Let humanity and the earth disappear, and nothing in the cosmos will have changed. And this leads to the ultimate paradox: we aren’t even sure that the knowledge that reveals our insignificance has any validity. We know that we are nothing or not much and, knowing that, we don’t know if this truly is knowledge. To perceive that the universe and thought are incommensurate leads us to question the validity of thought itself. It’s never-ending.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (“Politics and Race”)
If there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
In truth, we have nothing much to say. Written or verbal profusion does not change this. To the contrary. Several intuitions, some revelations. An ordinary experience, a “miserable miracle” (Henri Michaux). Sometimes a grand event, that will have solicited us only on the basis of a barely felt rupture coming from the past, or of a strange and far-off pleasure that we would like to rediscover. We might as well call this an unthought, at the edge of the world of life and the life of spirit—but what should we do with this unthought?
Incommensurable and translation.—We seek to translate the unthought. From silence, from the unhuman, from the barely formulated, from far-off sensation. To translate does not consist in making a passage from one form to another one on the grounds of a universal language. “When I look at an article in Russian,” Warren Weaver, pioneer of today’s flourishing automatic translation, tells us, “I say: ‘This is written in English, but in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’” The other is here considered a failed self that does not even know how to speak English well. And translation becomes, according to what Naoki Sakai calls the mode of “homolingual address,” the production of a commensurability that reveals a discursive homogeneity that aims to neutralize any sort of alterity.1 The unity of the other and the “self” is that of a “self” lent to the other, and that the latter will give back when it knows how to recognize and reproduce it—a little less well than the “self,” it goes without saying. Such is the virus of homolingual automation that verifies that all is the same in reducing all to the same. As an antidote, let us emphasize, as Brett Neilson does, that authentic translation is not a “communication of information between language groups,” a weak form of communication that reduces languages to codes and codes to one unique code, but “the institution of relation at sites of incommensurability.”2
Translation as a relation that maintains a form of incommensurability takes place in philosophical utterance. There is a philosophical “people” [peuple] in translation, but this people is divided, always attesting to an incommensurability between the saying and the to-say. The written is not the record of the Idea, for the Idea is negative, incomplete; writing drifts on a drifting surface. To consider that there is an identity between the Idea and the written is ultimately to be consistent with the spirit of capitalism and its move of generalized equivalence, an equivalence that non-Prigogien science has facilitated by its reduction of everything into measurable, commensurate quantities. Marx summarized this perfectly as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, when he understood that in the Hegelian system, and beyond it in the capitalist system, logic is the money of mind.3 To fight the pact of logic and money, philosophy must first recognize the limits that shape what has to be said. Certainly philosophy is held to the requirement of ex-plicitation (etymologically: to un-ply, i.e. to unfold); but it must also combat the manner in which this solicitation can become the imperative of a logical flattening, of a translatability whose automation would reinforce saturated immanence, that integral fluidity that tends to completely assimilate absolute transcendence. From here, several strategies are thinkable for a philosophy that refuses to submit the search for communication to the eradication of the incommensurable. The only way to arrive there consists in communicating the incommensurable. To the circularity of absolute knowledge, some will substitute a closed work, attesting to an out-of-measure (Guy Debord and his Society of the Spectacle); the concept will be struck by such a negativity that it will be compelled to give up, at the level of the content, all foundation, but the form of the concept will be kept, promising the enunciation of a still-inaccessible truth, or a truth whose immediate access would, for a civilization irreparably lost, be the sign of a failure (Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben); some will seek the passage toward the poetry of thought, toward the “other thought” (Martin Heidegger), toward the point where literature and philosophy become indistinguishable (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell), toward the prophetic of the overhuman (Nietzsche), a world-literature [littérature-monde] of schizophrenic projections (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). Each time, the meaning of philosophy will be put back into play in the form of a vivifying anti-philosophy—sometimes to the point of refusing the name of philosophy in the name of feminism (Catherine Malabou).
Atopia and relation.—Writing a manifesto for philosophy had as its goal: to promote that which in philosophy was deserving of its name, as the divergence or dis-joining attested to by all existence. To underscore the violence at work in all manifestos, I might have gone after media-friendly philosophers, but the target would have been too easy; or after the dignitaries of philosophy who prevent untimely knowledge from crossing the threshold of the university—but even the university no longer tolerates them. It will later be necessary to explain myself at greater length to certain new disciples of the absolute, of object-oriented ontology, or of “flat ontology”: returning to the idea of substance, the absolute, or the object out-of-relation is less reactionary than ultimately engaging a movement for restoration that, without doubt, has not yet breathed its last. But orientation in terms of objects or things is just one aspect of so-called speculative realism. This trend of thought also includes thinkers who refuse to reduce being to objects. For instance, Iain Hamilton Grant, one of the founding members of speculative realism, leans on Schelling’s philosophy in order to oppose “somatic” representations of nature that reduce nature to bodies or objects: Nature is also a subject, understood as “the dynamic process of the self-construction of matter.”4 Elsewhere, Steven Shaviro resists what he calls “eliminativism,” which consists of positing an inert material Outside, without life and without thought.5 Finally, we should mention one of the major works associated with speculative realism: Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, which, in stunning style, describes the manner in which “anonymous materials” shatter all subjectivities and all poles of identification from the inside. A speculative fiction inspired by Deleuze-Guattari and Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia brings horror to the ontological dignity demanded by our tormented era.6
For now, let us note that what is salient in thought has always required a form of exteriority vis-à-vis the economy, social spaces, or the State—and let us add, for our day, social networks. There is nothing new in this. It is indeed necessary that metaphysical atopia have, in a way, its point of localization in a deterritorialization vis-à-vis power, even when it is a matter of opposing it. It is, however, more than probable that the social form that is drawn before us might have the effect of reinforcing this delocalization, as well as the search for new sites for the discovery of thought and acts of transmission that would not be reduced to the verification of immediately utilizable skills. The new social form integrates via norms even as it accentuates the “symbolic misery” (Stiegler) and the expropriation of everything that could allow living beings, human and non-human, to hope for a life. It is in this respect symptomatic that madness itself can no longer benefit from a dismissed case (non-lieu).7 Before, any reason left to the madman was the condition of possibility of his healing, while his madness excluded him from any form of punishment; today, it is in the name of what remains of his reason that the madman will be punished. Where article 64 of the old French penal code specified that “[t]here can be no crime, or delict, where the accused was in a state of madness at the time of the action; or when he has been constrained by a force which he had not the power to resist,” and that a dismissed case could potentially be granted him after psychiatric examination, the article 122-1 that replaces it introduces a notion of alteration that makes him punishable.8 But why relate this change in psychiatric paradigm to the question of socio-ecological misery?
Because there is no relation without atopia. Atopia is not the exception held back from the All, posed in sovereignty like an absolute difference similar to no other, but the room to maneuver from which it becomes possible to connect. Without this spacing, the very idea of relation makes no sense; there is no relation when everything is compact. But it is equally certain that relation, or in other words, the existence of more-than-one,9 is what enables the cut. It would, however, be pointless to wonder which, relation or atopia, comes first, insofar as atopia concerns any more-than-one, not necessarily human. At the origin, there is always the play of clinamen, the originary spiral by which the being comes and goes, makes its way in the form of a world then disappears. If atopia is the possibility of an untethering, it does not, however, prescribe a non-relation. In no way does it require being in a situation without truly being there: that pathology of presence, that non-presence, is the hardening of atopia into existential immunization. “Hamm: I was never there. Clov: Lucky for you.” The critique of the ravages of the undamaged must in no manner lead to a pure and simple binding to the world, but to the affirmation of being-toward-the-world, transcendence ≈ x, neither binding nor exception, both relation and atopia.
Transcendence ≈ x: Was this the conceptual formula that we sought to elaborate in this book? It is quite possible, in that ectopia would doubtless have been preferable to atopia. However, it seemed to me necessary to shift the emphasis toward the side that is today most inaudible. The prefix of the term atopia, the privative a-, is necessary because it insists on the place of negativity in the relational elaboration of being-towards-the-world. It introduces the existence of metaphysical territory as perilous camp into the possibility of thinking, calling forth the two extreme functions of the imagination: to take account of the immemorial, and to engage in negotiations with the end of time.
Ecology and existentialism.—What type of philosopher could engage such relations with the end of time and the immemorial? I have described her as a peripheral medium. Peripheral because she occupies no center but can bring about—starting from eccentricity—a certain number of mediations, a certain exercise of consciousness extended as non-place of passage toward metaphysical lands.
These lands shelter very strange adventures. There we seek a medicine—there the doctor-philosopher of language or of civilization (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) is at work, taking care while keeping his distance. But these philosophers make strange doctors, prescribing that we keep ourselves equal to the task of existence even as existence is ballasted by an infinitely profound universe, irremediably lost in the groundlessness that binds it to its enigma. There is no philosophical therapy, or else it exists only to create relations of meaning.10 Philosophy first thinks these relations starting from a primordial untethering. From there, its risk is to expose subjectivity to the cruelty of the real, chaos, or the empty case. Is the philosopher thus committed to re-creating a center, restoring the position of the subject in the manner of late Foucault, as well as Badiou (Theory of the Subject) and, in a reactive and weak form, of numerous French “new philosophers” of the 1980s? Unless the world might itself be the center, the world as relational field riddled with out-of-fields. Not Object-Oriented Philosophy, but Field-Disoriented Philosophy.
I have, however, indicated the necessity of not purely and simply evacuating the position of the subject, but of situating it on the edges of existential trans-jects and their incessant re-moval. Spiral re-moval, always materialized in a new form of life (looking the empty case straight in the eye is a resolutely depressive position). It is one of the great merits of Muriel Combes to have shown this: “no bare life is severable”: a life cannot be severed from its form without losing what qualifies it as living.11 If we accept that a form of life is existence, then we must say that existence is not being or the being, logically detachable, but that without which life would be what the majority of scientists try today to obtain in vain: a plastic matter exploited at will. Untethering, disidentification, or de-subjectivation are only the desirable moments of transition towards a new form of life—“No detachment from a form of life except by configuring another.”12
The philosopher must work toward these new formations. All of his or her conceptual equipment has no meaning except when extended toward these terrestrial projections and the politics that existence requires: not to give life to existences (an essentialist position that would see existence as a sort of spirit to embody), but to make it so that nothing prevents the living from existing. This is not a pan-psychic or pan-vitalist formula, which by giving life to everything risks denying the precarity of the living (it does not matter if the animals die, for everything is living, robots are living, and so on) or that asks that all life be protected. It is a formula in which an existentialism attentive to ecology is brought to recognize the eccentricity of the living: To prevent the living from existing consists first and foremost in collapsing them (on an object, a commodity, patentable DNA, common substance, generalized vibration, and so on). To allow to live is to do justice to the rare forms by which the living express themselves.
Philosophy’s metaphysical propositions thus situated have the ultimate aim of making livable the space between the immemorial and the end of time. They must make it so that this grand transition that is the universe does not break down under a lack of promises, whether these come from politics, from art, or from love. This work will have sought, by example, to see if it is not wonder, or at least enthusiasm, about the existence of the universe which the figure of Socrates, “maker of music,”13 has sometimes carried.