Book II. Theory of the Trans-ject
Philosophy’s call is to find itself, in Emerson’s image, on a stair, meditating a direction.
Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America
The Great Outside begins “by oneself.”
Deborah Danowski, Eduardo Viveros de Castro, “L’arrêt du monde”
There is no philosophy except that of existence—even if there has always been an opposing tendency, consisting in simultaneously offering philosophy another object, as a piece split from the first: pure Idea, First Immobile Mover, God, Being, In-Itself, and so on. As if the divergence identified earlier—Socratic divergence—did not occur in the right place, or as if the dis-joining of existence had hardened into an onto(theo)logical split. As if the problematic domain were an unequivocal solution, and dis-joining were immunological defense: all in-themselves are attempts at warding off existence, integral protections against its fragility, its abandonment (to the) outside. But what do we mean here by this last term, being-outside? What do we encounter, once we are outside? Let us examine here the existential consequences of Socratic divergence.
Existence, extension, eccentricity.—The verb “to exist” is made up of ek-, outside of, and sistere, to be placed—sistere coming from ˚sta-, to be standing. By extension, to exist means to live. But what extension is this, precisely, and how is existence related to the living? The only way adequately to respond to such a question is first to refuse the sacrifice of existence in the name of an ontology, or of an immediate generality supposed to account fully for it. Existence is, in actuality, the dismissal of being. How, then, to speak of it? If existence dismisses being, does this not simultaneously invalidate all thought? Must we invoke some mysticism of existence and affirm that we cannot speak of existence at all, except to betray its meaning?
In posing such questions, we are more truly at the heart of thinking existence. In a certain way, this thought could begin anywhere, could call for any form of existence, any individual or living being, claiming as such the arbitrariness of the initial time and place, in the manner of a novel: “How did they meet? By chance like everyone else. What were their names? What’s that got to do with you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going to? Does anyone really ever know where they are going to?” (Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist). All novelists, from Cervantes to Toni Morrison, make the contingency of their language explicit through the creation of experimental characters.1 It is not, however, by means of contingency and the “nausea” that it can provoke that we must think existence from the position of philosophy. For philosophy, existence is instead that singular existence that recognizes contingency not as the pure opening of an infinite number of possibilities, or as an insupportable burden (Sartre), but as the background against which its situation of exception is formed—or rather, its eccentricity. Far from being reduced to some disseminating effect, far from being resolved into relativism that flattens all ideas and all values in the name of the fact that everything is contingent and thus equivalent, we must seize existence as this existence, here: this woman, standing, outside. None of this is purely biological, nor is this a form of so-called “bare life”: A bare life is that which, precisely, could not exist. For each existing living being is formed from the outside, in a sort of tension of existence that causes plants to grow, animals to move, and this author to write a Manifesto.
“To live,” writes Perec in Species of Spaces, “is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself.” To pass from one space to another is the ordeal of the outside. This passage is not a movement, or not necessarily: It can happen in place, but to be in place does not mean to be immobile. Neither mobility, nor immobility, existence is the tension that establishes the standing position (˚sta-) as before rather than behind, inclining rather than stiffening. If, after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, there is no center (cosmological, biological, psychological) this does not at all mean that every thing is equal; it means the impossibility of concealing the eccentricity of each existence. The concept of eccentricity does away with two unfortunate ideas linked to the concept of the exception: narcissism (to demand exception for oneself) and sovereignty (exception from the law from which the law itself is produced). Eccentricity is obligation made, in an a-centric world, to singularize oneself. For a philosophy of existence, it is not the necessity of contingency that counts but the necessity of singularization that the contingency of the world produces. If everything were necessary, there would be no need for difference. In truth, difference would not exist—nor the universe.
Finitude.—Necessary eccentricity is classically called finitude. This term has been subjected to a powerful critique by Badiou and his disciples. For them, finitude is a sad passion, something deadly, the mark of the nihilistic-democratic rejection of all Idea, of every emancipatory political project as well as every absolute. Finitude would mean that everything is finished; the future is that of capitalism; we must resign ourselves to what is, to common discourse as well as dominant powers. But actually this concept means nothing other than existence insofar as existence demands an “exit” from infinity, a necessary eccentricity.
The problem is to understand what this exit—literally this out of—means. “How the absolute could come out of itself and oppose to itself a world,” such is “the riddle of the world,” wrote Schelling in 1795: “the very transition from the nonfinite to the finite is the problem of all philosophy.”2 This problem can be resolved in two ways:
1. Either by returning philosophy to idle talk, sometimes erudite, on the positions of such or not-such, a discussion adding one more opinion to the opinions already in circulation. Most of the time, this sort of discussion—to compare, to make one’s narcissism fluorescent—is far less interested in the question of the exit than in that of the entrance (into the university, or the mass media);
2. Or—and this is the point in which we are interested here—by considering that the real problem is that of being, of “being qua being.” However, in the time of its saying or writing, the statement “being qua being” now splinters into two distinct “beings,” and the second can by no means merge into the first: It is already outside, expelled, has left infinity. Infinity, however, is not a melancholic object that is left far behind and that we would seek in vain to recover; it is the finite insofar as it exists—all other conception of infinity is merely fantasmatic. Schelling ends up discovering that we can derive no existence of a compact God; it is still necessary that God shelters in himself a non-ground that ex-ists him, as if to exist were a transitive verb—an internal non-ground outside of him. This is what is most difficult to understand: the meaning of the concept of finitude is that the exit is originary. Being-outside cannot be delayed.3
To say that we are already outside, and that the exit is originary: Is this not ultimately a melancholic position? Is the concept of existence opposed to that of becoming? Is becoming simply a decoy, a long detour toward that which does not become, but is? Such is the grand Hegelian thesis: One must leave oneself, exteriorize oneself, alienate oneself—exist—in order finally to know what one already was. It would have been necessary to rend the veils of Maya to perceive that we had already arrived, and to go through Heraclitus to show that Parmenides was right. Is existence the long detour from becoming to being? But the Hegelian dialectic is a certain relation between being and time; and the existentialism that I propose sees existence as a different relation to time: The eccentricity of each existent does not define a becoming, but the immediate tension—the ex-tension, the tension of the outside—that engenders difference. Put differently, that existence might be always already outside means that even immobile, even inert, even at the heart of the most serious of depressions, a surplus of time inhabits existential disjunction: the ex- is time.
Co-existence, projection, and double advance.—What is this surplus that constitutes and extends existence? Awaits at the same place it extends? Sartre, after Heidegger, will call this surplus “project.”4 But we can understand the manner in which existence projects itself in two ways:
1. The first is ideal projection, that which takes the existing subject in the direction of that which it is not, but would like to be. This the malady from which Conrad’s Lord Jim suffers: “the faculty of swift and forestalling vision.” “Projected headlong into the fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations,” Lord Jim is prepared for everything, except “the unexpected”—which subsequently becomes the “inconceivable.” Ideal anticipation is nothing other than the dream of the absolute realization of a model of the self. Thus, according to Sartre, the human being dreams of a “synthetic fusion of the in-itself with the for-itself,” and he “makes himself a man in order to be God.”5 A “useless passion,” as Sartre says, because it effectively denies the finitude of existence because it would exhaust the imagination in a reality that would completely embody it. Sartre has conflated ontology with the anthropological fantasy of ontology that he describes in the form of a fusional aspiration (that of the in-itself and the for-itself).
2. Traversing this fantasy, it becomes possible to define another form of projection, which projects the subject there where it is. The advance is thus not something that is carried out in a future, a program to complete, a being to become, an ideal to achieve, a fusion to bring about; it is a deviation interior to the present, the clinamen of time. Let us call this immediate projection a real projection. It does not liquidate the imagination but mixes it with sensibility: I project myself from that which my body perceives, from the sensibility that puts me in relation to the world, to others, to the community of feeling beings, perceiving and communicating.6 I advance into the world in the same way that the world advances toward me, into me. This double advance only sets existence in advance of itself to ballast it at the same time with other existences with which it makes up a field. By this double advance, existence is at the origin mixed with other existences in an existential field.
At the origin, as soon as it exists, existence is more than itself. We find here one of Jean-Luc Nancy’s fundamental motifs: “the One is more than the one.”7 There is no One alone, no absolute One released from everything, nor existence purely separated. There is always surplus, projection, or advance in the form of the double advance (anticipation and ballast). To exist is always to co-exist, to exist with other speaking, living beings, and sometimes with revenants. On this basis, the concept of the outside is enriched: Outside of the self, there is a multitude of beings in relation. These relations do not connect objects; they are not added to pre-existing entities, but constitute them from the inside. The outside of the being is the set of relations that constitutes existents as an existential field. By co-, which is experienced outside, I am in relation with myself, my form of life linked to other forms of life.
We now understand that what Sartre or Heidegger called projection could just as well be an injection. Think of those moments when we imagine something that is not: This ideal projection forms an image that manifestly does not correspond to that which perception might have expected. In an improbable form, a mental space like a hallucination or a perception enabled by art, we inject the more-than-One that we have received as being-with.8 This more-than-One injected into the image ballasts all of our anticipations, and means no projection duplicates simply a personal model. The imagination never only determines a narrow personal world; it communicates the universe—“The shortest path/From ourselves/To ourselves/Is the universe” (Malcolm de Chazal). For the special existents who live and die, the injection of existence is the manner in which the living takes a form that expresses itself only in the encounter with the world that has advanced toward it.
Existential field.—The beauty and the paradox of existence: only the experience of singularity lets us take account of the singularity of other existences. In this sense, each pure ontology can only lead to the underestimation (at best) or the foreclosure (at worst) of existence. Existences form a field of eccentricities: each one of them demonstrates that in order to begin, it was necessary to deviate. The absence of deviation would be the absence of all existence, in Schellingian terms: the non-exit of infinity. The difficulty is to understand this deviation—this clinamen—not as a movement in a previously given space, but as the simultaneous creation of existence and its space (its environment). Clinamen is not added to an existent, but carves out the atopian spacing that manifests itself thanks to an existent. Because existence first is eccentricity, it has no place of its own, but shares an existential field with all other existents. The reality of this field depends upon each deviation, each way of inhabiting the absence of the center—which is to say, the lived outside.
Imagine the existential field as a universe where each point would be displaced. It is in the place of this displacement that the co- of existents is expressed. Lucretius considered the encounter of atoms following a clinamen as formative of a world; we must, rather, think the world as the ex-pression—a pressure outside the self—of encounters. Crossed by an infinity of outsides, the existential field enjoys the endless dis-placements that roam it.
To live alone, one must be an animal or a god—says Aristotle. The third case is wanting: one must be both—a philosopher.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
(0).—At the beginning, there was more than One. But this was not yet known, or else it was known vaguely. We believed we were only One, and that the multiple would come together toward the end. We knew very well that the story of the One did not make sense—but precisely because nothing was able to remain, because everything was flowing, we produced—as a sort of compensation—the fantasy of something that would persist, somewhere, from the beginning of time until its end. The fantasy of something that would be able to uni-fix itself in some firmama [firmaman]. In some absolute substance.
But in order that there might be something rather than nothing, the absolute must have opened up, we said; the absolute had been subjected to a lack, we thought. We tried to preserve the absolute, to make it into finite forms without losing any part of the infinite. But the trick was too clumsy, and immanence too compact. The absolute itself, or nature, or God, had to contain a groundlessness, a shapeless precedent, an internal tear or transcendence. At once It and not It. (Always) already Two.
It has been necessary to begin again: At the beginning, the absolute was already divided. It was necessary to continue: The absolute was dissolved so that there might be world. It is necessary to conclude: There is the multiplicity of the world.
1.—But the story continued. It was taken up by one voice, more voices, all demanding a story, an odyssey in meaning and in image. One by one, these existences murmured to each other: What there is takes time, nothing happens all at once, I was born, I notice how long sugar takes to dissolve, I saw my son born, there are beings who come into the world and worlds that demand to open. One by one, they added: I exist, I am outside, I wait for the tramway, I smoke a cigarette, I think of later, how did I get here, am I outside? And they responded, a little later: I’m still coming, I’m not there yet, and maybe this will never end, even if it stops it will start again, elsewhere, otherwise, with someone else—a whirlwind takes up some leaves—and they began to compose a song, an existential one, like in the film Magnolia, film of the world in a film, and then they began to become disillusioned—thus, in turn, simultaneously, in turn, alone and together.
2.—One says: Let’s start again. I exist, I am outside even when I am inside, we call this exile and the right country is only the one that supports me, there is no other, no better, and each country is numerous, we’re numerous outside, even if it’s better to be outside inside when it’s cold, or when there are roundups, the outside insides have to be welcoming, hospitable, there must be thresholds to put me in relation to others, estrange me at the threshold of the Stranger I will never be, these thresholds must be guaranteed, they must be, this is the Justice of the Outside and it’s the only one, there is no other, no better justice, so that those of the outside aren’t sent outside, it’s complicated but it is like this.
Another says: To exist, or to be outside, is necessarily to encounter people, to be several, even when I was Inside there were already at least Three. And even if I don’t want to meet them, they will be my ghosts, specters of a renounced common, reduced to silence but full of words that had been said and will maybe be again. Existence will always have been multiple, everywhere.
Another adds: There are turtles in the garden, dogs who take the metro in Moscow and get off at the right stations, in Chicago there are over 2,000 coyotes who let out their growls, their huffs, their woofs, their whines, their yelps, their howls, and their famous “wow-oo-wow,” it’s raining—we say—cats and dogs, pigeons equipped with sensors collect data on atmospheric pollution over San Jose, look close enough and you might even glimpse a transgenic mouse.
And hears a response: There are walls of words in the social networks, web syndication voluntarily set up by computer escorts, electronic chips that blow their noses into the files of the police of the mind, the Internet of Things promoting the last opus of Philip K. Dick, nanorobots in a swarm who cooperate before obstacles, a lovesick android who knows he’s going to die.
While another follows: Closer in myself than my own closeness . . . A fortress that compels every entrant to strip even of the One . . . God incarnated to the point of his own death, Light upon Light, Text without end . . . And telluric points, gods even in the kitchen, objects and animals that are more than objects and animals, “smart wood,” Prophets, Shamans, Sorcerers . . .
And another responds: Images that are animated, more real than the real, taking the voices and the bodies of dogs, coyotes, or humans, they say unthinkable words at the edge of the void, they announce nuptials and ruptures, they hold their breath when their daimon asks them to, they take part in assemblies, in the creation of laws as in the extraction of new minerals.
3.—A multiple, at least four: human beings, animals, technological individuals, divine assumptions. A multiplicity beyond all count, made up of existents past, present, or to come, stretching temporality in every direction to the point of sending it outside itself. Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Posthuman; Savages, Barbarians, Primitives, Firsts, Moderns; chimpanzees, dolphins, pigeons; let’s let in the insects and the plants; objects, machines, practical mediations, artificial intelligences; spirits, phantoms, gris-gris, God, gods; works of art, social installations. Hybridizations: GMOs, GMAs [genetically modified animals]; an artificial uterus; a performer who grafts a camera behind his head; Mechs and Shapers; radioactive clouds. Becomings: One never changes without the other changing too. Confusions: The production of substance spilling over its bounds, hardly changing from one difference to another; the unaware crossing of thresholds, as if they were nothing; the abolition of binary divisions without the creation of remarkable singularities—a nightmare that no unity could ever interrupt.
4.—Impossible to know in advance, or even after the fact, what assembled beings can carry as common load, to make reference to the “bearing” [munis] of the word community. We can only consider it. There is nothing outrageous about this: the thought of community will have always called for a metaphysics, that is to say a science of imaginary variations submitted to the Principle of reason. And the Principle of reason opposes the Principle of identity, it only acknowledges that there are some things rather than nothing—clinamen . . .
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6.—Things, living or artificial beings, are inclined with/against/on/in/from each other, using all possible prepositions. If we were to speculate, or to think to excess, we might as well leave free a share for that which leads beings to coalesce. This is to say, never to reduce the common to interests or identical intentions. Let us call coalition this ensemble of beings inclined one on the other, an ensemble bearing uncertainty without undermining the possibility of a being-in-common. From the corporeal absence of the common, a coalition is woven in all material forms, some crystallized by loves, wars, chatter, writings, magazines, assemblies, collectives—but always of the One un-filled several times and in all ways, letting the wild depths that give the coalition its sovereignty emerge.
7.—Let us call the subjective trajectories that advance, thanks to coalition, trans-jects. They advance by their projections, ideal or real. Each coalition goes forward, at the same time, in the form of an endless loop (a spiral), in each trans-ject that goes forward or back. The spiral of coalition and trans-jects is the place of the formation of the double advance. The absence of coalition does not mean the return of a subject to its pre-subjective animality, but reduces the trans-ject of existence to the ideal projection of a subject—its quixotic aspirations, its securing narcissism, its lack of love.
8.—To confused coalitions, which deny thresholds, smother singularities, produce hybrid confusions in which each object would be lost in another object, where the absence of One has become the nightmare of a malleable diversity, let us oppose not clear and distinct coalitions, which would annul community in its very principle, but those that recognize and celebrate their excess. Excess of amour fou, exo-realist art, politics that liberate existence, un-institutionalized minoritarian religion, an economy commensurate with the abyss—the trans-ject of existence over wild depth. Or: everything that paid-off experts, immune nations, stolen mediations, private finances, manufacturers of atoms, pharmacies of forgetfulness, controllers of fictions, suppliers of high-quality images, butchers of processed foods, neuro-cognitive specialists, and logicians of the spirit strain to forbid and to make impossible. Rather than these inertial fixations, which produce this intravenous absolute, let us wager on the living flesh of adventurous coalitions.
9.—As a non-state politics, coalition demands organization. But no organization is desirable without the adventure of the collated. Without the free expression of that which is projected with others toward a Good cruelly absent. All alliance must remain an adventure.
Freedom lets beings be.
Martin Heidegger, “The Essence of Truth”
The other than the One is existence, finitude, or disjunction. In various ways, these three terms name existence liberated from that which would contain it, surround it, or prevent it from being, rendering any form of adventurous coalition impossible. In other words, existence and freedom are inseparable. It is, however, impossible to invoke the concept of freedom without reformulating it, so much has freedom been subjected to neoliberal programming of behaviors, under the name of flexibility or social license accorded by liberal governments to individuals. By social license, we mean freedom of speech without consequence, the right to live without questioning the legal framework of life, the right to lead a private life without objecting to the manner in which this is under close surveillance, controlled, and anticipated by governing bodies, whether these are economic, forms of media, or political. We must, however, have the courage to say that these neoliberal “freedoms” are not freedom. They are patently only denials of existence, only the operators of that which we have called ideal projection, instruments of an exhausting auto-realization at once indefinite, laughable, and destructive. Indefinite in the sense that the self can never correspond to a model; laughable because non-adventurous models of life are the negation of trans-jects of existence; destructive to the extent that the technological means employed by humanity to realize itself are the causes of ecological disaster. It is imperative to escape this ontological-economic trap.
From the “out of reach” . . .—To escape this cage, it is first necessary to think freedom outside of the humanist position. In fact, for humanism imagined metaphysically, freedom is nothing other than the human capacity for eternal self-definition.9 It is doubtless in Sartre’s work where the relationship between freedom, existence, and humanism finds its clearest expression: “existentialism is a humanism” of freedom. Let us not forget, however, that for Sartre freedom is literally unbearable. Being and Nothingness highlights the absurdity of the condition of freedom, which depends on the fact that “human reality can choose itself as it intends, but cannot not choose itself.” Freedom is choice, and not an ontological foundation. It is precisely this absence of foundational control that the fusion of the in-itself and the for-itself would seek to remedy, in the figure of a being who would exhaust himself by trying to be absolutely Man in order to be the divine Absolute. This programmed failure depends on the initial partition between the in-itself and the for-itself, but an exact understanding of this partition is crucial if we do not wish to reproduce the humanistic schema of freedom. In Sartre’s philosophical system, this schema depends upon a mode in which human reality manages to distinguish itself from the in-itself. If it is certainly not possible to hold oneself outside Being—if freedom is thus always situated—“human reality” can, however, modify its relationship with Being by “[drawing] itself back on the other side of nothingness.” The negation of the world puts the human being “out of circuit,” “out of reach”: “Descartes, following the Stoics, has given a name to this possibility, which human reality has, to secrete a nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom” inasmuch as it precedes the essence of man and makes it possible.10
With Sartre, the atopia that we demand as existential disjunction becomes the immunization of human reality, a split that encloses this reality in a crushing responsibility. This immunization, this putting-out-of-reach that effectively recalls the remarks of Marcus Aurelius,11 turns atopia into the territory of the undamaged, whereas we seek to think it as communication of being-in-the-world, ectopia. The problem is when freedom is reduced to a pure negation that only can create an Absolute and its “passion,” which Sartre knows is “useless.” Useless indeed, and above all established by making human reality an exception. If freedom really is unbearable in Sartre’s philosophical system, this is because it precedes the essence of man, and would like to be ontological foundation, envying its absoluteness. We must therefore free freedom of its jealousy towards any sort of foundational condition.
. . . to “Ab-solution.”—No longer to think freedom as ontological foundation—or lack of foundation—would be, first, to imagine it as a fact. As long as freedom is pure Idea, a call to be, it asks us to deny what we are in order to become what we are not yet. It ultimately demands that existence is preceded by an essence that it would already have projected in advance. That this essence should be before existence demonstrates its sovereignty. As Jean-Luc Nancy insists, we should rather “liberat[e] human freedom from the immanence of an infinite foundation or finality, and liberate it therefore from its own infinite projection to infinity where transcendence (existence) itself is transcended, and thereby annulled.”12 For Nancy, freedom does not precede anything, but traverses (transit/e) existents: a. it communicates (transite) them as the movement of existence, an ectopic movement; and b. it transfixes (transit) them as concretion, intensification by which there are existents. Freedom does not precede anything because it is not a choice followed by an effect. Freedom is existence: this world, this trans-ject. It is spacing, deviation—a clinamen, according to Nancy.13 It is not freedom first, and then the thing; but there is a thing through freedom. Being and freedom are the same.
For Sartre, nothingness is brought to the world by human negativity, which enables the human subject to put herself “out of reach,” outside matter. For Nancy, matter is made into a world thanks to the nothingness that tears absolute immanence. Freedom, writes Nancy, is nothingness that “affirms itself by making itself intense”: Intensified, nothingness is carried “to the point of incandescence,” like a “black fulguration.”14 This existing entity—that advent—is nothing other than freedom as “the deepening and intensification of negativity, up to the point of affirmation.”15 This approach to freedom allows for the release from the trap of the ontological foundation, and the liquidation of all conception of an absolute outside the world, an absolute that for Sartre is nothing other than the human being. Let us briefly follow these lines by Nancy, difficult but crucial:
Freedom is absolute, which is to say that freedom is the absolutization of the absolute itself. To be absolute is to be detached from everything. The absolute of the absolute, the absolute essence of the absolute, is to be detached from every relation and every presence, including from itself. The absolute is being that is no longer located somewhere [my emphasis], away from or beyond beings, with whom it would again have this relation of “beyond” (which Hegel knew well), and it is not an entity-being but is being withdrawn into itself short of itself, in the ab-solution of its own essence and taking place only as this ab-solution. The absolute is the being of beings, which is in no way their essence, but only the withdrawal of essence, its ab-solution, its dis-solution, and even, absolutely, its solution, in the fact of its existence, in its singularity, in the material intensity of its coming and in the tone of the autonomous Law whose autonomy, auto-foundation, and authority depend only on the experience of being the law extended to the edge of the law like the throw of an existence.16
For Nancy, if the Absolute is not situated anywhere, this does not mean in any way that it is beyond, “out of reach,” or “out of circuit,” as Sartre would say, but that the Absolute is itself the circuit. This is why it can be attained, submitted to any form of damage, to all that happens and might happen—including death. Contrary to what we might believe, the logic of the Absolute does not lead to exception, but to its dissolution: “released from all relations,” writes Heidegger, the Absolute “is then still related to others if only in the manner of being absolved from it, and is on the basis of this relatedness, this relation, relative and not absolute.”17 And Nancy extends this logic to its extreme, beyond Heidegger, showing that the relation of the Absolute to some other is not exterior but internal, in the double sense of the transition identified above. The relative is relation (co-existence). Here is why the Absolute, pushed to its conclusion, is dissolved.
But what does “pushed to its conclusion” mean here? If this push takes time, the logic of the Absolute becomes chrono-logic, and the dissolution of the absolute is the time that time would take to pass into existence. This question, as we know, was crucial for Schelling (see the section “Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x” in Book I), for all idealism, and for early German Romanticism. But we face two possibilities here: 1. if the problem is temporal or historical, then in fact all questions of escaping the Absolute or God rise again; 2. if the problem is only logical, then the very place of the concept of the Absolute becomes highly problematic. For why not start directly with finitude and relation? Is it not, in Nancy’s thinking, a matter of preserving the schema of a sacrifice of the Absolute—of God and his death as man—so that there might be something and not nothing? Freedom, he writes, is the “detachment—and unleashing—of being insofar as being is not retained in being and is absolved of its being in the sharing of existence.”18 But would it not ultimately be a matter of succeeding in ab-solving freedom from the sacrifice of being?
We find the same awkward situation here as in the preceding chapter: going outside to realize we were already there. In the same way, perhaps we must still proceed by the ab-solution of the Absolute to know that, in a certain way, this has already taken place (see the first point in the “Coalitions” section). In any case, philosophically, we must “hold the ground gained”19: being is freedom—immediately, in the form of being finite, which is to say, existing. This is true to the point that we might be able to say: “The stone is free. Which means that there is in the stone—or rather, as it—this freedom of being that being is, in which freedom as a ‘fact of reason’ is what is put at stake, according to co-belonging.”20 We are now far from every humanist conception of freedom. Freedom passes through all existence as a specific trans-ject, be it in place or in motion, human or animal, contemplative or engaged in political action.
To let be.—In 1843, in The Jewish Question, Marx denounced freedom as that which requires stopping before a “stake” separating two self-sufficient monads, assured of the human right to secure their goods.21 But to be an immunized monad has today become a full-time job. At the heart of neoliberal governance of behaviors, freedom is only given to produce self-subjection. This conditional, instrumentalized freedom, this social license is inscribed in the process of the autoproduction of the subject-entrepreneur-of-himself with his human capital on his shoulders, who feels obliged to become everything because he is nothing, because “man is not born, but made man” (Erasmus).
Ultimately, liberalism grants freedom only in exchange for the imperative of infinite liberation, mobilizing the subject at the heart of a movement without end from which it is impossible for him to extract himself.22 A movement without finitude, and finally without existence, or an absolutely fluidified one. In this sense, complete integration into the world implies, as its condition of possibility, the sovereignty of a subject able to fully submit. The deepening of human sovereignty, which wears itself out trying to produce an unattainable autodefinition, is the instrument of the most profound compatibility with the world, of the greatest compactness. In sovereign subjection, being-towards-the-world never appears as such, and vanishes either in the form of the worker—before she takes sides and reclaims the world—or in the form of the solitude of the self-proclaimed master deciding by himself, for himself, and in himself, as if the world did not exist. Atopia is the re-moval of these two subjective positions, requiring that we think freedom not as self-production, self-definition or self-identification—even though mediated by another consciousness—but as letting-be [laisser-être].
Letting-be is not liberal laisser-faire, which always hides an absolute will to politically impose the fantasy of a “self-regulating market” (Karl Polanyi)23 by all means possible. The new form of this fantasy today is that of the credit rating agencies, which, far from regulating State economies, continually destabilize them in order to confirm the sovereignty of financial markets. To the neoliberal forcing of automated manufacture, let us oppose letting-be and its politics of existences. Letting-be is the position of that which exists, and becomes a fundamental political demand when existences are prevented. Far from being reduced to a passive and non-political attitude, the politics of letting-be requires preventing that which prevents existence.
Fundamentally a poem comes from the Outside. I have no idea where, I have no theological or any other kind of notion of it. Green Martians was the thing I used before. It’s obviously not Martians. But I do think poems are delivered, when they’re good, from the Outside.
Jack Spicer
We must still elucidate the fact that atopia requires a subjective position founded on the re-moval of that which prevents it from being. An ectopic spatiality—finite and free—has its interior correlative: an empty case, a crack. We would not be originally outside if the outside were not originally in ourselves. This is the strange topology that we have sought to describe since the beginning of this work, like a ∞ with its two holes, looping and unlooping forever. It is not ultimately a question of the outside, a term that too strongly evokes symmetry with a preceding inside, but rather a dynamic spacing, deviation, clinamen or dis-joining at work in the subjective constitution of speaking subjects. This dis-joining induces every speaking subject to experience a form of madness, which enables philosophy and the speaking subject to communicate.
Speech and empty case.—“From where” we speak: This expression was popular half a century ago, when we were given to understand that the subject is ultimately the structure. We explored in depth the mysteries of the assignation of structure. We absolutely forgot Sartre’s assertion that “Valéry is a petit-bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit-bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.”24 Sober structuralists—in other words, post-structuralists—will eventually rediscover the truth of Sartre’s formula (the non-reversibility of the structure and of the singularity that a proper name contains, that is to say the fact that a structure is more a condition than an explanation): a subjective singularization results from a destructuring internal to structure. This destructuring can be localized as an “empty case” at the core of the structure.25 As Deleuze explains, the empty case is missing from its place and is constantly displaced, permitting the distribution of differences across an entire structure. It is, crucially, the “the differentiation of difference itself.” Blind spot, zero, the place of the king in the Velasquez painting described by Foucault in The Order of Things, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s floating signifier, object=x that refers to the x of a subject, the empty case is that without which we would not speak, because everything would be pre-said, always already written or decreed, edited: it would be the writing of the things structured by a dead language, that is to say, a language that would have filled its empty space. When the lack lacks, words become things, the structure becomes a jail, and metaphors turn into frightening things—a transformation that Moosbrugger experiences in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities:
It had happened that he said to a girl, “Your sweet rose lips,” but suddenly the words gave way at their seams and something upsetting happened: her face went gray, like earth veiled in a mist, there was a rose sticking out of it on a long stem.26
To speak manifests the atopia of the empty case, yet without being identified with it, in the form of a dis-joining. In linguistic terms, we find something similar in the Saussurian relation between langue and parole, a relation itself doubled or multiplied by the relation between society and individual, between the treasure of language (Lacanian “big Other”) and the exchange of phases (conversation), and between passivity and activity. Along the same lines, we could also mention Chomsky’s relation between competence and performance. In every instance, we must start from the evidence that linguistic performance, actualized and thus finite, is at once inferior to the infinite possibilities of grammatical construction and heterogeneous to these possibilities because to speak implies and expresses registers of competence that are not simply linguistic, but contextual, sociocultural, affective, and so on. Speech is never adjusted to language, but is always a misuse of language (un écart de langage), distinguishable by the hesitations of the voice, the stumbles, the “uh”s, slips of the tongue, all those abolished baubles27 where individuation is sought and found. There is never an “id” that speaks without an “it” being on the point of becoming an “I,” even if this point is sometimes frozen (as in psychosis). What is language, after all, if it is not a spacing between the imaginary and the real, a symbolic emergence that speech re-actualizes?
Readers of Derrida and lovers of poetry might argue that spacing, misuse of language, and disturbance do not concern only speech, but also writing. Certainly, but in poetry the cut is always measured more than once, calculated many times during the making; poetry is always counted.28 Written iterability—the possibility of being repeated—anchors the language, turning a hapax into a new signifier proliferating into countless copies. In this sense, writing enables the adjustment of dis-joining. On the contrary, and without a phonocentric gesture, in speech disturbance is lived specifically as a presence that, far from being pure or phantasmatic, is exposed to its irreversible lack of anchor, its anarchic volatility.
Negativity and madness.—Spacing, deviation, and dis-joining: the question is that of negativity at work in the constitution of the subject. Negativity is not only brought by the human subject into the world but frees the subject as such. Freud saw this in his account of the creation of the symbol of negation. In the place of a first attempt at the unilateral expulsion of that which is judged to be bad, this symbolization makes possible, through negation, the maintenance of that which we would like to externalize: This is not A (although that might be it); there is no B (even if there is B); I am not C (although this might be false). This is not my mother, says the analysand about a dream, denial serving as the proof of “a first degree of independence from the results of repression”: Thanks to the symbol of negation, thought “frees” itself of the “limitations of repression.”29 In the case of psychosis, the lack of this symbolization translates into an a priori destructiveness without limits—for how to rid myself definitively of what constitutes me, if not in the suicide of all that is close to it, including myself? Thus, Serge Leclaire considers psychosis an auto-immune disorder, attacking alterity—the big Other—without which we would be out-of-speech. To the body of the infans, all words arrive in the manner of a foreign body, causing the production of antibodies. No appropriation of words without a corollary rejection, these two processes constituting the unconscious as a heterogeneous ensemble. The first rejection is none other than the Verwerfung, which Freud as well as Lacan (under the name of foreclosure) would attribute only to the psychotic, radically separated from the neurotic by a qualitative difference. Yet for Leclaire, neurotic and psychotic are only distinguished quantitatively, according to the extent of the linguistic rejection, limited for the first, undefined for the second. But in all neurosis resides this rejection, this “accursed core”30 without which, taking everything from the big Other, reiterating its otherness as if it were an identity, a subject would be nothing.
Madness and civilization.—There is thus no subject except through a creative incompatibility, a heterogenesis. “Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself,”31 writes Freud, when he explains the “oceanic feeling” as an expression of our “limitless narcissism.” Yet it is from the hypothesis of an original totality, whether Freudian or Hobbesian, which we must stray, when we consider that a subject comes into existence by leaving its status as self-centered monad, self-totalized, humanized only by the civilizing violence that comes to breach the ramparts of the original fortress of drives. Let us think here of Cornelius Castoriadis, who, through Piera Aulagnier’s psychoanalytic perspective, maintained that the human being is first a “mad animal” who is civilized by the use of reason (thus of logos).32 Where the id was, completely a-social and violent, the I must sublimate even the thinnest “veneer of civilization.”33
Contrary to these positions, I affirm that to become civilized is to become mad, if we grant that the madness inherent in the process of civilization is not clinically diagnosed psychosis, but consists of a normal madness, that of dis-joining, of approximate performance, of atopia. Psychosis is either the unlimited extension of atopia, antopia (schizophrenia), or its absence, the saturation of the void, overtopia (paranoia). It is a mixing of the two—antopia and overtopia, the proliferation of places deprived of anything habitable and the lack of any sort of free space, the fragmentation of the world in empty junk spaces and the impossibility of bearing emptiness—that best describes contemporary pathology: a frozen atopia, full of fears and safety measures, over-territorialized in absolute flux. A healthy subjective atopia requires more or less reluctantly leaving the possibility of an infinite road with one direction for a sinuous road not correctly listed on maps, with exits that appear only too late, with gas stations that are somewhat dubious. If these paths lead nowhere, it is not that at the end of them there is nothing, but that nothingness, phantom of the negative, accompanies the path that we follow as much as we trace out; this is called clearing. The madness of atopia is that which opposes the principle of Identity, the laminar flow that characterizes, in Lucretius’s system, the parallel fall of atoms in the void. And the principle of Reason, as Michel Serres has brilliantly shown, following Lucretius, is not that which makes conformity but, on the contrary, that which accounts for the fact of being, for the fact that there is something rather than nothing—that there are other things besides pure identity, pure grammar, the confusion between words and things. In this perspective, the subject is not an identity resulting from the civilization of his drives, but a difference discovering the approximate madness of singularization, the wandering of reason without any basis other than improbable clinamen. Born of contingent encounter, the subject is caught permanently, until death, in a whirling disequilibrium. When the force of this current favors creative intensities, the subject enjoys her being-towards-the world.
The void and the drives.—In his 1964 seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the subject comes more from its fissure than from its drives.34 In the first sessions, Lacan reminds us that the Freudian unconscious shows itself as a dis-joining, the fact that there is “always something wrong” “between cause and that which it affects”; but if we seek to see the unconscious directly, all we would perceive would be a “gap.” If something stumbles and faints in dreaming, as in a Freudian slip, this means there is something else that takes place and seeks to be realized: The unconscious is the gap through which neurosis is joined to an indeterminate real. The unconscious is therefore the “unrealized,” the “not-born,” “limbo,” something on the order of those “ambiguous mediators” such as sylphs and gnomes, Lacan tells us. What appears as the formation of the unconscious is at once a finding, as formation, and a re-finding of contact with the shapeless, the non-realized, and so on. The unconscious is thus first not a drive but a rupture, a discontinuity, which, Lacan specifies, is not preceded by any totality. Discontinuity comes first, and it is from discontinuity that absence emerges. The unconscious is thought not diachronically but synchronically, as a horizontal bar without depth, and this synchronicity of the unconscious is centered around “the subject qua indeterminate.”
The biggest remaining theoretical difficulty is that which concerns the relationship between gap and limbo, indetermination and the figure of the sylph. For Freud, the drive is an intermediary, “a borderline concept between the psychic and the somatic”35—in other words, an interval, a hyphen, and a dash of discord. One question remains: Is the empty case full, like an egg? This is not very Lacanian. But if we add: an egg of virtuality? This is the Deleuzian solution, reading and un-reading structuralism. The void that engages the symbolic “is, however, not a non-being; or at least this non-being is not the being of the negative, but rather the positive being of the ‘problematic.’”36 This is not so far from Lacan, who argues that the unconscious is neither “being, nor non being, but the unrealized.” Perhaps drives should be considered as the spatium of intensive virtuality, made of differential relations of which nothing can predict the actualization.37 The void would then be the spacing between differential relations and differentiating actualizations, which is to say the fact that the totality is never given or givable as such: the there-is of being—the il y a or the es gibt—is an unlikely declination, always a throw of the dice, even if we do not know from what hand they are thrown.
Beneath or before?—In this sense, a subject is always a problem, problema, literally what is thrown before, pushed ahead, proposed to existence. Such a conception of the subject is, however, paradoxical: The subjectum is that which is thrown beneath, which is not the same thing as being thrown before—but before what? Is it not time to change the subject? This is to say: to think the subject from an inaugural dis-joining, and not according to the humanistic schema. Humanism always consists of imagining 1. that there is no subject but the human subject and 2. that the human subject is what escapes the status of the animal, that biological and empirically determined form of life.38 Against this linear ontogenesis, it is necessary to reconsider the status of animality, itself subjected to dis-joining.
If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
From the subject to the structure and from the structure to the subject, from structuralism to post-structuralism: In all, we have progressed less than some would think. We have remained in the restricted frame of the human being and his structures or his ways of escaping them. Today, however, a new way of thinking appears: on the scene of the “death of man” announced by Foucault at the end of The Order of Things, we could expand the concept of the subject into the animal world—as, for example, Tom Regan does with his concept of a subject-of-a-life.39 This theoretical proposition is necessary to counter a humanist and anthropocentric mode of civilization. It is, however, insufficient, even harmful, if it ultimately maintains the figure of Man behind the subject. Is it not from the concept of the subject itself that it is necessary to depart, insofar as this clings to the humanist schema? Unless we change the meaning of the subject: Instead of situating it as apart from the living, we should consider a subject as the edge of an existential trans-ject. Let us put this idea to the test by confronting the concept of existence with that of animal life.
To which subjects?—If I say, “Sean, the Irishman,” with a comma between the two terms by way of marking the breath, the spacing, this means that first I give a singularity (a proper name), then a particularity (nationality). But with “Washoe the chimpanzee” or “Kanzi the bonobo,” something else happens: the apposition without a comma creates a zone of indecision between the proper name and the common name (or the name of the species). As if the species—bonobo, chimpanzee—were on the point of losing its generality to the very name of the case of the species. Must we thus remain in this zone of indecision, à la Agamben? Or re-mark the spacing? Let us think of Washoe who, at four years old, had a vocabulary of more than 140 signs, and could combine up to five characters of ASL (American Sign Language), taught to him by Allen and Beatrix Gardner, two psychologists from the University of Nevada, at the end of the 1960s. Or of Lucy, the chimpanzee who, asked to sort photos of chimpanzees and human beings into separate categories, put her own into the category of human beings.
Simple anecdotes, we might say, in order to sweep their truth under the cover of an anthropomorphism that ought to be resisted. However, anecdotes concerning animals are the means to bring about the spacing that prevents all efforts to collapse the case into a generality supposed to describe a behavior. The error would consist in inferring, from these singularities, a thinking substance hidden behind the act (paralogism already invoked by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason) whereas it is instead a matter of conferring on some animal a biographical trans-ject that would be sufficient to himself, in his brilliance.40 Dominique Lestel, on whom we rely here, speaks of this matter as “accreditation.”41 Instead of looking for hidden properties, it is a matter of seeing those properties that are constructed at the heart of the singular arrangements of humans-animals(-machines). Rather than build a binary knowledge upon animals (subjects or not, persons or not, individuals or not), it will be necessary to think the cases in which we could distinguish between subjects with stronger or weaker autonomy, subjects more or less dependent on the human-technical arrangements in which they are engaged. In doing so, we will establish degrees of pluralized consciousness according to the multiple forms that these take.
The point that occupies us here is the mode of accreditation of forms of animal individuations or personalizations. This mode, in fact, implies the existence of what Dominique Lestel calls “hybrid human/animal communities,” without which the question of animal singularity would not be posed, at least not as it is posed in the existential dispositifs that have been constructed by human beings: experiments conducted using animal life (laboratory experiments) or the lives of humans in the company of their pets. It is, in fact, in the modality of an interrogation of the cognitive or communicative capacities of animals that these respond by using, in their own ways, the human artifacts that they are permitted. As Lestel shows, the scientific experiments involved in this interrogation undergo permanent “overflowing” that show the emergence of unexpected, and actually moving, behaviors—eventualities that would never occur, to the displeasure of those who fetishize object-oriented ontology, in an interaction between toaster and human being, for example (although perhaps computer and human being). It is certain that today, with these experiments, with the deployment of the category of the subject beyond its modern confinement to the human being, with the extension of rights to animals and particularly to primates, we are witnessing a paradoxical situation: an opening of humanity beyond itself on the grounds of “interior colonizations of the animal,” as Lestel writes. The question is to know whether colonizing closure or destabilizing opening will win out.
To give this question its maximal degree of amplitude, we must understand what happens in these interactions in which an animal singularity awakens. Imagine a scene of encounters between different worlds—different Umwelts (Uexküll)—that would come to interpenetrate for a time: The animal who becomes what he was not is not that which he was. It is as if, from an ocean of virtuality, a form of instantaneous biography was awakened. This form has two ways to produce its differentiation: 1. in the weak form, the difference falls between individual and species, giving way to a negative personality, “by default” in conformity (here we think of Lorenz’s geese); 2. in the strong form, which is more rare in the animal worlds, the difference occurs inside the individual. This internal difference is what we have earlier called disjunction or dis-joining. In the first case (the weak form), the unexpected behavior will be brief, like a flash, or limited, like a small variation of the expected ethogram42; in the second (the strong form), the points of the unpredictable trajectory condense into a biographical trans-ject that, in the case of humans beings and several other species, is fixed by the art of memory and of prostheses.43
This memory, this linguistic prosthetic, exists in the case of the dolphin and its “signature whistle,” a unique sonic modulation that each dolphin learns at the beginning of life, and that can be imitated by another dolphin—but why such an imitation? Certain researchers associate these signature whistles with first names that let dolphins “call to” each other.44 Unlike “Washoe” or “Lucy,” these names were not given by a human being. They are the living signs of a heterogenesis that has not waited for human colonization to exist. If a lion could speak, it would be time to find some alternative between an immediate pseudo-comprehension that annuls alterity by translating it into human language and an a priori deafness, stripping in advance the capacity for generating their own ways of subjectivation from all other animals.
Trajectories, trans-jects, subjects—If to start it has been necessary to speak of human existence, then of co-existence, then of the subject, these terms should now be rethought from the category of the trans-ject. A trans-ject is neither a substance, lying beneath human or animal behaviors, nor the pure Lego game to which the constructivists seem sometimes to reduce the groundless game of being. The living is not plastic matter that can be shaped at will without becoming precisely what one wants it to be: Its “flexibility” is not inherent to it, but comes from the humanist project that falls upon it, taking everything in its forcing—not only humans, but also animals and machines. Trajectories are unpredictable in that they have always overflowed, with no pre-established plan, the constructions we would flatten onto them—from this comes their eccentricity. While a trans-humanist—bio-art artist (Stelarc) or not—wants to change bodies because he thinks that of the human is “obsolete,”45 in the place of what he rejects there will appear a dis-ject (an object of rejection). But trans-jects are unconstructible: In the term trans-ject, the trans- does not indicate a capacity to pass through everything, to produce anything according to any aim, but the incredible apparition of a creation that smashes all expectations. Trans- as in transit: the ectopic movement that materializes as a singular form of being.
Yet the concept of the trans-ject is obviously dangerous: Does flexible capitalism not rejoice intensely in the dissolution of the concept of the subject? As this is undone, ever-changing trajectories appear, always adjustable, modelable according to new economic imperatives. But a trans-ject necessarily involves a history, stases, remarkable moments, marks, injuries, and sometimes certain forms of resilience.46 Unlike the concept of the subject, that of the trans-ject involves the passage of time across places; it carries with it what Guattari calls “existential territories.” An existential trans-ject can resist neoliberal modulations because it has a past, because it has existed—because it has become. It can be the place and the time of a refusal because it has already been the scene of a negation. Repetition now becomes an essential question: The problem of an existential trans-ject consists in knowing whether a negation will be repeated—a repetition bringing forth a confirmation. I will call this confirmation “subject”: a repetition that is equal to an act, not a deed that one regrets after the fact, but a resolute response to what would try to erase the deed. What is thus sub-, under the ject, is the name of an a-subjective force that is the memorial of a decision. A subject can refuse the fate that is made for her, or a politics that she does not want, or a perverse trap, in the very name of that which has made her this transient singularity, this existential trajectory. An existence does not need to be immortal to feel the power of its eccentricity.