58	SOME REALITY, PLEASE

My new book will be on reality, and it will be an up-to-date manifesto on weak thought. On reality and the future.

I’ve given some lectures at Leuven on this theme, and also my university course this year.

I talk about the “Heidegger effect” and the “Nietzsche effect,” meaning the critique of the notion of reality in my two lifelong references, but I go farther, much farther. I show that the very notion of reality is violent.

This new theoretical elaboration won’t be greeted any more warmly. Because there’s this pervasive need for realism and certainty right now. There’s a return to politics and especially to religion, with regressive characteristics like a need for facile security, a turning back, an embrace of community if that’s what it takes to bear the anguish of the dissolution of the real in postmodern society.

The point of departure is another concept at which I arrived some time ago, which is that my relativism is not absolute. All my thought and all my life are against every absolute, against every claim to absoluteness, which all translate into political oppression and oppression of consciences. So how am I going to absolutize anything, even relativism?

So the concept is the one I’ve already alluded to: that which is real does exist, but within certain paradigms. It’s always possible to establish whether a proposition is true or false, but only within paradigms: a historical moment, a certain scientific discipline.

Now I am trying to take a further step. My “analytical” friends were always recommending an American author, John McDowell, to me. I read him and found him still very much tied to Kant, to Aristotelianism, to absolutes in short. But contradictory at the same time, and therefore useful for me. What I like in McDowell is that the passage to scientific truth is mediated by mathematics. I would interpret him as follows: reality is formulas, not single facts. The single fact proves nothing, at most it invalidates, as Karl Popper would say, with his eternal conviction that invalidation brings us closer to the truth. (A piece of real foolishness: from the fact that a hypothesis is mistaken you derive nothing at all.)

There it is, the step ahead: a passage to another level that is true, but not so real any more. When you put a concrete experience into a formula—a brick falls on my foot, then I measure its velocity, and so on—it does become true, but it is no longer the immediately real. And this is something even I can use: the sciences too are forms of lightening of reality because they transform it either into manipulable technologies or into universalizable formulas, but the universality depends on the thing no longer being there, being present. This is what I’ve got buzzing around in my head.

Once again there’s an immediate translation, an existentially and politically important upshot: politically and ethically, what is best is the self-consumption of everything presenting itself as objective and absolute; of the wall you run up against, which ought not to be taken as that which you have to come to terms with, as though it were insuperable. On the contrary, coming to terms with it means precisely taking a hammer to it. To batter it down means to make the claims to absoluteness of ethical and political propositions lighter, but also to transform the world into a scientific, technologically calculated, system, dependent on the human. If the human is Bush on his own, it’s a disaster, but if it’s all of us together, it will be socialism. Let’s hope so.

And at this point—maybe it will be the very last passage, who knows—I will have to measure myself against the last things, with the things that make one’s hands tremble: death, judgment, hell, paradise.

This is what I’m working on, I don’t know what I’ll say yet.