Techne

Techne: Once again Kubrick’s movie is our modern Odysseus, as its title promises. An ape grabs hold of a bone and makes it into an instrument: it is the dawn of humanity. As Jean-Clet Martin1 writes, the animal

gets directly in touch with an environment and introjects its givens as if in order to negate them by devouring and contest the distance that separates them. The dog eats the meat almost without chewing it, destroys immediately whatever gives him appetite without either delay or deferring the satisfaction. There is no stepping back for the animal; a grain is the invitation for swallowing it up. No bird could wait to see it sprout. (…) The cow (…) is entirely determined by the green of the grass, it lives only for that and, as a result, its passive existence remains purely thingly: a natural life, aimed with all its might at a natural object, the grass. This hunger could never be satisfied in that always yet another clump of grass will arouse it again on the endless path of an inexhaustable infinity. The animal dies without having touched itself, having brought forth a new herbivore that chases after the same grass according to a cycle impossible to close.2

Which is why life is actually the first stage of appropriation; but because the latter is solely ontic, it does not get out of the circle of immediacy and hence does not know the expropriatory gigantism that characterizes the anthropological, i.e. techno-scientific stage of appropriation. In other terms, there is no politics, that is, no exponentiation of the play of appropriation/expropriation by representation. Save for the “possession” of territory, which always depends on the physical presence of the “possessor” or “possessors,” animals do not double this play of appropriation/expropriation through the representational cut. I can possess a land while being perfectly absent, and this faculty alone deserves to be called “representation” (see above). For this very reason, the animal world expands neither in historicity (in time) nor in geoplanetary and cosmic consciousness (in space).

The animal directly devours the grass; whereas man breaks this cycle by (self-)appropriating the being [l’être] of the grass. “Instead of devouring the seed, he plants it; he suspends his instinct of self-preservation and does not throw himself on the earth’s produce,”3 like the animal or the Master who, with the slave’s produce, acts like an insatiable animal. It is only later that the archaic techne of the simian tool or of representational repetition that makes food gathering into agriculture becomes “pure” science.

Let us make it clear: techne dialectically constitutes the moment of the materialization of mimesis. The latter is an empty repetition. We would have to wait for an incubation period of only a few thousand years, with the appearance of logico-mathematical sublimation, for this emptiness in its turn to become literal and material, closing the loop. This is why Aristotle is more crucial than Plato, that is to say, he is both more lucid and more useful. If mimesis were not materialized into techne, it would remain an act of consciousness among so many others, meaning: among those countless others that, beyond all doubt, fill the heads of other animals. If in these pages you see the “high road” of an infinite debt of Hegel to Aristotle, it is because only Hegel, in near modernity, truly overturned Platonism by instituting ceaselessly the proceedings of the Idea to the court of its effectiveness, or non-effectiveness. Platonism’s henceforth conscious, and for this reason unforgivable, trickery is that it knows that all its prescriptions, just like in the original version, are destined to remain dead letter; or else can really mortify, on the the pretext of “true life,” “eternal truth” and “immaculate immortality.” If the SoN, to a large extent, consists of an encyclopedic revisitation of the Hegelian concept of aufhebung, its archaeology digs up the remains of the concept never mentioned by Hegel, and which Heidegger will mention for him: techne. It is the name of Hegelian effectiveness, but such as empirically accessible to everybody. If, as the SoN pleads following Lacoue’s discoveries, aufhebung truly is a meta-Aristotelianism that is unaware of itself as such, in other words, a combination of concepts which Hegel does not mention much by name, i.e. mimesis, catharsis, and techne, in a stunning anachronism we will see Hegel clarify Aristotle in return: Hegelian effectiveness translates techne; the rightly famous and universal mediation (or representation, see above), mimesis; and finally the famous surpassing, relève, or sublation translates catharsis.

The Differend with the absolute Master of modern philosophy4 becomes clear exactly on this point. The Hegelian aufhebung is what “lifts up” [relève] difference in order to lead it to identity. The aufhebung as reworked by the SoN demonstrates that it is a fictitious operation of identification, a technomimetic appropriation, which produces difference (see Mimesis).