Foreword
1Translator’s note: L’EsdN [l’Esprit du Nihilisme]: the SoN [the Spirit of Nihilism]. When in abbreviated form and not in italics, it is used by the author to refer to the system as a whole. When it is not abbreviated, the book will henceforth be referred to as The Spirit of Nihilism.
2New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2009.
3Without the shadow of a doubt, the predominant contemporary influence on my work (Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). In Algèbre de la Tragédie, even more than anywhere else, one can notice the extent to which I attempted the impossible, that is to say, the conciliation of the two most ambitious and also most opposite and irreconcilable contemporary philosophies not only of today but that have ever been: Schürmann’s and Badiou’s. This great disparity, which could lead me to nothing but an agonizing struggle and a kind of speculative suicide, pushed me to the point where I finally had to decide: it was the one or the other, with no possible compromise nor settlement.
4Translator’s note: “la femme mi-existe, ou m’existe.” Alberto Toscano, in his translation of the Logics of Worlds, translates this phrase as “a woman (semi-)exists or exists for me.” I did not entirely adopt his translation, in an attempt to replicate the forced grammatical structure of the original.
5Because we are dealing with the squaring of a vicious circle: the modern (post-Kantian) philosopher, being inalienably academic, cannot but foreclose the state-dependent condition that conditions his practice. A double foreclosure even, when he prides himself on being beyond shame to profess (literally and in every sense …) a great lord’s contempt, and even a bellicose hostility which thinks itself as “heroic,” for the State that feeds him. And since everyone considers, implicitly, that being a functionary is consubstantial with the Figure of the philosopher, no one even imagines laughing at the tragi-comic aspect of such a performative contradiction. On the other hand, the independent author who lays claim to the concept, who is non-academic, and therefore by definition does not know the first thing about philosophy, the “anti-philosopher,” being unable to say anything sensible on the conditioned, cannot but bitterly point the finger at the naked king of state allegiance.
6Rousseau, after his fifties, spent the rest of his life persecuted in all of Europe; Kierkegaard too, precociously became paranoid (he no longer went out of his house so to speak), and having exhausted the resources of his paternal inheritance, he died at the age of forty-two; Marx spent all his life in the darkest of miseries, “Christlikely” identifying himself with the people whose theory he was making; Nietzsche also lived in utter destitution, and became mad at the age of forty-eight; Benjamin lived in material and moral destitution which became unbearable at the end of his life, and he committed suicide at the age of forty-eight; Bataille lived in a precarious state and chaos all his life, and at the age of sixty, he was still asking for money from his friends; Blanchot, in his sixties, spent ten years in an isolated place, with neither hot water nor electricity … The history of non-academic thinkers has been nothing but an uninterrupted martyrology for two centuries. The strangest thing about it is that it has never been noticed: it is impossible not to see a professional, that is to say, professorial deformation here, yet another one …
Affect
1Edgar Allan Poe, The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Benjamin F. Fisher (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004).
2Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 150.
3Pascal Taranto in Le ressentiment, passion sociale, ed. Antoine Grandjean and Florent Guénard (Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 2012; my translation).
4Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 400.
Appropriation
1We will have recognized the difference between herbivore and carnivore animals, to which I will come back later.
2Heidegger in Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 548.
3We owe the present remark to Quentin Meillassoux’s unpublished dissertation, L’inexistence divine (see the note below), where he says: “(…) hylozoism is the only irreligious way of thinking the emergence of life, in the sense that all immanentist thought (…) finds itself constrained to assume a minimal common point between matter and the qualitativity of life. This is why it is a matter of a fundamental option of thought, and not of a historically dated theory, confined to the materialism of the eighteenth century for instance. Sometimes Deleuzian immanentism itself presents striking hylozoic consonances, such as the following passage from What is Philosophy: “Of course, plants and rocks do not posess a nervous system. But, if nerve connections and cerebral integrations presuppose a brainforce as faculty of feeling coexistent with the tissues, it is reasonable to suppose also a faculty of feeling that coexists with embryonic tissues and that appears in the Species as a collective brain (…). Chemical affinities and physical causalities themselves refer to primary forces capable of preserving their long chains by contracting their elements and by making them resonate: no causality is intelligible without this subjective instance. Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlison, London: Verso, 1994, 212–13). I completely agree with Meillassoux’s anti-hylozoism, although with entirely different conceptual means and ethical motivations. Again, see the note immediately below.
4One of the two unpublished books mentioned in the foreword will include a great discussion with a philosopher of our generation, as important as he is little known in his own country: Quentin Meillassoux. The book will consist of a presentation (Meillassoux publishes very rarely, indeed being a largely “unpublished” author …), a critical discussion, a confrontation, and a book “around” things, all at the same time (the influence of this young philosopher on international academic production is already huge). As to the confrontation: it will consist of a very elaborate technical critique of what he calls “event,” in comparison with my own conception, which will shed light on some aporias of his.
5This is one of the questions not only asked but also answered by the SoN. Right from its originary envoi, philosophy has dreamed of “taking power,” literally and in every sense; but historically it is religion that fulfilled this dream to its detriment. Why? A convincing answer came from Nietzsche: Christianity is a vulgarized Platonism, that is to say, a Platonism brought to the reach of the plebs. Yet this is far from being enough: after all, Nazism too, which was a modern religion, shamelessly vulgarized Nietzscheanism. We will have only shifted the question from its real center of gravity. A religion is always an applied conjunction of a politics, an aesthetics, and a metaphysics. Where has metaphysics always failed in its successive diagnoses—from Plato to Nietzsche—concerning the desirable suture between an art and a politics? The SoN answers: in the underestimation of the aesthetico-political question of play (see below), which it moreover shares with all religion.
6In other words, an event, period; a pathology with respect to the apparently stable Laws of nature. The carnivorous plant does to the animal what the animal does to the plants: becoming-animal, in a sense which is not exactly Deleuzian … Here, we need to understand the oxymoron of a “transgressive Law,” which is inchoative with respect to the event and strictly statistical, that is to say, trans-statistical, as I often say. That technomimetic event should have “fallen” on the animal that I am egoically has the structure of a pure and simple miracle: I could have been born a chair (but the chair would never know anything about it; it would never suffer from not having been an appropriative being [étant], animal or human) or a battery chicken (the harrowing injustice—globally dominant because of us—of an animal who will never know the reasons why all its “life” was made into hell). What do beavers and their bridges, or birds, and their sophisticated language and their nests lack to achieve a technological hegemony that would be equivalent to ours? Not much: a few million years. This is what the ecological turning point of our History means; its speed, which all the same pushes the question of communism not to the background, but at the very least to the appendix of the ecological question and to the dependency thereon: the ontologico-historical of the suicide of the species which led the subtle physis/techne dialectic, i.e. technics as originary supplementarity of Nature itself, in what it regionalizes of itself as living. Historical appropriation is the extreme precarious end of an appropriation itself precarious: life on earth. The SoN asks: life, as event, would it not be the cosmological equivalent, the macrocosm, of what sexual jouissance, in our somatic microcosms, is to life itself? Statistically, from the millions of sperm trying to conquer the egg, only one of them has a small chance of achieving its aim, and often enough, all of them fail. The “ground” [fonds] of things is that all of them could have failed for good, and Nature could have not been stabilized into the statistic Law of fertilization; like this Nature itself could have not come about, and differentiated itself in the indifference of mineral infinity.
7Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy (Albany: State University. of New York Press, 2011).
8We will see how the SoN as well entirely refutes the contemporary philosophical pose of anti-anthropologism.
9This school of philosophy, currently the most lively, is the result of ten years of Badiouian domination over the international university, but also of “The Meillassoux Effect.”
10My unpublished book concerning Meillassoux will elaborate on the issue, showing that the emergence of matter cannot be taken as an event. Why? Because of something which is by itself absolutely demonstrable: matter has never emerged from anything; it has always been there. It is “eternal,” if you like, but only itself is eternal, and not what it blends with. A fine example of the subsuming spell of our metaphysical idiom, and a fine example of linguistic ethics, for why we must always remain vigilant against the ever steadfast grip of this spell over us.
1Translator’s note: in English in the original.
2Matthew Barney, in his film Cremaster 3, stages horse races where the horses are decomposed like living carcasses as they run.
3In the book Controverse (Paris: Seuil, 2012), which is a brilliant dialogue of the deaf between Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner, the latter recapitulates an obvious fact about which his interlocutor wants to know nothing: the age of revolutionary overbidding as the only reality of emancipatory politics was buried with the atrocities of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He says: “… the fundamental given we should remember is that the Revolution has failed (…) it is an internal failure, because it is not true (…) that a people can be dissolved in order to be replaced by another; it is not true that, to install any social form whatsoever, a people can massacre itself in the name of the people in order to put as it were another people in its place. All this constitutes a failure inscribed within the very terms of the project. (…) As it went on to destroy all forms inherited from Chinese history, it destroyed itself as historical form” (Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner and Philippe Petit, Controverse: Dialogue sur la politique et la philosophie de notre temps, Paris: Seuil, 2012; my translation). Badiou still does not manage to see the obvious, and answers according to the classic logic of mimetic surpassing: of course, China’s Cultural Revolution is a failure, but it is a failure “like” the Bolshevik Revolution was a failure, or “like” the Paris Commune, or “like” the Springtime of the Peoples of 1848, or “like” the Jacobin Terror was a failure. Therefore this failure must be thought “like” for instance Marx and the communists thought the failure of 1871. Last but not least, Badiou cannot help letting out the real story: Mao or Pol Pot are today treated by reactionary propaganda “like” Robespierre and Saint-Just were treated in the early nineteenth century. That in the meantime a regrettable anomaly of accounting occurred, that while the Jacobin guillotine cut off only three thousand heads, dead bodies in Cambodia were counted by the millions, and in China by the tens of millions, are only details for “modern Platonism.” Hence the respective diagnosis developed in my Inesthétique et mimêsis (cited above), in a still “benevolent” fashion: Badiouian philosophy is a generalized mimetology, a monstrous parody of classico-dogmatic philosophy, like Wagner was a gigantic parody of “great art,” with the mouth-watering political outcomes we all know, which will in no way keep Badiou from being willing to pair Wagner with Mao (and Žižek, with Stalin …), for all practical purposes. The last great philosophers of surpassing have therefore nothing more to offer—in terms of future surpassings—than gigantic parodic regressions: sanguinary in politics, pompous in art, and if possible, the ones in exact proportion to the others. For the exact same reason which I will only indirectly elaborate in these pages, it is precisely because May ’68 had something of a parody of Revolution or of play in its notion, that today it remains much more interesting—and bears a veritable political future for our century—than the atrocious Sino-Cambodian revolutions. In politics as elsewhere, the ideology of surpassing is really surpassed. It is no longer a question of surpassing the surpassing; our historical task is to think surpassing otherwise. The SoN assumes no other task; but the present book is the most striking recapitulation I ever wrote in order to explain how and why.
4Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, La chute de la démocratie médiatico-parlementaire (Paris: Sens et Tonka, 2002).
5Translator’s note: in English in the original.
Aufhebung
1See above, Inesthétique et mimêsis.
2A particularly original contemporary artist, who is also “ethical” in his approach to violence, is Michael Haneke. He is the only one to wrong-foot the “aestheticization” of the most horrible violence, most often made by art, and particularly by modern audio-visual arts: in short, catharsis in its vulgarized sense. He is the only one to try and show violence hyperrealistically, and therefore to produce a counter-cathartic effect: an almost insomniac, sickly uneasiness that makes us “touch” the absolutely unlivable aspect of human violence, which is “sublimated” by most other artists, although without success. Yet it could easily be shown that this cinematographic “Brechtism,” like already in Brecht himself, this applied critique of catharsis could become ordinary, is ever more “cathartic.” It is exceptionally so, like in Brecht, because it rediscovers the initial secret of Attic Tragedy, which was not only its “therapeutic,” but also pedagogical function. The violence of most “mass contemporary arts” is notoriously “therapeutic” (“to relieve” [défouler] is the word by which the modern idiom translates ancient catharsis), but it is practically never didactic.
3This is one of the reasons why the terminal philosopher of ultra-terminal surpassing that is Badiou had to strive in a thousand ways to “prove” to us that death is … nothing.
Desire
1Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Poetics of History,” trans. Hector Kollias, Pli 10 (2000): 16.
2Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Poetics of History,” 16–17.
3Ibid., 17.
4My concept of parody is to its common understanding what Hegelian aufhebung is to Aristotelian catharsis: an exhaustive extension of the application of the drawn concept. Catharsis was a processuality, an operation applied conceptually to the sole domain of art; aufhebung is the same operation such as it holds sway in all dimensions of human activity. In the same way, the parodic is usually understood as a certain kind of aesthetic practice or entertainment; in the system of the SoN, it concerns all of human activity, including the most derisory aspect of daily life.
5Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 189.
6Being and Sexuation, the only as yet unpublished volume of the SoN cycle, performs its exhaustive demonstration.
7Duchamp’s gesture and his “nihilism” however can be summarized in passing, and in the particular perspective of the SoN, in a simple as well as decisive manner: well before Heidegger and Lacoue-Labarthe, he showed that art, being basically techne, henceforth could no longer assert its autonomy which was never challenged within the long artisanal tradition to which it belongs. When industralization completed the circle of technological appropriation, Duchamp made big news by marking the dramatic expropriation which would strike the “propriatory” [propriatoires] criteria of art, which until then clearly defined its inside and outside, precisely by an each time singular (pictural, musical …) set of inviolable artisanal and therefore technical competences.
8The Catholic and reactionary novelist Richard Millet, in an interview, summarizes this point as follows: “As soon as the satisfaction of sexual drives becomes an order-word, we are in absolute nihilism” (Richard Millet and Romaric Sangars, “Maestro en Crise,” Chronic’art, May 6, 2007, http://www.chronicart.com/digital/richard-millet-maestro-en-crise/ [accessed February 7, 2014]; my translation).
9Valentin Husson, La poétique de Rousseau, unpublished.
10Translator’s note: masculine masturbation.
11Jean-Clet Martin, Plurivers (Paris: P.U.F., 2010).
Ontological Differend
1Nihilism.
2In one of his seminars, he made a slip of the tongue: “I believe in the existence of principles.” In other words, Badiou unwittingly rhymes with Schürmann, since, even though one self-proclaims himself a hyper-philosopher, the principal choice henceforth concerns the fideist act, and principles are not more demonstrable than the existence of God since Kant.
Event
1It would be impossible to sum up here the sophisticated details of this strictly ontological dialectic. I refer here to the whole of Ontologique de l’Histoire.
2Translator’s note: esthéthique in French: term coined by Lacoue-Labarthe.
3At this point, I must mention the subversive greatness of Reiner Schürmann’s deconstructive construction, which the SoN merely completes without altering it in any way. Metaphysics would be defined by the maximization of the two ultimate phenomenological traits of everyday existence: natality and mortality, which are not biological birth and death. Natality is what leads us towards the common, the universal, the love; hence the fact that metaphysics has always recognized Good in it (still today, with Badiou alone). Mortality is what subtracts us from the common, the universal, the love: that which isolates, breaks, makes suffers, singularizes, and it is therein that classico-dogmatic metaphysics has always recognized Evil. We can no longer fail to acknowledge (apart from Badiou …) that natality, maximized by metaphysics into Universal, into eternal Communism and Good that applies to all, is what has produced, as if “under its command,” the most terrifying evils: by subsuming the singular as a particular case of the universal, it inflicts on it enslavement, denial, torture, and death. Once again in Badiou’s work, what he calls “singularity” is yet and again never envisaged except in accordance with its possible contribution to the positive universality of truths: as in the whole classico-dogmatic tradition, “pure” singularity is considered for this very reason either as a nothing, or as an incongruous Evil. Schürmann, without simply overturning the old schema (surpassing it …), deconstructs it pragmatically. It is not at once a matter of saying that mortality is the source of all good, and the impetus of natality, that is to say, life maximized by metaphysics and technology, quite simply an Evil. The fact is that the mortality that subtracts me, removes me from metaphysical subsumption, is what singularizes me, and therefore the source of a possible “Good,” just as the unifying and universalizing Good, because of its always renewed denial of the trait of mortality, aggravates the latter in the singularity to which it applies the subsumption: it enslaves, tortures, and kills it infinitely.
4For me the brilliant guiding sentence comes once again from Reiner Schürmann: “Evil is born when I affirm and desire in the face of the law that which I automatically do prior to it” (Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 412).
5All considerations which, I must say, make me extremely skeptical about the cosy Marxist-“Platonist” dream of the end of the division of labor—the ideal of total and polyvalent man. I have elsewhere opened up about this. But in short, always for the same reasons: the fact of having “surpassed” our animal finitude traumatizes the latter, precisely because of the trans-natural obligation to work, to exhaust one’s strictly physical powers for a task meant mostly for survival and expropriation in exchange for a poor parody of “appropriation”: salary—what Marx, however, brilliantly conceptualized as “surplus value.” To demand that this finitude make itself furthermore capable of “doing everything” is the proto-fascism congenital to the originary surge of philosophy, forgivable in the innocence of its beginning, but unforgivable in the frame of two and a half thousand years of horrors, and at the end of a century which has been the unrivaled apotheosis of all atrocities, in the very, Platonic, name of always “total” man. To surpass humanity, by enslaving its overwhelming majority, that is to say, by making them work, has already cost dearly; to surpass this surpassing will only increase the cost of atrocities exponentially. This should be the implacable lesson of the twentieth century. Yet philosophical infantilism, comfortably paid and at the pulpit, will never hesitate to send us back for another round: it is not itself that will pay for it. Despite all its roaring leftist petitio principii, I have always seen the function of professorial stardom as the exact equivalent of the factory boss: a metaphysical sublimation of a relentless division of labor which admits being all the less so, since it claims to program the exact opposite. Plato’s Republic is, after all, just like a huge enterprise where the boss alone holds a somewhat pleasant place—others can go on sweating blood, waiting on him hand and foot. As for me, I have always seen myself at the lowest end of the managerial ladder of professional philosophers: something like the sweeper, or the cleaner of toilets …
Expropriation
1Louis Scutenaire, Mes inscriptions (1943–1944) (Paris: Allia, 1982); my translation.
2Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 3.
3The question of Right, although not explicitly dealt with in my philosophy, is crucial for me, on the same account as other great “truth processes.” The novel dialectic of Transgression/legislation lays the basis of a new philosophy of Right; but for the time being, I leave it, with admiration, up to the later Hegel, as well as to Kojève’s little-known masterpiece, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right (ed. Bryan-Paul Frost, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007).
4Translator’s note: in English in the original.
5Not more than it does in the superficially good-natured and profoundly cynico-chauvinist hagiography of “Subject-love” which tells us that, literally, woman is made only for love, and therefore for man whom she seconds, and that in short it matters not that all Didos should be destined to die for Aeneas.
6And, to add even more emphasis to our speculative “delirium,” we know that the process of industrial farming of these animals has them feed on the recycled remains and excrements of their own sort—the comparison with Auschwitz is entirely justified here, and even is exceeded in certain respects. Is this not the matrix of the event’s “negativity,” the impossibility of material self-belonging, the “forcing” of which, equally as foreclosure of being, produces “Evil?” The human being, in symbolizing the taboos of incest and cannibalism, does he not have a deep consciousness of the fact that the “positive” event gives itself in the intelligible form of a “self-belonging” barred from the real, and yet whose entire “Evil,” crime, etc., consists in the Will to the impossible?
History
1Translator’s note: in most cases, with the consent of MBK, I rendered l’être-historique, and its variants such as l’être-communautaire, by “the being-historical,” and “the being-communitarian,” in order to put the emphasis on “being.” However, in some cases such as the above, I adopted the viable alternative, “the historical being,” in order to put the emphasis on the first term.
2Translator’s note: in English in the original.
3Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 570.
4What is more, “algebra” comes from the Arabic word “al-jabr,” which means: constraint and reduction. To brush one’s teeth or to fill out one’s tax forms does not basically come from another essence than the practice of “pure” sciences.
5Translator’s note: in English in the original.
Irony
1Translator’s note: Lacan’s wordplay is a play on the similar sounds between “les non-dupes errent” (“the non-dupes err”), “le nom du père” (“the name of the father”) and “le non du père” (“the no of the father”).
2I want to spice things up here with a personal anecdote. What Guyotat captures in an extraordinary manner in this book considered by many as his most hermetic—which says a lot—is the essence of the dialects spoken in the streets of the Maghreb, and which are always literally monstrous blends of literary Arabic with countless parasitic neologisms from western languages. These dialects, most often too obscene (blasphemous) to be transcribed anywhere in Arabic writing, display an often astonishing coprolalic creativity: when two children insult each other, it can go on for hours, and it is a poetry which by definition escapes all memory. It is Guyotat’s genius to have managed, in my eyes and especially my ears, to “convey” something of these by-definition-doubly-accursed postcolonial languages: banned from official use in the relevant countries, and inaccessible to western countries. Here is the anecdote: knowing Arabic and having grown up in the streets of Tunisia, I happen to read aloud very well this text deemed unreadable. Perhaps even too well: I recall having read about ten pages to a friend, who happened to be slightly tipsy, and the cruel obscenity of the language moved her so much that she had to go and be sick. I offer myself without reservation for a public lecture of this great forgotten text. This is a genuine call for tenders.
3Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), 27.
4Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poétique de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002); my translation.
5Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 3.
6It is hard for me not to mention the admirable thesis of the young Kierkegaard, which still held onto the time when irony was an aristocratic prerogative: The Concept of Irony. In this book, Kierkegaard brilliantly shows that the master ironist is also the mythical tutelary figure of philosophers, namely, Socrates. Does the latter pretend to be ignorant? Not at all! He puts his ignorance on display, cards on the table, and this is what differentiates him from his interlocutors, who all think they know something, without pretending at all. By pretending to pretend that he does not know, by playing himself, he leads his interlocutors to self-refute themselves, one milestone after another, each marked by a question of the spiritual acupuncturist. What comes out of this knowledge soon collapsing like a house of cards by the ironist’s unctuous attack? The fundamental category of philosophy, which is truth, and which is always a de-composition of all established knowledge. There would be a lot to say here, but the concept of Ontological Differend (see above) painfully opens up the “wound of truth,” by blaming the abîme for its inadequacy in principle to all, especially scientific knowledge. The “conflictuality without agreement” that is truth, says Schürmann, and perhaps my work only serves to dramatize all its intuitions—when I systematize those of Lacoue-Labarthe.
7Pierre Carlet de Chamb Marivaux, “The Constant Players,” in Marivaux Plays, trans. John Bowen et al. (London: Methuen Publishing, 1988); my translation.
8For me the reference philosophical book on the transsexual question is Pierre-Henri Castel’s La Métamorphose impensable (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).
9I’m thinking namely of Agamben—both the tutelary figure and empirical friend of Tiqqun.
1Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 3.
2I do this in Ontologique de l’Histoire, as well as in Inesthétique et mimêsis.
3Translator’s note: in English in the original.
4Controverse, ibid.
5Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Society, Auch: Tristram, 2001.
6See the foreword.
7Serge Daney aptly remarks somewhere that Americans substitute the value of “sincerity” for the value of “truth.” Quite simply, they confuse the two.
8These “Hegelian” reflections came to me under the impact of the Tunisian Revolution, which was an ideological “shock” of the utmost importance, to such an extent that I am still reluctant to gather together all I wrote on the subject.
9Translator’s note: in English in the original.
10For me, Serge Daney’s work is equal, in depth and in intelligence, in soundness [justesse] and in altruistic emotion, to Blanchot’s. His genius for film-criticism-which-became-much-more-than-that—a writer and a thinker of the first rank—could be summarized as follows: in giving equal standing on whatever “cultural” pedestal to the slightest intelligent B movie, not to mention the great masters of the art of cinema, which will however never cease to be “vulgar” or “plebeian” art, Daney created a spiritual attitude which could go without saying, but which is, quietly, so exceptional that we must pay it tribute by naming it: democratic aristocratism. In short, I think today, along with Blanchot and Debord, Daney is the last of the great thinkers to have appeared outside the university: a thought which is certainly not “philosophical” in the professional sense of the term, a thought nevertheless, which I predict future philosophers will benefit from exploring.
11Tranlator’s Note: “inégaux en puissance,” in the French version.
12Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 141–3.
13Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 215–16.
14Having explained all this, Philippe Nassif pointed out to me that I metaphorized here, perhaps unconsciously, the same type of difference as between a non-cumulative practice—mine—of philosophy and academic “compulsivism,” where you have to push your way through a jungle of rhetorical conventions. When I come to think of it, it is hard to say he is wrong.
15David Sklansky and Alan N. Schoonmaker, “Poker is Good For You,” Two Plus Two Internet Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 9, 2009, http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue33/sklansky-schoonmaker-poker-good-for-you.php (accessed February 7, 2014).
16Translator’s note: in English in the original.
17This collective published two reviews in France, then for a while was associated with the neo-Situationist collective Tiqqun, translated for the most part into English, and mentioned above (see Irony).
18Which, in my humble opinion, should not jeopardize the hot nights following the confrontations …
19Translator’s note: in English in the original.
20With the greatest Stu Ungar, this relationship even took the form of the most demented infantilism. That is why he was called the “Mozart of poker.”
21Samuel Beckett, Endgame, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1958), 24.
22John Cale and David Owens, “John Cale: ‘I might be exhausted but at least I know my brain is working’,” WalesOnline, September 29, 2012, http://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/showbiz/john-cale-i-might-exhausted-2024872 (accessed January 31, 2014).
23We should note that this land coincides, in an immanentist mode, with the theologico-political pattern of the end of History, from St. Augustine to Hegelo-Marxism. I prefer once again to leave it to Lacoue-Labarthe: “It is well known: the scheme set up by Rousseau on the question of the origin (i.e. the condition of possibility) of culture does not simply open the space of transcendental reflection; it is strictly governed, even though lacking any formalization, by a dialectical logic, in the sense of so-called speculative dialectics. (…) teleologically thought, history can be deciphered as the putting-to-work of a design of nature’s which would end, through the conflict or opposition between nature and culture (freedom, for Kant) (…), with their final reconciliation in an art that, reaching its perfection, would become nature again. This is the sense of history” (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Traduction et histoire,” L’animal 19-20 [Winter 2008]: 142; my translation). In other words, if a political teleology of the Kantian, or Hegelian, or Marxist kind, were still possible, then play would represent in my work the ultimate finality of humanity. Let us be clear: where politics (see below) represents the reign of the obeyed rule, play represents the reign of the freely consented rule. A humanity which no longer does anything but play will be a humanity that has completely gone out of politics, and therefore History. You will tell me: “You talk to us about thinking otherwise the act of surpassing; but are you not falling, surreptitiously, in the good old trap, in imagining in play this “terminal surpassing” that you so carefully beware of everywhere else?” Answer: no, on the contrary, here as elsewhere, I am putting into practice what I am saying. It is a matter of a regulating idea. Alas, I do not dare imagine really that play replaces politics entirely, this on the one hand (therefore, no historical teleology); but on the other hand, if such a full advent of play became realizable (and, de jure, i.e. materially, such an event is already of the order of the possible), it would illustrate marvelously this “shift of surpassing”: full play would be the accomplished catharsis of the political, that is, what all art always already is locally; but it would not suppress politics without preserving anything of it. On the contrary, it would preserve its essential part: the pleonectic fury, its full energy. The impasse of “real communism,” yesterday’s as well as tomorrow’s, will always be this calamitous illusion, in itself always pleonectic, of suppressing man’s every pleonectic tendency, without preserving anything of it. And we saw that this suppression without preservation was literalized as mass graves; and was sublimated, in Badiou’s classico-dogmatic revival, in a Sophistic irrealization of Death.
Catharsis
1Translator’s note: in English in the original.
2“News Real,” River Front Times, December 9, 1998, http://www.riverfronttimes.com/1998-12-09/news/news-real/full/ (accessed March 20, 2014).
3Courrier international, special issue (July–August 2009); my translation.
4Fabrice Soulier, “Le poker français dans la tourmente,” Fabrice Soulier, February 2, 2013, http://www.fabricesoulier.com; my translation (accessed January 1, 2014).
Logic
1Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 217–18.
2Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Esthétique du Chaos (Auch: Tristram, 2000).
3Ibid.
4This philosophical Logic of being as event will completely unfold in my as yet unpublished book on Meillassoux.
Evil
1I think this is something Badiou as well as Meillassoux could maintain, and it is one of the apples of discord.
2Wrongfully, in my opinion, as you will have guessed. On that subject too, one of my hitherto unpublished books cited in the foreword will elaborate in depth, along with Meillassoux’s “theory of immanent immortality.”
3Translator’s note: the term bousoir is a pun with reference to Marquis de Sade’s “philosophy in the boudoir,” bouse meaning “cow dung.”
4Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 412.
5This will be one of the essential discussions in my unpublished book on Meillassoux, which obviously continues the dispute with Badiou’s “inhumanism” as well. One of Meillassoux’s great “discoveries” is to launch an attack upon the “correlational” age of thought; and every school of “Speculative Realism” that Meillassoux’s work has sparked in the entire world, consists in a war that some would describe as a pre-critical and therefore dogmatic regression against the philosophical “correlationism” since Kant. “Correlationism,” in its most preliminary definition, consists in saying that there is nothing that can be thought that is not a correlate of the thought that thinks it. From Kant to Deleuze, including Hegel and phenomenology, not to mention Wittgenstein and Heidegger, thought always “contaminates” that which is thought [la pensée « contamine » toujours le pensé]. Driven by Meillassoux’s very brilliant demonstrations, the postulate of “Speculative Realism” is henceforth that thought can think that which is radically outside all thought, for instance, the accretion of the earth or the Big Bang of billions of years ago, or the disappearance of the earth, or even of the entire cosmos at a time when by definition there will no longer be any thought. Not that I exactly deny the validity of this statement. I am simply drawing attention to something entirely absent from this philosophical trend as a whole, and which is quite obviously at the heart of a philosophy of the event, as what Meillassoux’s philosophy should be: every event of appropriation creates correlates. Every event, whether vital or scientific, introduces to the world a set of correlations that did not exist before. Therefore, what I propose as the “speculative turning point” of philosophy is, rather than wearing itself out going against the new windmill of “philosophical correlationism,” and thus refusing somewhat abreactively every correlational postulate wherever it may be, to change paradigm with respect to the correlate. In order to do this, we must think being as event. Moreover, with the exception of Meillassoux himself, the philosophies of “Speculative Realism” that propose “inhuman and anti-correlational ontologies,” each one more so than the next, are remarkable, as it happens, for never proposing any theory of the event. The ontologies of “Speculative Realism” could join together under the banner of “Being without event.”
Mathematics
1In mathematics, the axiom of foundation invented by Zermelo-Fraenkel demonstrates, transcendentally, that in order to “posit” [poser] a being [un étant], you always have to presuppose an other being. This is expressed, among others, by the absolute transcendental law which says there cannot be any “smallest member” in any region of the being, because you always have to presuppose, for the presumed “smallest” member, at least one other smaller member composing it, as well as another, bigger member whose composition it enters.
2Not so much on the margins of the SoN’s general thematic, but implicit in this book alone, this is one of the other possible canonical definitions of art, including and perhaps especially “contemporary” art: the approach, the exposition, the capturing of the pure singularity, unexchangeable with any other, which science by definition leaves out of its field. Contemporary art picks up the leftovers of metaphysics.
3It is owing to a rather ironic remark I made to him, and which he copied as is in his Second Manifesto for Philosophy (trans. Louise Burchill, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) that Badiou claims to have “resolved” the Kantian problem of the impenetrability of the in-itself. And for me such was the unique power of Being and Event, when I discovered it passionately in 2000–1: all of a sudden, a contemporary philosopher claimed, and convincingly, to have resolved the ontological problem on an equal footing with my two previous “champions” on the subject: none other than Spinoza and Hegel. Such was the power of the Badiou “impact” on me: a living philosopher had managed to assert a thesis on being which really seemed capable of reviving all the prerogatives of the most classico-dogmatic metaphysics: the most immemorial. One day someone asked me to say something on Badiou’s ontology. I replied that there was no ontology-of-Badiou’s. There was something much more powerful: the identification of ontology with mathematics. Where Reiner Schürmann tried to destroy every possibility philosophy could have to hold on to what he calls “thetism,” Badiou had found the ultimate Holy Grail of a non-critical philosophy: the thesis of an identity of being in the mathematical statement. And it is actually this thesis that eventually crumbled before my eyes, like a magnificent cathedral reduced to ashes. It is this collapse that explains afterwards my complete apostasy: the general calamity of the principial theses which Badiou, with new consequences, thought himself entitled to pronounce on the ethico-political, the aesthetical, the erotic, and of course the epistemological. Badiou is the Wagner of philosophy: all at once, his apogee, his recapitulation, and his kitsch-decadent parody.
4Which led him, once more, to theses each more aberrant than the other. For instance, in 1988 at the Collège de Philosophie, he declared: “As animals, we are eternal!”
5We must understand well that the principle of identity is something other than the principle of equality. Yet precisely the mathematico-metaphysical error par excellence consists in the “deadly transfer” between the same, identity and equality.
1The first two chapters of Ontologique de l’Histoire, as well as a hitherto unpublished text, L’être=l’événement selon Deleuze, are the two works where I explain myself fully on the subject.
2Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 135.
3In very broad terms: it is from the event of appropriation that proceeds all differences, i.e. post-evental singularizations, starting with the decisive evental difference that overdetermines all the others: that of physis and techne. Take the difference man/woman, which the Derridean front of Gender Studies is striving to “deconstruct”: here as elsewhere, the risk of affirming a difference always “more profound” than the simple “metaphysical” sexuated difference is not only to undifferentiate a real, pre-metaphysical difference (native of physis, and not of techne); it is above all to miss the real movement of the queer differentiation (and beyond, with the “accursed” singularities of zoophiles, coprophiles, necrophiles, pedophiles … severely reppressed by the “Law”), which properly defines humanity. The Appendix, in fact the entire volume of the as yet unpublished Being and Sexuation, is no doubt my most “clairvoyant” attempt at description of this immanent mechanics of differentiation, which we obtain thanks to “metaphysics” (that is, technomimetic astuteness), and not “against it,” which to me looks like the hypertrophied Achilles’ heel of Derridean deconstruction. In fact, the infinite process of libidinal singularizations is explained by the appropriation of the male/female difference, then by its diffraction into ever wider networks of legislative-transgressive games. In the same way, the transcendental is the differentiating appropriation of the empirical; and being, the differentiating appropriation of nothingness, etc.
4Metaphysical moment we owe to Badiou, without the shadow of a doubt. The only, but unforgivable, mistake of the latter is to have understood nothing of the metaphysical upheaval of difference in the twentieth century, and thus to try to maintain identitarian hegemony within the scope of the explosion of the Whole and the One. Even the term “Multiple,” the central name of the being [l’étant] in his metaphysics, is nothing other than a way of identifying difference. It is on this point and on this point only that not only Badiou’s philosophy is a wreck, but also half of his metaphysics: the half which identifies ontology with mathematics; that is, identifies being. But we had to go through this gigantic historical patch in order to, inopportunely, blame the “victory” of the Heideggerian intuition: it has become impossible for us to identify being.
1Tristan Garcia.
2Pierre-Henri Castel, “Les perversions, la sexologie et le mal” (5th session, unpublished seminar), March 27, 2003, http://pierrehenri.castel.free.fr/S%E9minaires%20ALI/perversion270303.htm; my translation (accessed February 2, 2014).
3Jean-Claude Milner, Le Triple du plaisir (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1997).
4Castel, “Les perversions, la sexologie et le mal”; my translation.
5Furthermore, it is important that the meaning of my “deconstruction of deconstruction” be clear: it is in virtue of the very great proximity—not to even mention my admiration for the magnitude of his work—with Derrida that I take the critical responsibility of going further than the thought of différance: Hölderlin’s “faithful infidelity,” the necessity to betray in order to be faithful more profoundly than a “forthright” faithfulness. In particular, in what concerns the ethico-political consequences, such as attested to by the following excerpt from The Animal That Therefore I Am (the title of my foreword being an obvious allusion to it): “No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occuring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let us say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire” (Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills, Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2009). No one … apart from the classico-dogmatic neo-metaphysician.
6Pierre-Henri Castel, “Les perversions, la sexologie et le mal” (4th session, unpublished seminar), January 30, 2003, http://pierrehenri.castel.free.fr/S%E9minaires%20ALI/perversion300103.htm; my translation (accessed February 2, 2014).
7Translator’s note: in English in the original.
8And Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s just as brilliant readings of Hölderlin. Where my general philosophico-ethical project places itself in the shadow of Schürmann’s historial phenomenology, all the decisive concepts which led to my break with Badiou, for instance, proceed from the latent philosophy that Lacoue drew from Hölderlin’s work: if “my” event is different from Badiou’s, I owe it to Lacoue. The Hölderlinian concept of transgressive event is not exactly the same as mine, but mine would not have existed without the access Lacoue provided me to Hölderlin’s philosophy of latent History. Idem also for the extension of the concept of an archi-transgressive event so as to include the Hegelian aufhebung, understood as a monumental reprise of the Aristotelian catharsis-mimesis-techne complex.
9Reiner Schürmann’s Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (trans. Christine-Marie Gros, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) is the most extensive and profound commentary ever written on Heidegger, the decisive book on the question. Once you close this book, the last classico-prescriptive projects of modern philosophy, from Habermas to Rawls, from Leo Strauss to Badiou, appear as what they are: null and void.
10A short introduction for Anglo-Saxon readers: a terribly mediocre philosopher, yet one who enjoys a public success worthy of a rock-star in France. This author, bolstered with a supermarket “Nietzscheanism” and “Epicureanism,” actually practises a kind of ressentimental demagogy by taking on opponents always stronger than himself in the name of vague libertarian-democratic and “hedonistic” values.
11Translator’s note: in her translator’s preface to Badiou’s Plato’s Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), Susan Spitzer gives the reason why she translates L’Idée du Vrai as the Idea of the True (whereas it might have been rendered as the Idea of Truth), explaining that Badiou instructed her to maintain a clear distinction between le vrai and la vérité.
12But not fascisms, mind you …
13Translator’ note: in English in the original.
14In Being and Sexuation, I push the speculative temerity to the point of asking whether this typically “phallogocentric” faculty of division of material homogeneity in representational butchering is not only the condition of possibility of all the slaughters in History, but also of the oppression of the feminine physical homogeneity as its division into detachable “parts.” What psychoanalysis called “fetishism,” and what I call “archi-pornography,” in other words, cutting up woman’s whole body into literally detached pieces, as we see in the crudest examples of pornography. And thus whether, incidentally, what psychoanalysis recognized as woman’s “ontological” hysteria did not proceed from this dividing, metaphorically butchering violence to which masculine libidinal pleonexia subjects the woman, who is with good reason is called man’s “object.”
15In “Plato,” or what is left of it, everything is by definition stereotyped.
16In Après Badiou, I already show that this sense, the only correct one, in the end can only be the one and same thing as “communism,” that is to say, the gigantomachich being-in-common allowed solely and always by technological facticity. This is illustrated well enough by the fact that, save for the Hitlerian Reich or Benalist Tunisia, it is in countries with an experience of real communism that, today still, state monstrosity is the most effectively tentacule and omnipotence. I cannot repeat the demonstration here. Let us simply say that if, as I said above, the practical destination of metaphysical deconstruction is the dismantling of the technological, then what is at stake is nothing short of the dismantling of our “being-in-common” as well: the Platonico-Marxist-Badiouian “eternal communism.” If the ethico-political teleology of classico-dogmatic metaphysics is what deconstructed itself by itself, and for me this is Schürmann’s indisputable diagnosis, then “communism” is historically the very last name of the History of teleologies: it is this remainder [reliquat] that Badiou tries to save painstakingly, by putting forth nothing but patent antiphrases, as we see. Remainder, because we are done with the simple determination of Good as everything that leads to the common, unification, mathematizable organization. Determination which the communist utopia de facto brought to its self-refuting saturation: by definition, the more humanity goes towards the common, the more it goes towards the State. To me, two destinies seem possible for the coming humanity: either an assumed strengthening of the State, hence a factual “communism,” independent of the still constantly growing economic model that will prevail therein: hence the becoming-play I wish for humanity will be accomplished in the form of “play,” every bit as gigantic and probably terrifying: more totalitarian than all the totalitarianisms we have ever known. Or the dismantling of technology—probably under the shock of a few big catastrophes—begins to take effect, and along with it, the dismantling of the being-in-common: then the decline of States will take effect as well, and humanity will learn again to disseminate into increasingly restrained and elective groups, to live outside of teleology (“without whys”), and the games will become once again as multiple as the micro-communities themselves, by definition freely chosen (Marx’s “free association”). It is obvious that this “program,” if it is one, coincides with what would be the equivalent of an anarcho-ecologism, which would draw its historical inspirations more from the Spanish Republicans or the Situationnists than from the spectacular reversal of Marxism-Leninism into Stalinist or Maoist super-statism.
17Translator’s note: in English in the original.
18For example: I am sympathetic to the vegetarian cause. However, vegetarian puritanism should not lose sight of the fact that had we not been ferociously carnivorous hunters, we would have survived neither the ice age nor prehistory. Yes, every “Good” is preceded by a Wrong [Tort], an Evil more originary than itself.
19Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
20In the sense of the dialectical definition Lacan gave of psychosis: what was foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real. Chase away Evil from speculative discursivity, and it will come back in overdriven form in the real: from Plato to Wagner and Mao, the result would be deemed excellent.
21It is in my unpublished book on Meillassoux that I will show that, among other brilliant anachronisms, Badiou’s philosophy is the last metaphysics, because in placing itself under the supposedly “unassailable” ontico-ontological invocation of the logico-mathematical, it subjects every being [étant], with new consequences, to the yoke of real necessity. Suffice it to say here: this is why it reproduces, so pompously, the originary error of metaphysics: Evil, not falling under any “ontological” necessity, is nothing. Religion, even if only on this point, is a more lucid thought than philosophy, because it shows absolutely the fact that Evil arises from a contingency, an accident. It is precisely this “freedom of choice” of original sin that Rousseau and Schelling will undertake to “laicize,” that is, philosophize.
22This remark is of course a very personal interpretation, to draw Schelling a bit towards me: for him, freedom to do Good and Evil are actually co-originary. For me, Evil precedes Good, unless “Good” is understood in the simply pleonectic sense of supplementary appropriation allowed by techne, in relation to the appropriations of physis. But in that case, the “Good” itself, in the ethico-moral sense, would never have seen the light of day. Good is born, only after man becomes aware—on top of the “Goods” that technological existence endows him with—of the new sufferings he self-inflicts because of it. It indicates all the conceivable means to repair the damage.
23Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd, foreword Marshall Sahlins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Parody
1Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Rose poussière (Paris: Gallimard, 1972); my translation.
Politics
1In fact, it is almost never a question of pure and simple abolition of the old Laws: I will demonstrate this point in the book devoted to Meillassoux.
2Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 139.
Representation
1Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Voyage à Tibüngen: un portrait de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, telefilm by Michel Deutsch, Sepia/France 3 Alsace, 2008, http://www.filmsdocumentaires.com/films/434-philippe-lacoue-labarthe; my translation (accessed February 4, 2014).
Science
1About his Forme et Objet. Un traité des choses (Paris: P.U.F., 2011), I have intensely mixed feelings of extreme closeness and extreme distance towards this great philosophy book. To sum it up, influenced by the aforesaid trend of “Speculative Realism,” Garcia starts somewhat too blindly from the “anti-Correlational” postulate, like all philosophers of this allegiance, and hence “equalizes” all the beings [étants] in an assumed anti-humanist absoluteness. Still at the same cost: the lack of a theory of the event, something somewhat “frozen” in the ontological (more or less Euclidean) flattening. However, paradoxically, in the brilliantly “encylopedic” dimension of this book, I end up recognizing myself in quite a few analyses and conclusions. I confided about it in “Lettre ouverte à Tristan Garcia,” published in La Revue Littéraire (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2012).
2Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, 150.
3I will elaborate this point fully in the unpublished book on Meillassoux. One of the most striking outcomes of the demonstration is that, in terms of critical epistemology, Nietzsche is infinitely more Rousseauist than he would have liked, and thus Heidegger as well. Once again digging the furrow opened up first by Lacoue-Labarthe, I show that Nietzsche and Heidegger, in the ultra-critical discourse they make for the first time in the history of philosophy on the subject of Science, no longer placing themselves under his invocation and fiduciary tutelage, purely and simply paraphrase Rousseau without even knowing it.
1Jean-Clet Martin, Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). I owe to this admirable reading of Hegel infinitely more than I explicitly said out loud until now. It is done.
2Martin, Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie; my translation.
3Ibid., my translation.
4Still today, maybe even more than ever: Badiou, Žižek, Jean-Clet Martin, Meillassoux, Garcia or myself are all “defrocked Hegelians,” as Meillassoux said publicly himself.
Transgression
1Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 58.
2Badiou/Kant.
3Besides, if metaphysics is well and truly accomplished in technology, does not the deconstruction of the former announce the practical dismantling of the latter? It would be political ecology become intelligent… The philosophies of one century are always literalized in the following century, or in the century after that. The philosophical teleologies of the nineteeth century have shaped the twentieth. Then it is to be hoped that the deconstruction of metaphysics has this future sense that I accord it, i.e. the dismantling of global technological totalitarianism, rather than its destruction (in the amphibolic sense of “the destructing (it)” [le détruire], which would run the sole risk of turning back against our simple survival, and the total destruction it is henceforth capable of carrying out).
Appendix: Propreptic to Being and Sexuation
1The present text is the virtually untouched version of a lecture given at the École Normale Supérieure in rue d’Ulm on May 14, 2011. I include it here so that this recapitulation can be complete, because this dimension of The Spirit of Nihilism that is essential to this book is also the most speculative, especially in its “metaphysical” conclusions. All the rest is solidly demonstrative; this dimension, no doubt owing to its very subject, has something rather “floating” and—as it is the only adjective that so strongly asserts itself, I repeat—speculative about it. And yet it is not the one I am least proud of, and this little book would not have been a complete overview without it.
2Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 2004), 147.
3Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Barbara Habberjam (“The Actual and the Virtual” trans. by Eliot Ross Albert) (London: Continuum, 2006), 74–5.
4Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore) (Book XX), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 75.
5Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Poetics of History,” 16.
6Philippe Sollers, Éloge de l’infini (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); my translation.
7Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis upside down/The reverse side of psychoanalysis 1969–1970 (Book XVII), trans. Cormac Gallagher (from unedited French manuscripts with an eye to the official published version), VI 5–VI 6, www.lacaninireland.com (accessed February 4, 2014).
8Use of the verb cerner (meaning “to delimit,” “to outline,” “to define,” “to figure out,” as well as “to surround”) will be echoed a little bit later in the text by the term le cerne, meaning “a ring or circle that demarcates something”; for consistency, I translated cerner as “to surround” and le cerne as “surrounding,” but the above meanings should also be kept in mind.
9Translator’ note: in English in the original.
10Translator’s note: “tout s’échange contre soi, contre l’autre, l’être en faveur de l’étant, l’étant en faveur de son essence, l’essence en faveur de l’être.”
11Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, 425.