deceptively makes near the distant. The universal self-evidence of appropriated laws is blind to the singularity martyrized in the meantime. It is this illusory eidetic transparency, obtained by the most violent appropriative mimesis, that great metaphysical maximizations feed on, often with delight, and with the most obscene impudence.

The SoN is not opposed to science, even if it reminds that with Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger3 a new relationship is established between the latter and philosophy. The philosopher no longer genuflects, through atavistic reflex, before the eidetic transparencies of science, whose fundamental opacity is revealed by the nightmare of history. But to simply and purely fight science, as the “anarcho-primitivists” do, is to redouble what one is fighting, inviting the species to immediately commit suicide, precisely what science has historically prepared it for. To uproot man from his fundamental epistemic, i.e. technomimetic impulse, is still to dream of clearing him of all pleonectic “malignancy.” It would be to reproduce the oldest casuistic illusion of the metaphysical functionaries. The SoN simply invites philosophy to think its relation to Science otherwise than in simple paradigmatic admiration. It insists, here as elsewhere, on the necessity of a healthy critical distance.