Foreword

The anti-scholastic that therefore I was

In a sense, this book is a testament; in a sense that is perhaps only parodic, and to me, all the more so.

When a number of my readers suggested to me the idea of writing this book, I could not then foresee the premonitory aspect the project itself had: to recapitulate eight years of intellectual construction work sedimented into a system, and disseminated in an academic fashion in the five volumes of L’esprit du nihilisme: Ironie et vérité (Nous, 2009), Manifeste antiscolastique (Nous, 2005), Ontologique de l’histoire (Fayard, 2009), Être et sexuation (Léo Scheer, to be published in 2013), and Le sinthome politique which became under the pressure of circumstances, Après Badiou (Grasset, 2011). To these I must add the two “phantom” volumes: Inesthétique et mimêsis, published by Nouvelles Editions Lignes in 2010, and La conjuration des Tartuffes, by Léo Scheer in 2011. These will still be followed, as two addenda, by two books as yet unpublished in French: a book on a major philosophical contemporary, Quentin Meillassoux, and another on the Father of philosophical modernity, Rousseau. I often allude to these in the following abecedary, and I mention them especially since it is very likely that the first will be published in English before it is published in France, not long after the publication of the present book.

After considerable hesitation about what form to give to such a book, once again upon many suggestions by the readers, I opted for the form of a lexicon. However my initial reaction was reluctance, since this “abecedary” form smelt somewhat too much of Deleuze, and my offended modesty reckoned it was somewhat premature, pre-forties, to opt for a form with such strong connotations of consecration, maturity, if not the end of the reign and embalming. At first, I wanted to content myself with a little synthetic “account” of the five and a half volumes. In spite of this, the idea of a lexicon kept on making its way like an insidious worm in the ripening fruit. In my head I could not help writing it in that form. So I ended up admitting defeat and complied. In the end, to constitute a kind of pleiade of my conceptual syntax, by taking a score of keywords with their intertwined, introductory definitions, was the best means of making the reader see the organic interaction of the concepts and the systematic character of the entire undertaking. Furthermore, since the École Normale Supérieure in the rue d’Ulm, upon Martin Fortier and Nicolas Nely’s initiative, had convened an important colloquium on my work on 22, 23 and 24 of March, 2013, I would see this work through to the end in order to present all participants with a “bestiary” as complete as possible of all my concepts. It is indeed a matter of drawing a systematics. And therefore, a philosophy.

Thus, this systematics was not given beforehand. The research was carried out as if on demand; there was nothing systematized that pre-existed it and so it is after the fact that its organicity revealed itself to me: not even “as I went along,” but rather in a revealing flash of lightning which all of a sudden shed light on the whole undertaking. But how? As a matter of fact, the essential text of the entire undertaking is Algèbre de la Tragédie, which concludes Ontologique de l’Histoire. It is in there that was revealed—as if at the crucial moment of an analytic cure—the extent to which my thought, while I had been developing it, was architectured without even me being aware of it. All I had written before, perhaps even including the literary works of my youth, and which seemed to my own eyes like a vast, non-systematic construction site, appeared as if relentlessly striated after the fact. And all I wrote afterwards was merely an “unfolding” of everything the said text had conquered: the consequences which, although implicit, went without saying for those who can read. All this to say that the system was not preconceived when I proceeded to write my cycle, and that it is exposed entirely neither in the Algèbre nor in the texts that followed. Thus all this goes to underline the significance of the present book, which is all the more strategic as it is after the fact—the trick being also to make it as tight as possible, because it was initially meant to clarify the “system” of the SoN1 for not more than a score of people; but in the end, it turned out to be the clearest of all my books, and therefore the most pertinent for a beginner to get familiarized with my work. On that point, when Bloomsbury Publishing approached me for the translation of a first book into English, I deemed the kairos particularly ideal, and the present book the best to introduce my entire philosophical endeavor, in the form of a retroactive catalogue.

§§§

One of the signs which subjectively marked my philosophical path was the violent break with a philosopher well-known by the Anglo-Saxon and international public: Alain Badiou. My reading of Being and Event in 2000–1 was a genuine shock for me. Because of it, not only my work, but entire chapters of my biography turned out to be irremediably transformed, for better or for worse. In the end, the worse prevailed. I had a long lasting and vast collaboration with Badiou; my work obviously bears witness to it, but the reverse—necessarily dissymmetrical—was not less true, as laid bare by the note dedicated to me at the end of Logics of Worlds.2 Yet it is in 2005, during my presentation of his seminar to the audience that Badiou proved to be the most prophetic, by presenting me as his “best enemy.” I am afraid that what followed forever keeps proving him right …

And therefore upon Bloomsbury’s proposition, I added several passages that did not exist in the first version of this abecedary, and which, for the Anglophile neophyte, elaborates more in depth the reasons for this very violent break, which had immense polemical repercussions in France, with the book that announced it: the above-cited Après Badiou. Needless to say, it is the conceptual and technical details that count; but if I open my heart about it already in this foreword, this is for two reasons. First, it is in order to stress well enough from which position I engaged in a parricidal war: in France, I have been much reproached for using in Après Badiou the recurring, paradigmatic comparison with Nietzsche’s break with Wagner. I have of course been accused of megalomania and of taking myself for Nietzsche (something Nietzsche said, and which he wrote on the edge of his so-called madness, has always made me laugh a great deal: “I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not ventured to carry my private egoism so far.” It is in the next paragraph that the reader will understand the motive for this parenthesis…). The accusation is unfair. My work, following Schürmann’s,3 is a total and ruthless war engaged against the root of all psychological megalomania, which is the almost automatically megalomaniac essence of metaphysics, from its origins to the present day. It is Badiou and Badiou alone that is the proper name of this megalomania today. In these pages, we will find out why and how. Yet what the French accusers did not get about my gesture is that the comparison was not on the side of Nietzsche: I have too much admiration for the latter’s heroic saintliness in order not to think that even if I obtained a tenth of the historical outcomes that he obtained in philosophy, I would conclude that my life and work will not have been too much in vain. No: it is the second term of the comparison that is intended here. Yes, my relationship to Badiou, admiring for a long time, would appear to be similar to Nietzsche’s long submission to the Wagnerian project. And even if, following the second Nietzsche, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, one became, like myself, the most radical of philosophical anti-Wagnerians—for instance against Badiou and Žižek’s recent attempts to redeem Wagner—one would have to recognize that, if one is hardly a committed music-lover and connoisseur of the History of western music, Wagner is at the very least one of the twenty most important and creative musicians in all the said History. As for metaphysical genius, I am not far from thinking, still today, exactly the same thing about Badiou. His is very likely the vastest conceptual construction to emerge in Europe since Heidegger. Yet, exactly like Wagner’s case, the question that arises is the question of what envelops the core of genius: the one musical, the other metaphysico-conceptual. Now, Wagner’s idea of art was very specific. He took himself for a great dramaturgist (alas, this is what Žižek and Badiou think). He had an idea of politics, which historically proved to be very specific as well (hence the true horror inspired in me by Žižek and Badiou’s matching of Wagner with Stalin and Mao, and which, if I may say so, has been the drop to overflow the glass of an apostasy that had been in turmoil for a long time). There was even a Wagnerian philosophy (“Art and Revolution”: an entire program, literally and in every sense). In short: even if the composer Wagner was as an indubitable genius (although quite belated… like Badiou himself peaked towards his forties), everything he understood by theory, philosophy, art, politics turned out to be disastrous. I ended up thinking exactly the same thing about Badiou. Not only what he makes of his metaphysical genius, in terms of a “grande politique” inspired by Asian mass massacres of the twentieth century, in terms of art (necessarily “oeuvral” and “monumental”: Wagnerian), in terms of his rather regressive views on the division of sexes (“woman semi-exists, or exists me,”4 he still writes in full in Logics of Worlds), in terms of philosophy of science, not only all this but also, quite simply, what he calls philosophy on the basis of his tremendous metaphysical constructions, finally appeared to me as calamitous as what Wagner made of his uniquely musical genius, in terms of art. Badiou is to metaphysical virtuosity what Wagner was to solmisation; but he is also to philosophy, and his relationship is to “truths,” what Wagner was to the always indivisible suture of aesthetics and politics. Thus all of these come under the first reason, whose ramifications will be argued in the following pages. The second reason is very important to me: it is that I am not even remotely academic.

When I tell people that I have never had university education, that I have never taught, and that my most distinguished qualification is the baccalauréat, they blink and do not believe me. Yet it is the truth, and a crucial truth to understand, with insight, the very meaning of my undertaking. This is why I deemed it appropriate to mention this second reason in the foreword: because it is more closely related to the first than it would seem at first sight. Indeed, among the numerous foreclosures it should have on consciousness, the notion of “anti-philosopher” coined by Badiou is not the lesser one. He does not even realize that the elementary feature common to all those he slams as “anti-philosophers” is to have worked outside the walls of the university. But I have observed only too well that there is none so blind as the Platonist blinded by the bedazzling exit from the Cave… Let us suppose for a moment that the most spectacular academic animal we have ever seen (a kind of Normalian Mao-Wagner) is right, in this foreclosure itself: since Kant, the philosopher is necessarily a professor. Hegel, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou … therefore, the question posed by my own path, after so many others—and a very serious question since, by definition, nobody would be in a position to answer—is:5 how does the fact of being inalienably academic affect philosophy itself? Its weight is all the more crushing since no one would be in a position to put into perspective how this (all the same moderately glorious) condition of the “functionaries of humanity” is poisonous for their own presuppositions, if we accept Badiou’s foreclosed postulate: whoever articulates a conceptual systematics outside the university is ipso facto an “anti-philosopher.” This is the consequence I do not allow for. I call “philosophy,” in a very precise sense, closer to Hegel than to anyone else, the conceptual system I have created over a decade with my own hands, so to speak. This had to be said once and for all; therefore, I say thank you to the quasi-providential circumstances which finally let me.

Let us put it differently. I gave up the idea of becoming a professor for—in a way—“selfish” reasons: I was too attached to my “difficult freedom.” However painful certain episodes might have been in my life, however half-crippled my life might have often become due to my sometimes Dickensian material precariousness, nothing will make me regret having always lived as an absolutely free man. This is a luxury that has become much rarer than our democratic false consciousness tends to delude us into believing. Yet with the distance, the long way I have come, the many material and psychological difficulties I have had because of the fact of philosophizing outside the walls of the academy, I realized that there was also something eminently altruistic about this decision—besides, the poverty in which I lived could serve as a good enough proof of this. Yes, there was something sacrificial about this decision. In a way, it is for philosophy’s own sake that I refrained from teaching for a such a long time, including even the unbelievable deliberate mistakes I probably made subconsciously: in fact, since philosophy has been practically monopolized by professors for two centuries, are we not entitled to put on trial the gigantic professional deformation that this quasi-exclusive background imposes on what is said explicitly in 90 percent of all that is written in this noble discipline? Without going as far as wishing that a mechanic or a farmer be philosophers, even if in a perfect world it would be desirable, are we not entitled to hope for a little more sociological diversity among philosophy’s representatives? With all this, I finally saw, very late, that my decision in the negative had something sacrificial about it: there had to be at least one such philosopher. And even though for two centuries, all attempts to extract philosophy from the sole professorial coterie had failed, mine included—at least in the existential sense of the term,6 since furthermore we cannot say that Marx or Nietzsche did not produce some effect, the question still being at what price to them, and why—it had to be tried, at least one more time. There had to be, in my time, at least one contribution to philosophy that was not professorial.

One day a friend of mine told me she admired my “ability to (self-)manipulate (myself).” I replied it was because I loathed all propensity to manipulate others—you know what I mean. With the slight clumsiness of its expression, and said in a Maghrebian accent, this remark was still exquisitely accurate: I also added that it was an integral part of my philosophy, to consider oneself as one’s own toy, one’s own automaton, one’s own actor-instrument. Oneself as an other. Yet, to be exact, the reason was actually far from selfish: ten years of social happiness cheerfully sacrificed in a spirit of perfect self-abnegation, so that the innervation of the philosophical circuit is not made solely through academic channels. I repeat that this says nothing against the eminent dignity of this occupation; but it is obviously a question addressed to the strict sociological exclusivity of those who in general relentlessly prescribe miracle-answers to all imaginable problems in any domain whatsoever.

For all these reasons, the present book obeys the Epicurean principle of rejecting the cumulative conception of philosophy which is typical of academic practice. All in all, who, better than myself, could put himself in the position of resuscitating practical self-education, invented by those who philosophized not in the Academy nor at the Lycée but in their own garden? A true philosophy should fit in a corpus of maxims as short as possible, which you should later be able to recall at any moment, and put to use in all circumstances, without the need to open a book, whether you are in jail or on a desert island. A structural Epicureanism, all in all. So I set an example of myself, and forced myself not to open any volume of The Spirit of Nihilism in order to draw up the present conceptual “breviary.” Thus, everything in this book has been written “from memory” so to speak. I contented myself with defining in this way, without any books to serve as rear-view mirror, the principal concepts I created along the way, such as they are sedimented in me—in my most ordinarily psychological and everyday person—since the time I discovered them while I wrote the different volumes of the SoN. I threw them on paper such as they serve me in my “daily life” so to speak. We know, and I remember that time very well, that one has fully become a philosopher when the concepts one has created oneself become like a second nature, and even a quasi-literal sixth sense, which allows you to detect, in the most trivial phenomena of day-to-day life, things not yet perceived by anyone—and I am certain that my readers will perceive them, just as a philosopher I admire is always someone who has functioned like a perceptual “graft” on my intellectual “body.”

I hope the present summary does not blunt the reader’s curiosity: the volumes recapitulated in a “testamentary” fashion contain countless further subtleties, if not entire continents (an entire literal philosophy of History that the present breviary does not even touch upon), that are not broached here. The appendix at the end of the treatise recapitulates it all: it is a protreptic. Yet the protreptic justifies itself retroactively, for being sedimented in a mnemonic “depot” of concepts that can be summoned and efficiently put to use at any moment.

I hope the “abecedary” tree that can be taken anywhere does not however hide the forest that gave birth to it, but that in it, the new reader feels warmly welcome.