Transgression: Ours is the age which shows that the whole of anthropological experience is under the sign of transgression, and not of legislation. Philosophy, with the exception of Bataille, Foucault, Schürmann, and myself, is lagging much behind this obvious fact. And again as religion suspected, this originary transgression which I also call “archi-transgression” is nothing other than scientific appropriation that doubles things in order to take anthropological appropriation to both trans-historical (consciousness of the Big Bang, the accretion of the earth, its possible dissapearance, etc.) and cosmic-geoplanetary dimensions (complete “trustization” of the planet, including sea depths, spatial conquest, etc.).
Now, we should be aware of a literally crucial detail where the SoN’s whole contribution is perhaps concentrated: it is that “transgress” has the same etymological root as “transcend” that is so dear to philosophers since Kant. Having said that, I almost have the impression of having said it all, and that I could pick up the SoN’s whole undertaking in a Heraclitian fragment, or in a haiku which says “only” this, which says absolutely all. This sole consideration drastically clarifies the tragic overdetermination which makes the “natural metaphysician in us,” and which a great majority of professional metaphysicians want to know nothing about. It is because the human animal is that which transcends the given by science that the appropriation of the laws of nature has an essentially transgressive structure, that transgression then becomes the essential reality of the world’s anthropological age (after the age of “pure” matter, and the age of non-technological life, not appropriated by science).
For instance, and as it has become commonplace to observe, in sexuality, fundamentalists of all kinds are absolutely right, and not wrong, to observe in horror that the sexual life of the human animal is essentially a “transgression of the Law of Nature.” Their only mistake, which nobody ever says anything against, is that they are not less in this Transgression than the adulterous, the sodomites, or all the “deviants” they want to cast out. And this is one of the crucial points that my philosophy turns upside-down: it shows that the supernumerary laws governing anthropological coexistence are nothing but the “masks”—the semblance—of Transgression. Hence the whole overturning, which seems to do more than just emerge in my undertaking, to which I subject the treatment of the question of semblance and parody. It is first of all Law that parodies Transgression and not the other way around. The appropriation of the laws of nature by science unleashes such a potential of violence—and this is the political fact as such—that man feels the necessity to transgress these laws in the second degree by “doubling” them with “laws” not inscribed therein. This is why the transgression of these laws by the rebellious, the rascal, the sexual deviant, the artist, etc., has been historically recognized as a fundamental reality of the anthropological situation—as disturbing as it is ineradicable. Art, starting with Sade, makes these rejects of humanity into heroes, and philosophy will have to wait for Bataille, Foucault, and Schürmann in order to probe what this unprognostic heroization was all about.
Indeed, this was one of the SoN’s “eureka” moments which, in the same way as the diagnostic of the ironic era, merely drew an obvious fact that did not weigh lightly on the mental landscape of a whole generation—at the very roots of every “nihilist,” “postmodern,” etc., sentiment. It is that, since Sade, art has overwhelmingly been the art of a heroism of Transgression, unprecedented until then. A teenager who grows up reading Sade, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Bataille, Artaud, Genet, Burroughs and many others, enters the world of literature—and art in general—taking for granted this categorical imperative of “transgressive heroism,” born almost a century and a half ago with aesthetic modernity. But he very quickly realizes that the era of transgressive heroism had indeed entered the parodic mode decades ago. There are still a few creatures who seem to believe in the discrepant virtues of Transgression in the first degree, but they are in general somewhat pitiful. The age of heroic transgression certainly died with the assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the last “holy transgressor.” The part of the Ontologique de l’Histoire called “La forclusion, le vide et le Mal” analyzes this historiality in depth; Algèbre de la Tragédie coins the adjective “pathetico-parodic” in order to characterize the “postmodern” age of the deflation of transgressive heroism in art; and finally Inesthétique et Mimêsis lays out the foundations of a new thought of the links that originarily tie Transgression to Parody, in the era of the transgressive become auto-parodic. As with irony (see above), a seemingly “poor” age turns out to be much more interesting than it itself believes to be. Blindly, but it is to this blindness that philosophy always restores sight, the identity of the transgressive and the parodic overplayed by contemporary aesthetic “nihilism” is in fact a find [trouvaille].
It unconsciously formulates the following: Transgression is in fact primary, and is confused with scientific transcendentalization as such. The appropriation of the Laws of Nature and being are a transgression of those laws, a surpassing-preservation-excretion. This appropriation institutes a regime of new “laws,” inexistent to Nature and being, which are the “rules” of civic life, what we generically gather together under the title of “politics.” It is solely in this sphere of—literally secondary—rules that emerges a regime of “transgressions” precisely inexistent to Nature and animal life. These are all the phenomena brought together by metaphysics under Evil, and all our greatest artists since Sade have erected their paradoxical dithyramb. The great heroes of artistic Transgression are, from the onset, ironists. They were already parodying art, until then dictated by metaphysical solemnity, by handing their lyre over to what the latter considered as the most repugnant, by putting the Prostitute in the place of the Muse, the appalling and self-interested Crime in the place of the nobly sacrificial weapons, ugliness in the place of Platonic or Kantian beauty, etc.
We saw that ocular reflexivity was the animal proto-stage of mimetic appropriation. What singularizes technological mimesis whose artistic document has always been the critical commentary of “misfortunes” (as Sade would have said!) is that it doubles appropriation by the void. The simply animal, ocular mimesis is a “full” appropriation of that which is reflected. Whereas technological mimesis is an appropriation as it were by the void.
Then, in conclusion, the title of our little lexical book, Transgression and the Inexistent, becomes clear. In transgressing the material existent through the appropriation of its transcendental Laws, in transcendentalizing, in other words, purifying and voiding in eidetic forms, the material existent through appropriative transgression called Science, man introduces the void into the world. The appropriation of the transcendental Laws of the being [l’étant] is the transgressive appropriation of an Inexistent. The SoN does not seek to act original. It thereby, in its own manner and within its own capabilities, revisits a glorious backbone of metaphysical modernity since Kant and not before (that the latter should be the promoter of one of the most saturated adjectives of philosophical history that succeeded him, i.e. the “transcendental,” has obviously nothing fortuitous about it). “Man introduces nothingness into the world”; this has already been said, and brilliantly, by Kant and by Heidegger, by Hegel and by Sartre, by Schelling and by Bataille, by Nietzsche and by Blanchot. The SoN says it again, its only pride consisting in saying it otherwise. The essence of my polemic with Badiou is that the latter, for the first time, says black is white, resurrecting Plato as he wishes, in a manner beyond all decency. Only the idea becomes real; the constituted, which is the purely anthropological intromission of the void in the world, the metaphysical invention par excellence, becomes the constituent. This philosophy acts as if the void had always been there. The sentence, “(O)ntology, therefore, can only count the void as existent”1 entails the gravest consequences for the coming philosophy if it adopts it without further examination. The strictly “political” swerves of its author are nothing but a symptom—besides, superficial—of the manner in which his indubitable genius has recapitulated the criminality inchoative with respect to metaphysics as such. The whole question consists in knowing whether this vast recapitulation should be read as envisaged by its author, in the right way around; or completely in the wrong way. It is not difficult for honest readers to understand why I eventually ended up opting for this latter solution.
The Spirit of Nihilism: the deconstruction of this concept, in Nietzsche and Heidegger, consists in asking, especially, to Nietzsche: what would become of us without the introduction of the Nihil on earth? Nothing. Nothing of what Nietzsche promotes would survive a very hypothetical “interdiction of nothingness.” There is no “nihilism” because, taken literally, the “nihil” is not a bad, but a good thing. We must admit, it is also a catastrophe, the catastrophe incumbent upon us with respect to what religion, better than philosophy, thought as “original sin.” Nietzscheo-Heideggerian “nihilism” is a psychology of decadence that must be rejected once and for all. The only serious question that remains is all those phenomenological modes in which this void is materialized catastrophically. It is all those forms recognized as those of Evil. This question is old and serious, but in another way than the question of “nihilism” (see above).
Why did the modern artist, including its “postmodern” version, make a sarcastic, provocative, paradoxical praise of Evil? The transcendental laws appropriated by science are empty. The attestation of this void consists of the political “laws” that realize it: these are conventional laws, out-and-out empty, but this void is chosen, as Kant realized it first. The Laws of Science are the laws of a necessary void, whereas the Laws of civic life are those of an arbitrary void. The modern artist made praise of the criminal, the blasphemous, and the rascal, because the latter, through their transgressions, reveal the both transgressive and parodic essence of Law, every Law. Their “arbitrary” acts simply respond to the arbitrariness of civic Law itself. Whereas Science and the complicit metaphysical functionary sublimated this appropriation of Nothingness into “ontologies” in charge of the purging of singularities; the civic Transgressor, the criminal, the blasphemous, or the rascal constitutes the return of this singularity to the very inside of the metaphysical closure that is literalized as rules of civic coexistence: originarily iniquitous politics. The artists told us that the illegalities committed by the “reject of humanity” are not more so than the legalities instituted by civic coexistence; the latter eventally necessitated by the devastating overpower with which technomimetic appropriation endows man. But then crime is not less of an event, which speaks volumes on the eventalness of science itself, and its consequences. Moreover, “legislation” could very well have been a term of the SoN’s fundamental lexicon. To save it means to emphasize that Transgression, in what touches the “ontology” of the technomimetic animal, prevails by far over all Legislation, whether scientific or political; and in spite of the original metaphysician, it is art that has always seen this better than anything.
Ontologique de l’Histoire meant: how every event, in other words, a Transgression that is each time transformed into what is called a “transcendental” since Kant, is phenomenalized. Every event is a phenomenon that can be shown; its result, appropriation, is not so, and it is a new ontological and judicial Law; but this transcendental is phenomenalized in its turn, becoming something other than an ethereal transcendental. Take the most simple and solid example of original sin, the archi-transgression that founds man, and gives the absolute transcendental called Science.2 This is what I called, perhaps somewhat too pedantically, “ontological,” which I must admit is a contraction of the two moments of Badiouian metaphysics: being [l’être], the onto-, which becomes appearing, identified with pure logic. How does the scientific transcendental phenomenalize itself afterwards, how does the technomimetic approriation of a transcendental Law regulate itself? By definition, not in the form of the transcendental, but in the form of something which is no longer Science at all, but Politics: this is how the first of “our” events, archi-transgression, is phenomenalized.
On this point, the hostility towards Badiouian neo-Platonism cannot be more complete and more argued. The Spirit of Nihilism refutes that politics can be considered as independent from Science, which is the meta-autistic case with “modern” Platonism. Even Plato himself had the good taste of not thinking that way. Art, love, science, the Law, etc., are all regions that permanently communicate with each other. If psychoanalysis, but already libertinism and courtly love, today sexual liberation and pornography, discover new things on eros, and even and especially create the new, in Good as in Evil, in this domain, it is extremely easy to show that this is because of the tectonic slides in our ontological vision of the world, in the grip of the each time-specific scientific and technological upheavals. It is easy to see how the invention of photography turns the history of painting upside down, and a little bit later how the invention of cinema drastically changes the whole history of art, but already the invention of the camera obscura in the high time of the Great Masters, notably the Flemish. Piero della Francesca revolutionizes the entire history of painting through his properly mathematical work. However, “modern” Platonism claims, despite all evidence to the contary, that all these domains (science, art, politics, love) never interfere with each other. They idealize a given field, the Idea of Art, and they cook up from scratch a form of Sacred Invariance of this Idea throughout the ages—and the concrete arts. On the contrary, I call “philosophy” the one and only discipline of thought capable of thinking these interferences. It is perhaps nothing other than the description of the play of these interferences.
There is not an iota of reason to return to the Heideggerian diagnosis of a metaphysics accomplished definitively by the age of technological gigantism: the Nothingness appropriated by science and sublimated by metaphysics is monstrously literalized therein.3 The crimes of civic right are literally nothing next to the automatic criminality perpetrated each second by the parodic automatism of the technological and technocratic, i.e. metaphysical, Leviathan. The transgressive appropriation of the Inexistent is accomplished in what it always was; the monstrous expropriation of the existent. Yet our age is the first to have the means of knowing it, through a knowing which is no longer that of metaphysical yes-manism, the eternal mimetic ancillary of transcendent positive science, the immanent result of which is political calamity.
Schürmann said there were two fundamental approaches to the philosophical vocation: either to see the other of the visible, or to see otherwise the visible. Ethically, the two kinds will never agree; to dramatize professional hostilities means it is never enough to insist on the gravity of the stakes philosophical work is responsible for—or blindly irresponsible, precisely for selling relentlessly a transcendent alterity to the visible. This age is, to the naked eye, the one where micro-transgressions rise to the surface on all sides of civic life, in order to blame the most originary and buried truth of the metaphysico-historical adventure: causing the edifice of “ontological” legislations to collapse before our eyes, the collapse of “civic” legislations being nothing but a derived case of the latter.
Such is the one and only challenge that lies ahead of the coming philosophies.