Book III. The Metaphysical Proposition
The Transgression of the Principle of the Excluded Middle
People say, “It’s either this or that,” and it’s always something else.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss
In the first two parts of this work, we have seen a certain number of concepts appear: the undamaged and the contagious, secret complicity, hydroglobe, absolute flux, saturated immanence and transcendence ≈ x, Socratic divergence, atopia, being-outside, existence, existential field, coalition, finitude, real projection and ideal projection, double advance, absolute freedom, the absolute, clinamen, deviation or spacing, dis-joining, trans-ject. These concepts show what philosophy today must think in order to face the problems of our times—but do they enable us to grasp what philosophy is as a problem for itself? Is it enough to say that philosophy creates concepts to account for the way in which philosophy relates to the undamaged, contagion, double advance, being-outside, and so on? It would first be necessary to agree on what concept means. Hence the necessity of proposing a concept of the concept able to open to an outside—an outside that relates philosophy to its own creation. Here is my definition: every concept contains, in the form of an excluded middle, an out-of-place [hors-lieu].1 To understand the manner in which philosophy is constituted as a problem requires thinking the relation of this out-of-place to the existential atopia that we have sought to identify from the beginning of our inquiry.
Consistency of the concept.—For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy is defined first and foremost by the creation of concepts. There is also the plane of immanence, which philosophy must trace, but it is said to be “pre-philosophical” or even “non-philosophical,” an image of pre-conceptual thought. And the conceptual personae (Socrates as the “main conceptual persona of Platonism,” Nietzsche’s Dionysius, Cuse’s idiot, and so on) who “show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations,” are said to be “proto-philosophical.” In the “philosophical trinity,” the Son (or the concept) has precedence over the Father (the plane of the “cut”) and the Holy Spirit (the conceptual persona who ensures the mediation between the two, as well as between chaos and the plane of the sieve that filters a part of it).2 Each concept has a history, connecting it to the philosophical corpus on which it has the task of commenting: this is the external relation of the concept to tradition. Yet the concept is not only oriented toward the past: In the end, its orientation toward the future relates each component of the concept back to that concept. This relation is not an external one; it is a relation immanent to creation. By staying at the level of the first relation (the external one, with its over-emphasis on tradition), we miss the emergence of conceptual novelty, reducing it to historical necessity (or even historial: Deleuze and Guattari clearly attacked Heidegger on this point). It will thus always be necessary to interpret the past starting from the greatest powers of the present, in a Nietzschean manner: to show how the concept, because it is created, is its own interpretation of the history that it thoroughly rebuilds (on the whole, what would have been made by Heidegger as well as all other creators of concepts).
The internal consistency—the self-consistency, the persistence—of the concept is its capacity to stand entirely on its own without there being anything to refer it to some exterior object or some mode, like every creation, such as a painting or a film. The Mona Lisa consists and subsists with no need of knowing whether it resembles Mona Lisa; all paintings seem in an intransitive way. This autonomy is manifest by a particular relationship that the components of the concept maintain between themselves, a relationship that crosses all specific distinctions: If a and b are two components of the concept c, then there exists “an area ab that belongs to both a and b, where a and b ‘become’ indiscernible. These zones, thresholds, or becomings, this inseparability, define the internal consistency of the concept.” The definition of this zone is crucial, and Deleuze and Guattari show clearly—but too quickly—what the matter is: “the concept has already passed into the excluded middle.”3 It does not seem to me that all the consequences of this short statement concerning the principle of the excluded middle have been elaborated, including the manner in which these two thinkers present their examples of concepts. Why?
Hegelian transgression.—To understand this, we need to go back to Aristotle, the first to state the principle: It is not possible for “there [to] be any intermediate between contrary statements, but of one thing, we must either assert or deny one thing, whatever it may be.”4 True or false, being or non-being—but no intermediate (metaxy), nothing in the middle. From an ontological point of view, this principle is Parmenidian: either something is, absolutely, or it is not at all. What are termed many-valued logics will call this principle into question, starting with Łukasiewicz in 1910. But we know the thinker who, in the nineteenth century, has already challenged the principle of the excluded middle: Hegel, who wanted to get to Parmenides via Heraclitus; Hegel and his philosophical transgression that re-interpreted the entire philosophical field. What Hegel brought to light is the warding-off function of the principle of the excluded middle, consisting in the refusal of contradiction—but this refusal is, in fact, the denied recognition of contradiction! Let us explain this delicate point.
For Hegel, all that is can be said to be concrete, which is to say, formed by a non-correspondence. For strict self-congruence would be the purely abstract identity of the type A=A. But all of Hegel’s philosophy consists in showing that logical equality conceals a passage: The first A is not identical to the second. As soon as we seek to seize what is, we seize, after the fact, what has shattered the principle of identity. What is has a finite form, and finitude signifies for Hegel that the immediate being of a thing does not correspond to what that thing is in itself. This lack of correspondence founds for itself each finished form, and consequently singularizes it. Singularity is not the absolute identity of the thing excluded from the rest, without world, for this is impossible (meaning non-concrete, non-real, inexistent): Singularity is necessarily relation with the Other. In this sense, A is not A: Each thing is only in relation to itself insofar as it is in relation to the Other. This relation is not exterior to the thing; it constitutes it internally as contradiction, and cannot be reduced to an either/or, which Hegel attributes to abstract understanding. Abstract understanding is limited to the principle of the excluded middle because it excludes the possibility that contradiction might be the very movement of the passage beyond—and not the affirmation—of the either/or. Yet the middle is still present, but as becoming, the becoming of that which is predicated. In effect, when we say that “A must be either + A or – A [. . .] [i]t virtually declares in these words a third A which is neither + nor –, and which at the same time is yet invested with + and – characters.” Because each term (+ A, – A) “has an existence of its own in proportion as it is not the other. The one is made visible in the other, and is only in so far as that other is,” “the one is only reflected into itself as it is reflected into the other.” Reflection and appearance (Schein) certainly are not the supreme state of concreteness, but its conditions of specular possibility: It is the concept that is absolutely concrete,5 and not that multiplicity given to senses where each thing seems linked to each other from the exterior. The concept takes in itself this sublation of the sensible multiplicity after it has seized the essence (reflection and appearance of the one in the other), the foundation from which comes existence, then the appearance (Erscheinung) of the essence as existence,6 then the relation of existents between themselves, the total reality of which the concept is charged with supporting, containing, and retaining. The concept is indeed the “murder of the Thing,”7 which is to say the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic, and in this passage the concept frees itself 1. from the Other because it has com-prehended (understood and included) it in itself, and 2. from finitude, because the concept corresponds to its capacity to account for the non-correspondence of being.
Contradiction and difference.—Certain similarities appear between the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophical approach and Hegelian logic. Both cases are committed to the middle, metaxy, the ontological space deserted by the poor logic of understanding. For this, it is necessary to think becoming as a transgression of the principle of the excluded middle. But it is ultimately the principle of non-contradiction that Hegel wants to overcome through this transgression, where Deleuze and Guattari want to affirm difference as such. These two perspectives diverge when it comes to the superiority accorded to the and or the nor. What interests Deleuze and Guattari is the both/and; but Hegel, even though he identifies the logical function of union, insists on what precedes it: the neither/nor. For Hegel, the zone of indiscernibility (both/and) is conditioned by an originary negation (neither/nor). Deleuze and Guattari have minimized this negative condition. The advantage of their philosophical position is that in the logic of both/and, becomings concern not only that which is contradictory, but also that which is different. Must we say that for Deleuze and Guattari becomings concern only that which is different? It is possible. The opening of unpredictable (contingent) becomings probably implies the eviction of that which is contradictory,8 to the extent that the becoming of what is subjected to contradiction is also on condition of necessity: If the seed dies, there will be no plant. In the Hegelian system, contingency is only formal (whether that particular plant grows or not does not matter). I state only the obvious: The entire question for Deleuze and Guattari, their philosophical bet, is to be able to do away with contradiction in favor of difference. Here is also a philosophical divergence, and its price: either we limit becoming to that which is contradictory and we lose radical contingency, or we extend becoming by minimizing the negative. Blindness of the neither/nor to the improbable conjunctions of being that not only become, but come back; deafness of the both/and to the negativity that works always already mutely. Either, or: Do we leave it there?
x=x says something about “=” but nothing about x.
Heinz von Foerster
No philosopher has ever left it there. Divergence is only the initial situation of philosophical thought, or where it ends up falling back, out of fatigue. Each time a concept is created, the principle of the excluded middle is transgressed. The question is to explain the gesture of transgression and what sort of creation results from it. Such a gesture cannot come about without some apprehension. It requires a sort of wager, an eidetic imperilment, an act that is unreasonable, harrowing, and marvelous. A leap at once out of and in the circuit of the being, there where the double-holed ∞ of subjectivity is undone.
Becoming and line of flight.—Deleuze repeats often that becoming is one of the concepts that he and Guattari have created, along with the refrain or the body without organs. Yet the first pages of the chapter in A Thousand Plateaus dedicated to this concept are very clear: It is first a matter of showing that becoming is neither a, nor not-a, neither b, nor not-b—neither correspondence of relations, nor resemblance or identification either. “We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, a block of becoming.” The terms put into play—for example, human and animal, in the “becoming-animal”—are not traversed as fixed points; rather, becoming “runs its own line ‘between’ the terms,” it is a rhizomatic line that is neither “a classificatory or genealogical tree.” Becoming is neither producing, nor appearing, nor being, nor equaling, and so on. If, consequently, becoming-animal is said to have to pass through the “contagion of the pack,” we must specify that multiplicity, if it is certainly not the One, is also not the multiple without “exceptional individual”—“there may be no such thing as a lone wolf, but there is a leader of the pack,” the “Anomalous” of the pack, which is itself neither abnormal nor normed, and finally neither individual nor species.9 If this double negation fades thereafter,10 this is without doubt because the man/animal relation is too molar, and what interests Deleuze and Guattari is what happens above or below this waterline, with “becoming-imperceptible,” the question of intensities and improbable arrangements, “becoming-minoritarian” as that which is the loss of all identity as ascribable face.
Waterline versus “line of flight”: This last concept has frequently been glossed. For our purposes, it is enough to note that, in describing becoming, the line of flight also describes the creation of concepts as experimentation or risk-taking, and not the assurance of erudite knowledge about being. If becoming is always in the middle, “neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent, running perpendicular to both,”11 we must understand a line of flight as an event that really happens to the philosopher who tries to become something besides a commentator on tradition. And as the movement of becoming is always double, it is the tradition which suddenly changes form. The one who says only both Deleuze and Hegel, or both Sartre and Nancy, without losing herself in the double negation of the neither/nor, is ultimately not only unfaithful to philosophy but to her own existence.12
Hic salta.—One cannot move into the excluded middle via a straight line, because no path leads there, nothing pre-traced. Even worse, the “perpendicular” of which Deleuze and Guattari speak is traced above a void which every creator must face with anxiety and jubilation. This is not the anxiety of the blank page, for filling it changes nothing, the void will not be filled in the manner of the empty case; the void moves and composes itself differently, in new configurations which are proposed to existence. The anxiety here has to do with the leap—the leap as the only way to move into the excluded middle. Let us study this risky move via several examples.
In the fifth chapter of the second section of Book I of Capital, Marx is confronted with the following problem: in the M-C-Mʹ process, where does surplus value—the fact that Mʹ>M—come from?13 Certainly it cannot be exterior to the sphere of circulation, but it cannot be reduced to it either. Either equivalent goods are exchanged and nothing is added, or nonequivalence is offset over time: The seller, who has sold the commodity at a higher price than its value, will in turn be the buyer and lose what he has won, and vice-versa. If we wish therefore to understand how money is transformed into capital, we must find something that is neither money nor some commodity, the only way to show that surplus value is simultaneously in and out of the sphere of circulation. In the face of this impasse, Marx closes the chapter with “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” a line from Aesop’s fable The Boastful Athlete: “Here is Rhodes, jump here!” This leap consists in identifying, at the very heart of the sphere of circulation, something that might at the same time be exterior to it, an anomalous commodity: the force of labor which, consumed, produces value.14
Hic Rhodus, hic salta: We find this formula again in Being and Event, when Badiou explains what an event is.15 The event is at once internal to the situation and at the same time exceeds it. Here again, it is a matter of localizing an anomaly, a strange place, an “evental site,” an “anormal multiple,” “on the edge of the void,” which is certainly not the event itself but its condition: the pre-revolutionary situation, the agitated searchings for an art born out of dissatisfaction with the icons of the time, the workings of science on a worn-out paradigm. The event has this paradoxical consistency of the simultaneous inclusion of the elements of the site and what marks it as event itself. This auto-inclusion would seem to close the event into itself: Who could say if there is a real event, or simply an illusion, or a necessary unfolding of the conditions already present? This is precisely what is “undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself,” for all questions on this matter would be “circular”: to know if the French Revolution is an event, and neither the expected and continuing results of historical structure (nothing new under the sun) nor a fantasy (nothing will have taken place but the place of exaggerated speech, a useless excess of signification): To escape this either/or, we must—escape! This is at the same time a tautology and an absolute conceptual risk. For, from the standpoint of the situation, I cannot be inside and outside at the same time; yet it is before this impossibility that it is a matter of the leap, and thus of being in and out at once. This is what Badiou at that time called an “interpretive decision,” a “bet,” an “illegal” nomination in view of the structure—in other words, a second event, this one linguistic. Against the “circle,” here is the method: “splitting the point at which it rejoins itself” and making “the curious mirroring of the event and the intervention” appear in its strangeness.16
Circle and loop.—Curious indeed. For the decision is a “belief”17; it pertains to a certain faith in the ability to escape from a circle in which thought is immersed. This is not to say that there would be something incurably religious or theological in philosophy, but on the contrary to maintain that religion—supposing that this generalization makes sense—is a specific manner of integrating belief, faith, confidence, the credit given to a certain conception of transcendence—the concentrated transcendence of the One, as we called it before. In this respect, it is possible to identify other ways of integrating belief, confidence, and credit, what our age verifies with its attempt to sanctify the financial sphere and its technological fantasies.
In Creative Evolution, Bergson gives philosophy the goal of “dissolving again into the whole,” beyond the intelligence that grasps clearly only the discontinuous, the useful and the immobile—but how to go beyond intelligence except with the intelligence? “Vicious circle” that can only be broken by an action of the type “I throw myself into the water,” accepting “frankly” the risk.18 We must leap, even if this would only mean to perceive that the circle is not as vicious as it seemed. For Bergson, it is a matter of saying that the intelligence was not in fact as separated from the rest of the world as it claimed to be. Actually the circle appears as a real circle, which is to say without interruption, only for those who believe in the absolute interruption of the intelligence by instinct. This is why it is so important, as Badiou taught us, to “split” the point at which the circle “rejoins itself.” It is crucial to understand that if the circle were perfectly homogeneous, uniform, symmetrical, absolute, no leap would be possible, no creation, no thought; it would be impossible to distinguish what flees and what comes back, becoming and that which has become.
Let’s take a step further: Why should we believe in the concept of circle? Is it not a perfect time to leap? I leap: there is no circle. But there are loops—heterogeneous, differentiated, asymmetrical—that are sometimes circles before becoming loops again. Unlike atemporal circles, loops have a point that is at once interior and exterior to them, a point of looping which is equally a point of un-looping. This original symmetry breaking is that without which there would be neither being nor thought. It is accessed by a leap. And even if it is a leap in place, as Heidegger maintains,19 this disconnection—which is of the order of finite transcendence, of existence—changes everything. We are perhaps tired of hearing about Plato’s Cave, and yet, how better to describe the loop of being, the fact that the ontological circuit is always already cut?20 The allegory of the Cave seems to begin with an inaugural dis-connection: A prisoner is freed; then he gets out of the cave and enjoys the contemplation of Ideas. But the narrative does not end here, for the prisoner agrees to lose her freedom and to return to the cave. The goal of this ethical-political return is to free the other prisoners, en masse, thanks to education—but also to offer a logical explanation for the first dis-connection: Indeed, the condition of possibility of the first liberation results from the liberation itself! Is it a vicious circle? Or the affirmation that the outside of the Cave is always already inside the Cave, that every subject bears a breaking point that contests the ontological reality of full circles. What exists are the infinite loops through which our freedom experiences itself as a ceaseless un-looping.
Wager.—But to what extent are we assured of these points of un-looping? Of the continuity or the discontinuity of being? Of these dis-joinings that would exercise their supposed effects even in animal realms? Of ek-, as such? Faith and belief, we say, in other words, alliances. Alliances of philosophy with what philosophy is not, when what philosophy is not comes to think philosophy, according to a recursivity that can be accomplished only at our risk and peril. As Pascal said, we “must wager. There is no choice. [We] are embarked.”
I cross the philosophical field in an absolute solitude. And so now there are no more limits, no more walls, nothing holds me back. It’s my only chance.
Catherine Malabou, Changing Difference
But it is not enough to wager. It is necessary to develop what the wager requires, beyond the mere creation of concepts, in the formation of metaphysical propositions. It can certainly seem difficult to take up the term “metaphysics” after all the attacks to which this term has been subjected: Did Nietzsche not declare that being is only a “fiction”?21 The human sciences have jealously attempted to take the place of metaphysics; but the humanities are today classed among those hollow idols, supplanted by the cybernetic sciences, computer computation, neurobiology, and research that digitizes literature in order to quantify it more easily. It is against all these cognitive simulations that I appeal to metaphysics, that name given to a science that will always lack a name.
The unlocatable of the concept.—Philosophy would not have been possible without an out-of-place, that un-attributable dimension with which it is sometimes too strongly identified. Philosophy is, however, not the only thing to suffer from this identification, this adhesion to nowhere: All cultural emanations—literature, science, religion—phenomenalize atopia to different degrees. All creation, singular or collective, draws the possibility of constituting an artistic or theoretical interiority to the outside.
Even more than philosophy, economics now represents the socially realized psychosis of a mathematical out-of-place barred from all real human and ecological situations. What separates philosophy in this inevitable regime of creative detachment is its definition as reflexive practice of atopia, curled out-of-place.
The term “reflection” goes back to a fundamentally classical conception of philosophy, a minimal conception, largely dismantled from Nietzsche to Deleuze—who, along with Guattari, reminds us in What Is Philosophy that scientists and artists know how to think by themselves, and have no need of philosophy to think what they create. Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Thomas Anderson, Virginia Woolf, Judy Chicago, and Ilya Prigogine are eminent thinkers in their own right, but in what way would it be forbidden to name the specificity of philosophy’s reflection? The creation of concepts is only the metabolization of the specific problem of philosophy, the problem that it is for itself in terms of thinking about thought. We cannot only compare, as Deleuze and Guattari do, creative operations (percepts for science, affects for art, concepts for philosophy), for it is equally necessary to include the creation of concepts in that paradoxical situation of the thinking of thought that makes the concept itself—far from being able to be reduced to the “tools” in what would be a sort of toolbox-book22—always in part unlocatable. It is this part that prevents the concept from becoming purely a tool, and makes it sometimes temporarily or ultimately unusable. To speak the language of Heidegger’s Being and Time, we can say that the unlocatable part of the concept makes it into something entirely other than a tool that is “present-at-hand” or “ready-to-hand,” for it causes the signifying “structure of reference” to crumble.23 It is thanks to this obscure part that the concept can venture beyond what is supposedly visible or invisible. This adventure can lead the concept to encounter a real aspect of the world. It is because of this that surfers, or origami-folders, according to Deleuze, might recognize themselves in The Fold, his book on Leibniz: The unlocatable makes unforeseen uses possible. Certainly this does not mean that it does not matter how we use concepts; not everything is “use,” as we are too quick to say today. The unlocatable part of the concept requires that the ethical gesture consists in problematizing more than in using.
The unlocatable part of the concept is its luck and its damnation, the same as that of philosophy—and philosophy must respond to it. Philosophy must be accountable for its atopian condition. This is a condition and it can be rejected; no one is constrained to philosophy—and this lack of constraint seems more and more to turn into the lack of philosophy itself, its disappearance in the name of theory, “studies” and trans-disciplinarity. However, because of its unlocatable and un-institutionalizable part, philosophy has always been trans-, firmly in disdain of frontiers, internationalist—or we should say, borrowing from Peter Gizzi, outernationalist.24 If political sovereignty has its source in the nothingness that allows it to give death and norms to living bodies, in the guise of what Achille Mbembe calls a “necropolitics,”25 then philosophy would be a relation to freed nothingness, unconditioned, without use, removed from all sovereign will. Philosophy is intrinsically an-archic.
Metaphysical problems.—Each domain of knowledge rests on a problem and different ways of dealing with it. But philosophy poses a problem to problems themselves, and this is what tends to disappear as soon as knowledge is assigned to calculation and to technologically assisted simulation. To problematize all problems pertains to the same passage that von Foerster opened up to transform science into what he calls “systems”: a doubling that puts what is interrogated into the interrogating position.26 The questioner himself has become the one who is questioned. This is not a simple doubling, but a change of epistemological status: the questioned object only becomes a questioning subject. Because of this doubling, truth emerges as what pierces knowledge, a mise-en-abyme that approaches—but only approaches—absolute skepticism.27 In effect, an absolute skepticism would attempt exactly to espouse the madness of being, that chaos that cannot even be set as foundation, because it is the absence of foundation—that absence itself giving no guarantee, in no way able to be mathematically held back. But an absolute concordance with chaos would be the end of thought; the doubling would dissolve in the pure One of a pure multiplicity of multiplicities. Philosophy can only be doubled, in the form of the thought of thought: This doubling is the abyssal place that philosophy creates for itself in order not to fall into the abyss. This is its paradoxical territory, which can be named the territory of metaphysics.
When we say metaphysics, we insist on the atopian character of philosophy, its relation to the –ek, to the outside. Around 50–60 b.c., Andronicus of Rhodes, putting the Aristotelian corpus in order, classified the principal work as meta ta phusika, literally what comes after physics. In this sense, metaphysics is without content, simply designating that which cannot be classified: a science with no name. Whether empirical or speculative, critiques of metaphysics have always been about hollowing out metaphysics, showing that its contents had been usurped, and from there returning these contents to a more concrete philosophy, a more authentic ontology or a specific science (sociology, economics, neurology, and so on). In so doing, these critiques ultimately end up purifying metaphysics as a domain outside domains, an extra-epistemological era, an extra-territorial science, unwittingly confirming—this is the irony—metaphysics’ original gesture and necessity. If ontology is the science or logic of being, the possibility of thinking being as such implies metaphysics as the position and operation of thought on being. The difficulty is—and this is indeed what we have been confronting since the beginning of this work—not to transform the “after”—the meta—into the “above,” into absolute split; not to change dis-joining into immunization, into auto-immune disorder. Here is our categorical imperative: “Metaphysician, do not turn atopian deterritorialization into the territory of the undamaged!”
We might re-read the philosophical tradition starting from this internal confrontation: If Sophia can also mean wisdom, this would be only in terms of its capacity to metabolize the negativity that is unique to it—a metabolization forbidding that “metaphysics qua metaphysics [might be] authentic nihilism” (Heidegger). In other words, the absence of an interior struggle against ontological immunization is always the sign of a rejection—known, unknown, projective—of philosophy. The justice of this agonistic operation is the reminder of originary chaos, of the temporal flame that flickers in each object, each thought: every matheme is the suppression of noise. Philosophy is obligated to suffer from a hypermnesia, just to the point of forgetting what it naively—natively—needs to create its concepts.
Being, existence, and the living.—What must be defended today, what must we promote? A fundamental ontology (Heidegger), a phenomenological ontology (Sartre), a mathematical ontology (Badiou), or an ontology of multiplicities (Deleuze)? We understand the value of a defense of ontology as constitutive exercise, opposing the thought of being to the celebration of the Other, in its moral or religious forms. Ontology also appears healthy when one wants to banish philosophy to the confines of studies concerning shallow language games,28 instructions for social behavior (how to be happy, whom to vote for, and so on.), micro-topics trapped in stifling “areas” of knowledge. Reducing reality to a social, cultural, and linguistic domain, in the end constructed by humans, dominant forms of knowledge are now challenged by a timely wave of ontological investigations: speculative realisms and new materialisms have launched a new set of researches into objects, reality, and matter that imply several conceptions of being as something literally unhuman, irreducible to human construction. Yet I am not sure that reality or matter is a good point of departure for theory. In fact, every time we begin an investigation by trying to find an accurate name for being, existence fades. When being is the first object of thought, a movement of absolutization is automatically launched; this absolutization unavoidably makes existence secondary. Thus what seems to me the main task of contemporary philosophy is to fight this secondariness and to ab-solve philosophy of the absolute. This does not mean that being is just a hollow fiction; rather, it means that being, the name of being, has to be found after existence is investigated. What is at stake is not a mere inversion, à la Sartre, of the kind “existence precedes essence,” but a new version of being as a difference retroactively found from the inside of an existent. Neither a substance that precedes subjects and objects, nor a hollow fiction that we ought to forget, being can be grasped as an effect of the self-differentiation of the existent—a stone, a living being, or the whole universe.
Once we understand that a true philosophy of existence accounts for the differentiating spacings by which an existent comes into being, how can we understand life? For Nietzsche, life is nothing other than the real name of being: “The living is the being: there is no other being.” Every other name given to being would be wrong: “The ‘being’—we have no other way to represent it than ‘to live’—So how can something that is dead be a ‘being’?”29 The mistake here would be to consider life a substance severed from such or such existing living being. Rather, we should understand the relation between existence and life, in the living being, as an indistinct separation: There is a difference, somewhere and somehow, but we are not necessarily capable of (al)locating it. For example, sexual difference can exist without being distinctly ascribable to a precise biological locus of the body, not because the body does not matter, but because the matter at stake in the process of sexual differentiation does not necessarily correspond to what supposedly is the norm (the “normal” “sexual” characteristic of such or such “identity”). We understand now why a philosophy of existence, far from being a flat kind of knowledge, requires a metaphysical depth of field: The metaphysical function is to leave a place for the unlocatable that is involved in the self-differentiating process that gives way to an existent. If a vitalism should stem from this philosophy, it would be an affirmation of the fact that life, rather than being a principle or an animated matter, is what confirms to the highest degree that there is no such thing as being as such. In this lack of being-as-such, metaphysics creates its territory.
The unlocatable [insituable] and situation.—Hypothesis carved into unassignable territory, the metaphysical proposition awaits perceptions. A metaphysical proposition is neither relation to objects, nor to subjects, but to trans-jects, to trajectories as incalculable as the disjunction whose movement it seeks to repeat. Inhabiting a paradoxical territory, a metaphysical proposition must, however, guard itself from being too guarded from the world. As Bernard Aspe has shown, the danger of metaphysics is in believing that speculation is a self-sufficient act: Such belief will unavoidably bypass real political action, especially if speculation finds a comfortable place in culture—as, for example, a book.30 How does the passage from metaphysical out-of-place to place in the world come about? From the unlocatable to the situation? It does not come about, it cannot. A metaphysical proposition can only charge a trans-ject with metaphors of the unhuman, with the hope that these metaphors will not completely vanish once exposed to politics.
The Madwoman of the Out-of-Place
For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner’s adage forbids: to work one’s way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through a higher concept of the negation of the negation.
Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems
Name for a science that does not have one, out-of-place, unlocatable character of the concept: All of these conditions are assembled to set new and imaginary doves flying in the “empty space of [the] pure understanding.”31 I want to affirm rather than to deny the relation of metaphysics to the imagination. Against philosophy’s inaugural and persistent mistrust of the imagination, I say that metaphysics summons the imagination in its out-of-place. But in what form? What type of imagination is at play in metaphysics? The question is whether the imagination seals and encircles metaphysical territory, or if it can open it toward its extremes: the immemorial and the end of time.
Madwoman of the house.—Like their predecessors, the thinkers of the twentieth century are highly wary of the imagination. On this point there exists general agreement from Plato to Deleuze. Deleuze and Guattari insist on the real aspect of becoming; Lacan develops the concepts of the real and the symbolic against the imaginary and the illusory captures of the “mirror stage”; Badiou, following Lacan, accords to fiction only the virtue of being a stop-gap for the real; Derridian “messianism without messiah” implies the casting off of all anticipation so as to leave space open for the “to-come.” The idea that the imagination is the “madwoman of the house,” a “madwoman who is pleased to play the fool” (Malebranche),32 is systematically maintained. Pascal points out the difficulty: If she were only the “mistress of error and falsehood,” this would be a lesser evil—but the problem becomes that the imagination is “all the more treacherous because it is not consistently treacherous. For it would be an infallible rule of truth if it were an infallible one of lies.”33 The imagination can be true, and it is exactly this possibility that is intolerable. To evade this danger, we place her under the control of reason, by producing allegories (Plato)34 or by insisting on the fact that “truth has the structure of fiction” (Lacan).35 From here, we can truly say that imagination could possibly pronounce something in the way of truth. What is repressed each time is the destabilizing power of the imagination, which exposes a certain unlimitedness that cannot be fixed in some divine or mathematical infinity, not only to the wandering of the truth, but to wandering itself. Descartes thus shows that the imagination does not reach the essence of wax, and that it must leave room for the understanding and “the inspection of the spirit.”36 But this failure of the imagination is welcome: It enables its evacuation to the benefit of certitude. Against the fluidity of imagination, let us pose the fixity of the concept, understood as description of domain.
I am not certain that it is possible to escape this use of the imagination, as I write these lines in order to explain imagination, that is to say to fix it in a system of thought. Writing implies a symbolization in the form of emergence that spaces the two edges of meaning and links them on the basis of their difference. Interpreting the meaning of the second Biblical commandment, Lacan tells us that “the elimination of the function of the imaginary presents itself to my mind as the principle of the relation to the symbolic, that is to say, to speech.”37 The difficulty, which Lacan confronts in The Ego in Freud’s Theory, is to think symbolic emergence as such, and then to see the way in which this emergence reconfigures the situation that preceded it,38 in such a way that the latter, retroactively, seems to have been that of all time. A symbolization locally forbids the affirmation that “nothing will have taken place but the place” (Mallarmé), no matter how intense an obsessive anxiety and its canceling drive may be. However, the great danger to which Lacan, like others following him, has often succumbed is to fix the Symbolic by over-emphasizing its detachment from the edges of meaning. It is this reinforcement that does away with the possibility of reconfiguring the symbolic, renewing the emergence of the distinct, anticipating any politics that would contest the symbolic in its contingent social form. The Symbolic with a capital S, according to Butler (as well as Foucault), is nothing other than a norm.
Against this hardening of the symbolic, the opposite temptation is powerful: to refuse to distinguish between symbolic and imaginary (Butler,39 Derrida40). Certainly a local refusal might be useful, even politically necessary. But a confusion of registers will ultimately lead us to miss the unique power of symbolization as well as imagination. It is the “forgetting [of] this primitive world of metaphor,” the “petrifaction and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid,” that, according to Nietzsche, explains the fixing of the concept, this no more than a “residue of metaphor.” But for all that, can we do without this forgetting? And is metaphor only a product of the imagination? To answer these questions, we must go very far—in order to leap, again, even farther.
Non-knowing and prospecting.—In his Doctrine of Knowledge, Fichte defines a sort of inaugural unconscious, before all repression, which consists of the absolute impossibility, for the self, of becoming conscious of the imaginary formation of the world: “not a reflection,” this formation “is not ascribed to the self,” and is only reattached to the self after the fact, “in the philosophic reflection which we are at present engaged in and which must always be carefully distinguished from the common and necessary kind.”41 In other words,
to that of which we are conscious as a product of imagination, we do not ascribe reality; yet we certainly do this to what we find contained in the understanding, to which we ascribe no power of production at all, but merely that of conservation.
In so-called natural (non-philosophic) reflection, we cannot go back up behind—and before—the understanding and its activity on the world; we go back up to it and discover that there is something “given.” Something has been given “to reflection as the material of presentation,” but we “do not become conscious” of the way in which this matter “arrived there”: this original presentation remains inaccessible to consciousness: “Hence our firm conviction of the reality of things outside us, and this without any contribution on our part, since we are unaware of the power that produces them.”42 If we could naturally and immediately become conscious of this original power of the productive imagination, we would not have this “firm conviction,” the assurance that things beyond us exist. For Fichte, the assured existence of an out-of-us results from our ontological incapacity for the immediate grasp of the imagination. The unconscious, Fichte tells us, is thus thinkable as an operation (and not a content): It is that without which everything would be only oneself, and thus defines a sphere of non-power, an originally barred access. Fichte approaches psychosis here, insofar as his thought strays into the closest reaches of that without which alterity would fail. But he permits us to understand, a century before Freud, the difference between the unconscious as repression, “the unconscious proper,” in Freud’s terms, and the original unconscious barring access to a certain imagination that we would call creative, originarily creative or formative of the world. The “fiery liquid” of which Nietzsche speaks is already a derivative production, a representation, linked to a re-productive form of the imagination. What was called by the name of genius, as capacity, is the possibility of connecting the second imagination (re-productive) and the first (productive). This connection is first and above all artistic. But it also has, without doubt, a place in a certain regime of political formation, or of scientific intuition.
Let us add that this connection also comes about by metaphysical thought, in an abstract mode and not in the modality of any realization (artistic, political, scientific). This mode is double.
1. Under the category of consciousness, metaphysics does not mean that which pertains to identity and to the dialectic of self and other, but that which is in touch with the immemorial. Consciousness, said to be reflexive, is not what initially accompanies my representations but what summons them to their point of appearance. It is the immediate grasp of the immemorial, grasped in terms of form and not of contents (this is the Fichtian lesson). By consciousness, which is nothing other than the “outside of itself,”43 and which constitutes not so much objects of thought as a universe in quest of meaning, I am immediately carried to the beginning of time, and once again to the question: “why is there something rather than nothing” (Leibniz)? The inaugural unconscious does not have to become conscious, since it is that consciousness which, in touch with the immemorial, does not know itself. According to what is only apparently a paradox, the consciousness of the immemorial that knows itself is the known inaugural unconscious—not illuminated, disclosed or canceled, but known as such, with its gap (its absence of ground).44 Hypothetically, if a subject—a supposed Sage—incarnated the thinking of thought, and if this thinking managed to maintain itself, I believe that it would be necessary to say, with Schelling and the obscure tradition that innervates his philosophy, that this knowledge would also be the end of the subject, a non-knowledge indistinguishable from the subjectivity left vacant by the disappearance of the subject—a non-knowledge turned into a subjectivity for a subject who would know nothing about it.
2. This obscure contact with the immemorial, which is the ground of the unlocatable part of the concept, is the basis upon which metaphysics separates from time, toward something like the non-memory of the future, literally and metaphorically the end of time. It is here that the concept, riddled with holes, becomes prospective. If, as Adorno claims, metaphysics “is both a critique and a reprise or resumption of theology,” if it “attempts to rescue through concepts what it simultaneously calls into question through its critique,”45 this rescue simultaneously implies an advance in time that exceeds this critique. Certainly, Adorno tells us, “one will not survive by preserving some so-called higher spheres, or what I would prefer to call nature reserves, which reflection is not allowed to touch”; against this putting-into-reserve, he proposes to “[push] the processes of de-mythologizing, or enlightenment [Aufklärung], to the extreme”: “‘renounce, that you may gain.’”46 But it is the same Adorno who tells us that metaphysics cannot gain anything except by being also the possibility of “thinking beyond itself into Openness.”47 This Openness is the symmetrical temporality of the immemorial. Thus metaphysics “is the form of consciousness in which it attempts to know what is more than the case, or is not merely the case.”48 To know “more than the case, or is not merely the case” pertains to the imagination, and not to the calculation of understanding. Beyond what we know and what we feel is the place where the understanding becomes hallucinatory, the eye becoming concept and the concept seeing. Cartesian “evil genie,” Fichte’s “living sight,” Nietzschean “overman,” and so on.
Rational enthusiasm.—But what is this Schwärmerei? Are we not here beyond the boundaries of philosophy, and even of metaphysics? Or are we not confirming, but at our expense, what is said of metaphysics: namely, that it must be taken care of, nursed, because it is delirious or childish? At no moment, however, do we propose to abandon the Principle of reason, in the sense that Serres has been able to show, this Principle being simply that there exists something rather than nothing:
Exist rather than. Which is almost a pleonasm, since existence denotes a stability, plus a deviation from the fixed position. To exist rather than is to be in deviation from equilibrium. Exist rather. And the principle of reason is, strictly speaking, a theorem of statics. If things exist and if there is a world, they are displaced in relation to zero.49
The metaphysical imagination is what enables the contemplation of deviations or spacings that are not immediately perceptible, whether they concern the past emergence of things or their future possibilities—two localizations of the out-of-place. This rational imagination promises the incredible and gives itself to the enigma of the presence of the world. Thus metaphysics does not escape its boundaries, but incorporates them into its abyssal questioning.
If ancient tragedy was thrown off course by the dialectical drive towards knowledge and the optimism of science, one should conclude from this fact that there is an eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic views of the world. Only when the spirit of science can be carried to its limits and its claim to universal validity negated by the demonstration of these limits might one hope for a rebirth of tragedy; the symbol which we would propose for this cultural form is that of the music-making Socrates.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
A double temptation threatens philosophy: to close in on itself, abstract itself absolutely from the world, or to want to become itself absolutely other. These two possibilities can coincide, resting on a closure into itself by which philosophy would believe itself to be the other—a science, Science, art, a religion, politics. In other words, what Badiou calls “conditions,” the “truth-procedures” of philosophy. Is philosophy, however, never its own condition?
The philosophical act.—Badiou affirms that philosophy is missing an act, unlike its conditions. There is the act of love, or political actions (declarations of war, revolutions, and so on). There are also forms of techno-scientific production, artistic performances, and perhaps, beyond the conditions identified by Badiou, religious ritual. What, however, is philosophy’s act? We might say of the philosopher what Lacan said of the psychoanalyst: that she has a “horror of the act” (for the act could be reduced to an interpretation, even though interpretation is ultimately secondary vis-à-vis the symbolization that takes place in psychoanalysis). Here is Socrates:
You do not understand what is going on; none of the arguments comes from me, but always from him who is talking with me. I myself know nothing, except just a little, enough to extract an argument from another man who is wise and to receive it fairly.50
Socrates—or any philosopher—can sometimes be a Master, but certainly no more in the manner of Pythagoras, assuring that “He, the Master, said it [Ipse dixit].” For only the silence carried by a philosopher assures the impact of his act: the re-moval of weak knowledge, the displacement of trajectories, the transformation of circles into spirals. The philosophical act is conditioned by an exemplary passivity (“to receive,” says Socrates) attested to by the lives of the Stoics, Cynics, or Pyrrho: The rejection of the world rests on the utter conviction of being “embarked.” When the philosopher plays the Master (or, impatient disciple,51 names his Master in order to install himself in that line of descent and thus become, in a form of supreme recognition, the Master of his Master), he is perhaps a professor; if not, an imposter.
There is thus indeed a philosophical act, and because of this the risk—to take up here the ideas of Bernard Aspe—of an enclosing, a sort of suture of philosophy to itself, in its own speech, its words, and their cultural packaging. And, linked to this risk, philosophy’s permanent questioning of the act by which it would no longer be itself, but one of those privileged others that it tends to resemble: Science, sciences, art, religion, or politics:
1. Science. For Hegel, the Sage is possible, and Science names the end of philosophy and the end of questioning—which is to say, the answer. In his commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève insists on the fact that the elimination of the possibility of the Sage implies either a skeptical end of philosophy, or a theological affirmation of a non-human—that is to say divine—knowledge. Vis-à-vis the first possibility, he indicates that a radically skeptical end of philosophy leads to a supreme silence, taking in its fall not only philosophy but the possibility of speech itself—an “absolute silence.”52 This corresponds to what we have affirmed in Book I: the fundamental alliance of philosophy with existence as such. As for the second possibility, Kojève affirms that the condition of Science is the circularity of knowledge: to deny this return to the initial, which verifies that everything has been said, is to deny wisdom. On the contrary, the theological hypothesis implies the circle’s point of rupture, a “singular point” that “closes” and “interrupts” it, this point being God. It is remarkable that the lessons of Kojève, which are dedicated to this question of absolute knowledge, are confronted ceaselessly by the hypothesis of madness (that which his auditors—Bataille, Lacan—would indeed have heard). In fact, an extreme possibility is here at play: an either/or, which can only be resolved—if we try to maintain the Hegelian philosophical system as Kojève describes it—in a radical immanentization where human being, the world, and God are identified. What was not evident for Kojève here is the possibility of the spiral, which is only the incessant and a-theological multiplication of the points of interruption of the circle, throwing the latter into what is no longer simply the question of philosophy or the sage’s answer, but metaphysical proposition, and what it owes to the out-of-place—to the interruptions—as well as to the imagination.
2. The sciences. Once we have abandoned the idea of a mathematics capable of accounting for being-as-such, there remains the close relation that meta-physics keeps with physics. (Besides, Heidegger reminds us here that Aristotle’s Physics is an authentic book of metaphysics, which is not a good sign for him—but is, assuredly, for us.) The physics that we need concerns existence and tries to respond to Leibniz’s question—“why is there something rather than nothing”—transformed as follows: Why is there something rather than (nothing). The rather-than, as Serres after Lucretius has said, and as Prigogine and Stengers have confirmed, consists in accounting for the bifurcations, original phase transitions, structuring dissipations—the clinamen of being.53 When sciences do not think (to refer to Heidegger’s ungenerous diagnosis), it is because they become simulated calculations cut off from the immemorial and the unpredictable, subjected to the control of existences needed by capitalism. Thus we understand—thanks to Heidegger—that it is essential to make manifest the dimension of nothingness that, in Leibniz’s proposition as in the aforementioned Occidental tradition, seems largely to have been ignored. Yet Heidegger would certainly have interpreted our parentheses around the word nothing, in our formula “why is there something rather than (nothing),” as—again—the sign of the foreclosure of nothingness. To address this Heideggerian concern, we must subsequently write:
why is there something rather than → nothing
Thus rather than to consider nothingness qua nothingness, it is better to understand how the arrow of nothing(ness) tilts the letters of rather than → nothing, and to understand nothing(ness) as the groundlessness of being which takes place as spacing, rolled-up-between the spirals of being and its multiple singularities, living and non-living. On this level, physical and metaphysical are conjoined; but whoever is curious enough to closely observe the present state of the sciences can confirm to what point, for speculative physics in particular, the spirals of comprehension become wide and whirling as we approach the immemorial, the Big Bang being no more than an ancillary element to add to the file of the groundlessness of being. The universe has, in fact, been expanding since a quasi-origin 13.7 billion years before today, but the cause of this expansion’s acceleration is a force that is still unknown, that we call “vacuum energy,” and that would constitute 75 percent of the universe. Add to this 20 percent of what we call “dark matter,” and what remains is 5 percent for our visible matter. Five percent: The more we learn, the more it is dark and empty, and the more precious our candles become. In the same dark vein, M-theory (or branes theory) implies a space-time with eleven dimensions—although, happily or unhappily, we only perceive four of them (the three dimensions of space, plus time). Our universe would evolve among hidden branes, miniscule or on a very large scale. According to cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, a sort of Big Crunch/Big Bang is produced when two branes enter into collision.54 These hyper-cosmic encounters would be regular, and would be repeated several times in large periods of about a thousand billion years, according to the model of an ekpirotic universe signaling the conjunction of this new cosmology with certain Stoic intuitions. For the cyclical universes described by Steinhardt and Turok, there is no so-called Big Bang singularity (a singularity designating here a point of infinite density and temperature). But, indeed, is it not this cyclical character of these universes that must be interrogated? We say to those physicists that they have not yet found their spiral.
No subjectivism or relativism here, but a strange loop that seems on the verge of verifying Parmenides’s intuition that being and thinking are the same. Except we add one word: being and thinking are almost the Same, always failing to agree on what the Same is. Such is the meaning of the cosmic comedy in which our consciousness is experienced as the privileged receptacle of a tragedy.
3. Art and religion. But are we not making the sciences into a grand game of metaphor? Rather, it is the sciences themselves, which, calculating, must also think the incalculable domain that is offered to them in the mode of original metaphors, transports—that is to say what metaphorès literally means—that their “percepts” try to slow (to cool) down. Or is it not philosophy itself that we destine ineluctably to be lost, like poetry, as Carnap argues? Let us repeat, philosophy is a question about itself, its essence and its gender (son genre). It is impossible to classify philosophy. It is truly neither art nor science, the young Nietzsche tells us: “We must make up and characterize a species [for it] [eine Spezies].”55 This species of thought he defines in Heraclitus as “invention beyond the limits of experience [. . .] continuation of the mythical drive [. . .] thus essentially pictorial.” He adds: “Overcoming of knowledge by means of the powers that fashion myth. Kant is remarkable—knowledge and faith! Innermost kinship between philosophers and founders of religion.” Kinship, or rather affiliation that would be misleading to consider as an identity. Unlike believers, philosophers begin by de-founding the beginning and the end of time, which they revive into metaphysical propositions. Making holes in the two extremities of time, exceeding the human lifespan, metaphysical propositions demand neither communion with oneself (religere)56 nor unification (religare), but rather faith in an unhuman meaning that no God can guarantee.
In poetry, far from being the effect of a pure flow of the imaginary, metaphor fixes a new symbolic emergence, even though the “fiery liquid” of the imagination is not dried up, but always active, always running on the surface—a metaphor is a volcano, too, burning to be a monument. Poetic metaphor does not have to harden absolutely, contrary to what happens ineluctably to the concept, which is detached from the imagination. Nevertheless, a philosophy worthy of the name must not repudiate the contrary movement, which consists in redoing the path of the concept towards metaphor, not to come to an end there but to grasp the meaning of this round trip. In other words, a certain circulation between imagination and symbolization, image and concept, can be at work in metaphysical territory. It is this circulation, this double translation of—and from—silence, which has in a certain way always taken place in metaphysics. In this respect, metaphysics is a place where we remember that “metaphors are not for humans.”57
4. Politics. The woe of the political territorialization of philosophical atopia has been much described (Plato and Dionysus the tyrant, Hegel and Napoleon, certain philosophers of the twentieth century and Stalin or Mao). It is, however, easy to understand that a political application of a philosophical program with no discontinuity between program and application is not only a negation of the philosophy that we have promised since the beginning of this work, but also of politics, which is a matter of the case. Badiou has largely shown to what point to “act in the absence of Idea”58 would mean acquiescing to the disasters of time. But what is an Idea? Either it is the entire truth, the universal without exception, and the passage of philosophy into politics would be catastrophic—the passage would be application. Or the Idea inherently bears the mark of an interruption, or better, the strata of successive interruptions by which wounded truth is made the history of a thought in progress, of a trans-ject of thought. Subjectively, the Idea is situated at the point where I can only fail and despise it by denying what has initiated my own existential trans-ject. Taken speculatively, closed into philosophy, this failure would be the negation of the relation of philosophy with its others. The act that consists of embodying this Idea can, in fact, only take place in the form of a Political Other of philosophy. This act cannot find the reason—the justification—for its passage in philosophy. And this is precisely because there is a non-assured passage that the truth can be experienced as such. It is experienced not immediately as Idea, but as the loss of the Idea in the instant of the act. This is what I call a political case, a case being that which cannot be treated a priori. Said again in other words, a political act does not desiccate atopia, but dismisses it in the reality that bears its mark. This dismissal is that which prevents the political act from becoming a revelation, for politics as well as for philosophy. Certainly there can be revelations—in terms of crystallized intuition, of sensation, which is confirmed in intensity as in extension—but in no case do these permit us to do away with either thought or act. There is no possible absolutizing of the act as thought and of the thought in action. So what does philosophy do to politics? It charges it with meaning and promises politics the possibility of a bridge.
Out-of-place drives out.—But philosophy assures the necessity of a leap as well. Internal to the creation of the concept, this necessity also concerns all existential creation, insofar as this advances toward the unknown. This condition returns to philosophy: to be always unconditional in its relation to the world. Philosophy’s absence of condition must be protected from its immunitarian temptation. It is, however, precisely the rupture unique to the condition that is the very condition of being-towards-the-world, which demands to be lived as such. Philosophy must experience the madness of its out-of-place, which drives it from itself and extends it toward an other.