Critique of Pure Madness
1. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 59.
2. “Fountain of Youth, High Tech Style,” New York Times, June 14, 2010. See also the novel Permutation City by Greg Egan (1994).
3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186. Bruno Latour, “Beck ou comment refaire son outillage intellectual,” in La Société du risque (Paris, Champs/Flammarion, 2001), 8.
4. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
5. On the question of wilderness, see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 69–90.
6. Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 1999), 42; Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 442; Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5.
7. Even if one calls this constructivism a “compositionism.” Bruno Latour, “Il n’y a pas de monde commun: il faut le composer,” in Multitudes 45 (2011–12): 38–41.
8. It is certainly cavalier to conjoin Latour, who refuses “the power of the Two” in any guise, and Žižek, who intensifies antagonism into a politics; yet their common constructivism must be emphasized. In Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), Žižek maintains that fantasy “constructs” desire as such, because desire is not “given in advance” (6). Such is the standard poststructuralist position (and its inevitable submission to the hegemony of ontological constructivism): There is no natural desire because there is no nature at large. Compare this to the Lacanian syntax, by far less linear: “le désir se (my emphasis) soutient du fantasme”: the pronominal verb (se soutenir) implies that desire is the source of the action. This is very different from “fantasy [an active and perverse agent telling ‘how’ to desire] produces desire [here envisaged as a quasi-passive instance of the application of the perverse program of fantasy].”
9. Quentin Meillassoux speaks of “mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors, to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent,” After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 26. 1. We might note that the problem, for Meillassoux, is to show that an absolute exists, separated from humanity. For us, the problem is to show how the separation affects every existence, from the inside: Separation does not occur between an inside-inside and an outside-outside; 2. Mathematics seems here to operate a certain castration function (to produce some separated being), able to contain the excess of absolute chaos (see After Finitude, 64, on “hyper-chaos” and mathematical guarantee). For a critique of a mathematics stripped of all relation to history, see Alexander R. Galloway, Les nouveaux réalistes (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2012), 112–25. See also the political critique of Harman by the same author (“A response to Graham Harman’s ‘Marginalia on Radical Thinking,’” https://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/).
10. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 6. See also “things can be many and various, specific and concrete, while their being remains identical” (6).
11. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks (Melbourne: Re-press, 2009), 22.
12. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 36.
13. Ibid., 37. Prévert’s poem, “Inventory,” reads: “A stone/two houses/three ruins/four gravediggers/a garden/some flowers//a raccoon//a dozen oysters a lemon a loaf/a ray of sunshine/a groundswell/six musicians/a door with doormat/a gentleman decorated with the legion of honor//another raccoon,” and so on. In Words for All Seasons, trans. Teo Savory (Greensboro, N.C.: Unicorn Press, 1980).
14. See my article “NO/US. The Nietzschean Democracy of Jean-Luc Nancy” in Diacritics, forthcoming 2016.
15. Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” trans. Arthur Pap. In Science and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Logical Empiricism at Its Peak, ed. Sahotra Sarkar (New York: Garland, 1996), 12. Metaphysics is “empty of meaning,” Carnap tells us; it “simulates” having a theoretical content and the ability to express life, but it only apes science and art, respectively, mixing and thoughtlessly perverting them. In short, the metaphysician is a failed artist as well as a bad scientist. The “Manifesto of the Vienna Circle” (1929) clearly indicates that a “scientific world conception” must rid itself of depth, mystery, and imagination—that is to say precisely what I defend in this manifesto. Against the Circle of Vienna, the Spiral of the World. “The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle,” in Empiricism and Sociology, ed. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, trans. Paul Foulkes and Marie Neurath (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973), 307, 305.
16. See Naoki Sakai, “Introduction. Writing for Multiple Audiences and the Heterolingual Address” in Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–17.
17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1968).
18. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books), 123–33.
19. Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
Book I: Toposophy
1. P. J. Crutzen and E .F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” in Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 18.
2. See Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique” (http.eipcp/transversal/1106/holmes/en).
3. On clairvoyance societies, see my article “Occupying the Future. Time and Politics in the Era of Clairvoyance Societies” in Susanne Witzgall, Kerstin Stakemeier (Hg.), Die Gegenwart der Zukunft (Berlin, Zürich: diaphanes, 2016). English version (e-book): The Present of the Future (Berlin, Zurich: diaphanes, forthcoming 2017).
4. On the concept of alteration, see Boyan Manchev, L’altération du monde (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2009).
5. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2001), 63.
6. On the idea of the intact and the drive to remain untouched, see my article, “Intact,” in SubStance 40 (2011): 105–14. On the notions of the hydroglobe and absolute flux, see my book Clinamen, Flux, absolu et loi spirale (e®e, 2011).
7. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
8. Such as that which seemed to be at work in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement (see my short article, “Lose a Job, Gain an Occupation,” Libération 28 October 2011, http://www.liberation.fr/planete/2011/10/28/perdre-son-travail-gagner-une-occupation_770903). See also my article “Occupying the Future: Time and Politics in the Era of Clairvoyance Societies.”
9. On the strict opposition between contingency on the one hand (“there is no good reason but contingent reason”) and necessity, destiny, and the structure on the other, see Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 93. See also “Experiment” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 277.
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 281.
11. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 304.
12. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour declares that “transcendences abound,” defining a “transcendence without a contrary” (without immanence) as the “maintenance in presence by the mediation of a pass” (129, 128). But a bit earlier he tells us that scientific principles need networks of verifications so that they “do not exit from their worlds any more than the Achuar leave their villages” (119). This techno-scientific “cold chain” (119) that must not be interrupted—what is it, if not immanence? An abundance of immanences never leaving from themselves?
13. Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. IX, Parmenides, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1925).
14. Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. XII, Theaetetus, trans. Harold N. Fowler. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1921), 150c–50d.
15. Aristotle, Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols. 17, 18, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1933, 1989).
16. This not-quite-chaos is the mark of a certain skepticism unique to philosophy (the true philosophical skepticism, and not that which destroys even the possibility of speech).
17. Alain Badiou, in Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 147.
18. Sarah Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 247, 248, 7.
19. However, we will note, and not without pleasure, that Badiou calls upon Socrates and not Plato when it comes to affirming the “existence” of philosophy against prevailing morality—“ever eternally is Socrates judged.” Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2011), 72. The figure of rebellion is eternally Socratic, and not Platonic.
20. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The government of self and others, II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983, 1984, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros, general editors François Ewalt and Alessandro Fontata (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 180. Citations are from the seminar of 1984, only several months before his death.
21. According to Diogenes Laertius, it is indeed Antisthenes, the first cynic, to whom we must attribute the formula: “the concept is that which expresses the durable essence of things.”
22. Foucault, 17.
23. “Invited to a feast, he said nothing; when asked why, he responded ‘Go tell the king that there is someone here who knows how to keep quiet.’”
24. On the chorismos, see Etienne Tassin, in “La question du sol. Monde naturel et communauté politique” in Jan Patocka. Philosophie, phénoménologie, politique, ed. Marc Richir and Etienne Tassin (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992), 177.
25. In fact, Breton’s phrase is: “Je cherche l’or du temps” (I seek the gold of time). But I play on words, or (gold) and hors (out of, outside, but also apart from) being, in French, two perfect homophones.
Book II: Theory of the Trans-ject
1. On this point, see Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Perennial Classics, 2003).
2. F. W. J. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794–1796, trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 174, 173, 177.
3. On ex- as “dis-joining” and not distance, see Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). While Heidegger, in his “Letter on Humanism,” reduces existence to that which uniquely can be said of the essence of man and his “way of being,” my book 1.) extends existence to all beings, and 2.) poses being as a second object of thought.
4. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 626.
6. “From”—in “from the sensibility that puts me in relation to the world”—is nothing other than Kant’s definition of finitude, the fact that a finite subject is that which receives but does not create the matter intuited by the senses. On the Heideggerian interpretation of Kantian finitude and the concept of projection, see Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). On the reading I propose, see L’Indemne. Heidegger et la destruction du monde (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2008), 134–39, note 187.
7. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 39.
8. After Gilbert Simondon, we might say that we inject the transindividual.
9. I develop this point at length in my book Homo Labyrinthus. Humanisme, Anti-Humanisme, Post-Humanisme (éditions Dehors, 2015).
10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 479, 24.
11. “That is why a mind, free from passions, is a fortress. People have no stronger place of retreat, and someone taking refuge here is then impregnable.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin, 2006), 80.
12. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 13–14.
13. “Inclination of the ‘there is,’ of the ‘es gibt,’ of the offering. For it to be, it must bend.” Ibid., 159.
14. Ibid., 82.
15. Ibid., 81. Nancy deliberately takes up Hegel here: “The supreme form of Nought as a separate principle would be Freedom: but Freedom is negativity in that stage, when it sinks self-absorbed to supreme intensity, and is itself an affirmation, and even absolute affirmation.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), § 87, 162.
16. Ibid., 109.
17. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. John Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 43.
18. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 109.
19. The phrase is Rimbaud’s, from A Season in Hell, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1945), 89.
20. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, 159–60.
21. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, trans. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 40.
22. See Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp), 1989.
23. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
24. Jean-Paul Sartre, A Search for Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963), 56.
25. Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism,” in The Desert Island and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 170–92.
26. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Vintage, 1995), 259.
27. From Mallarmé’s “Sonnet en X”: “aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore.”
28. “The reality of poetic operation is the release and the identification of the distinct.” Jean-Christophe Bailly, “L’action solitaire du poème,” in Toi aussi, tu as des armes. Poésie et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2011), 21. See also Jean-Luc Nancy: “the poem or the verse refers to the elocutionary unity of an exactitude.”
29. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers of Freud, vol. 5., ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 185.
30. Serge Leclaire, Écrits pour la psychanalyse, 2. Diableries (Paris: Seuil/Arcanes, 1998), 194–98, 224.
31. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 41, 47, 59.
32. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 299.
33. There are two references to Freud here: civilization as a “thin veneer,” and “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” the latter translated by James Strachey as “where id was, there ego shall be.” Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1964), 100.
34. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 22–30.
35. Sigmund Freud, “Drives and Their Fates,” in The Unconscious, trans. Graham Frankland (London: Penguin, 2005).
36. Deleuze, The Desert Island and Other Texts.
37. On the difference between “differentiate” and “differenciate,” see Gilles Deleuze, Desert Island, 179–80.
38. We might think here of the thesis Badiou defends in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2013). For this reading of Badiou’s philosophy, see Aux bords du vide. Événement et sujet dans la philosophie d’Alain Badiou (è®e numérique, 2011).
39. Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in In Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
40. To confer means that the animal can respond and is not reducible to a machine. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). But Derrida ceaselessly retreats before the possibility of ceding back to the animal a quality that would have been denied it, seeking—as he clearly says—less to “give back” (159) something to the animal than to deconstruct that which has been uniquely attributed to the human being, that being resolutely subjected to a certain number of quasi-machine-like automated behaviors—unconscious repetition, for example. Like Heidegger, he accepts the “abyss” between humans and animals, and proposes only to multiply or to contemplate the differences. It is surprising that Derrida assimilates “abyssal ruptures” (30) and differences, when all the thinking of the 1960s, including his, sought by all means, contra Hegel, to show that difference is not an abyss (it is not localized as that which separates absolutely but as that which calls into question the logic of the absolute by “differing” from itself, as “differential repetition,” and so on). Derrida hesitates in this text, and remains stuck in his unilateral refusal of the metaphysics of the subject, on the basis of which he rejects animal rights: This would accidentally accord them a status of the “subject of rights” (88). He knows well the trap of the humanist extension of the category of the subject, but he does not name this trap, for lack of a concept capable of locating and keeping a necessary position of the subject (that which we undertake starting from the concept of trans-ject). A subject of rights is not other (or must not be something else) than the punctual requalification of a trans-ject. A requalification implies no effort, no pretension, no subjectivizing “event” on the part of the trans-ject.
41. Dominique Lestel, L’animal singulier (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 120.
42. Ibid., 111, 68, 36.
43. For Joëlle Proust, an animal representation is “detached” when its contents are not “centered on the manner in which the animal uses information”: The representation thus leads back to the exterior world. It is “immersed” (and in this sense “proto-representation”) when it remains, on the contrary, centered on the reactivity of the organism. Les animaux pensent-ils? (Paris: Bayard, 2003), 30. Thus we would distinguish the immersed memorization of the wasp from the detached memorization of the jay, capable of certain actions linked to the memory of the circumstances of past actions: “the jay has thought detached from his world” (58). In the same way, Proust analyzes the difference between clue (immersed) and signal (detached from the clue) by a “process of the ritualization of information,” by the copy of a section of natural behavior followed by its exaggeration, by operations of cut-amplification-deformation-repetition. The growl is an example of exaggeration, which signifies an intention—but of what? Of acting upon another: “infiltrating and subverting the receptor’s sensory-motor chain of command,” masking a motivated or emotional state (the tendency to flee or fight) (72–73, 93, and 95).
44. “Dolphins May Call Each Other by Name,” in Wired, February 2013. http://www.wired.com/2013/02/dolphin-names/.
45. Stelarc, “Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies,” Leonardo 24, no. 5 (1991): 591–95.
46. Catherine Malabou takes this possibility to the extreme in “The Phoenix, the Spider, and the Salamander,” in Changing Difference (New York: Polity Press, 2011).
Book III: The Metaphysical Proposition
1. The out-of-place [hors-lieu] is the proto-concept of the event in Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009). It seems to me that I use this concept differently.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 41, 63, 69, 77.
3. Ibid., 20, 22.
4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 219–20.
6. “Essence accordingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, but just because it is the essence which exists—the existence is Appearance.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), § 131, 239.
7. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: Routledge, 2001), 77. The expression “killing of the thing”—or “murder of the thing”—refers to Hegel via Kojève’s interpretation of the logic of the concept: “In Chapter VII of the Phenonenology, Hegel said that all conceptual understanding (Begreifen) is equivalent to a murder” (Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969], 140–41).
8. “We sorcerers know quite well that the contradictions are real, but that real contradictions are only for laughs [ne sont que pour rire]” A Thousand Plateaus, 244 (modified translation). This statement would not have made Hegel laugh. For the original text, see Mille Plateaux, 298.
9. Ibid., 238–43.
10. But remains present: “a haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination.” Ibid., 263.
11. Ibid., 293.
12. Other examples include: 1. We might think of Freud’s drives, a borderline concept that is neither reducible to the body nor to the psyche (see “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”). Clearly, Freud defines drives elsewhere as the “mythology” of psychoanalysts (which does not mean that drives are unreal but “more real than the real” [Schelling]); 2. The symbolic of the structuralists describes an order that is neither only real, nor only imaginary; 3. Based on his dialogue with Hegel, Gotthard Günther describes his “transclassical machines” as what can neither be thought starting from objective Spirit, nor from subjectivity. La conscience des machines. Une métaphysique de la cybernétique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); 4. Heideggerian Dasein aims to exceed the essence/existence relation; and so on.
13. M-C is the purchase through which money is changed into a commodity, and C-Mʹ is the sale, when the commodity is changed back again into money, with Mʹ>M.
14. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 258–69.
15. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 179–81.
16. Ibid., 209.
17. Ibid., 219. It would also be necessary to show that starting from “Meditation 13” another equally fundamental decision is at play, one concerning mathematical infinity, thus ontological, being qua being—and not the event (which is “that-which-is-not-being-qua-being” [otherwise called the generalized Sartrian for-itself]). See Badiou, Being and Event, 13.
18. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), 210–11.
19. The situation put forth in Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason reveals the place and the function of the leap: to escape from the “circularity” of the principle of reason (either this principle has a reason [a Grund], and it is not a principle; or it does not, and contradicts itself), it is necessary to leap from/on the proposition in itself, to accentuate it differently, read it in another way: not “nothing is without reason” but “nothing is without reason.” This is why the rose of Angelus Silesius can be without why, but not without reason. “We leap through as through a flame.” The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 60. In its passage, blown, the flame changes the italics.
20. Plato, Republic, ed. and trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 168.
22. “A theory is exactly like a box of tools [. . .] It must be useful. It must function.” Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). Too many are those who took the word “exactly” to the letter, regrettably neglecting the leap and lines of flight.
23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), § 14–16.
24. Peter Gizzi, The Outernationale (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
25. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/docs/achillembembe.pdf.
26. Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer, 2003). But Heidegger has already said the same thing: “every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is also there within the question” (“What Is Metaphysics?,” 82).
27. This skepticism makes it so that all science worthy of the name should be preceded by nothing other than “universal doubt, or total absence of presupposition.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898), § 78, 142.
28. These kinds of studies have been demolished by Gilles Châtelet, in To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014).
29. Nietzsche, Fragments posthumes, tome 12—automne 1885—automne 1887—(Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1978), 26, 153.
30. Bernard Aspe, Les mots et les actes (Caen: Nous, 2011). See also my essay on Aspe’s book, “L’oubli de l’acte,” in Outis! 1 (2011).
31. “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses as setting too narrow limits to the understanding and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty of the pure understanding.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 47.
32. Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics, trans. Willis Doney, in Philosophical Selections, ed. Steven Nadler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 148.
33. Pascal, Pensées, in Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16.
34. For example, the famous allegory of the cave, discussed in an earlier section, “The Leap and the Loop.”
35. Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 12.
36. Descartes, “Méditation seconde” in Méditations métaphysiques (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1979), 86–87.
37. Jacques Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 81.
38. Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991).
39. Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imagination,” in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993).
40. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
41. J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and translated Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 205, 208.
42. We might note in passing that Thomas Metzinger reaches the same conclusions starting from cognitive philosophy. The Ego Tunnel (New York, Basic Books, 2009), 44, 107.
43. “Consciousness has no ‘inside.’ It is merely the exterior of itself and it is this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance, that constitutes it as a consciousness.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Critical Essays (Situations I), trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 43.
44. This paradox rests on the fact that we are opposing consciousness, which is linked to the present instant, and the unconscious, attached to the past. Yet consciousness, by its contact with the immemorial, is the unconscious, or in other words the past; and this is always current, urgently present, via consciousness—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner). The out-of-place is not out of consciousness, but haunts it endlessly.
45. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 88.
46. Ibid., 115.
47. Ibid., 68.
48. Adorno, cit. Metaphysics, 196.
49. Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 21.
50. Theaetetus, 161b
51. “What? You are looking for something? You want to multiply yourself by ten, by one hundred? You are looking for disciples? Look for zeros!” Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 157.
52. Alexander Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, 84, 106.
53. On these points, see Clinamen, Flux, absolu et loi spirale (e®e, 2011).
54. Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang (New York: Doubleday Books, 2007).
55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press International Inc., 1979), 19.
56. Beyond reflection, however, Cartesian “meditation” is a preparation. But not so much for death, under an ethical or spiritual guise, as for knowledge itself—for the rules of the spirit. Cartesian meditation does not so much secularize a religious exercise as it fosters, by an extreme use of negativity (hyperbolic doubt), a certain form of asceticism that metaphysics makes possible (and not the opposite, which would consist in making metaphysics possible by a form of asceticism).
57. Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 300. I thank Lewis Freedman for having introduced Jack Spicer’s poetry to me.
58. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 218.
What Cries Out
1. See Naoki Sakai, “Introduction: Writing for Multiple Audiences and the Heterolingual Address” in Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
2. Brett Neilson, “Opening Translation,” in Transéuropéenes, 2–3 (http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/107). We find here the citation from Warren Weaver mentioned previously.
3. “Logic—mind’s coin of the realm,” Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan and Dirk J. Struik (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 128. See also Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, ed. Fred Moseley and Tony Smith (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 193–94.
4. Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), 13.
5. Against a realism that ultimately reinforces a dualism between being thought and being, Shaviro leans on Whitehead’s philosophy to affirm a “panpsychism”: the mind, which should be considered a property of matter, is everywhere. Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014), 12, 73, 79.
6. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re-press, 2008).
7. A “dismissed case” in French is a “non-lieu,” literally a “non-place.”
8. This article stipulates: “A person who, at the time he acted, was suffering from a psychological or neuropsychological disorder which reduced his discernment or impeded his ability to control his actions, remains punishable; however, the court shall take this into account when it decides the penalty and determines its regime.”
Source for old penal code: http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/france/penalcode/c_penalcode2.html.
9. Jean-Luc Nancy, “More Than One,” in Aurélien Barrau and Jean-Luc Nancy, What’s These Worlds Coming To, trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
10. See Josep Rafanelli i Orra, for whom all creation of relation is therapeutic (En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique. Soin, politique, et communauté, Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte, 2011).
11. Muriel Combes, La vie inséparée. Vie et suject au temps de la biopolitique (Paris: Dittmar, 2011), 276. Robert Esposito makes an identical pronouncement: “every life is a form of life and every form refers to life,” Bios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 194. It would, however, be necessary to discuss elsewhere the second part of this statement, which seems to abusively transfer life to any form.
12. Muriel Combes, 320.
13. “If we look [. . .] at the highest spheres of that world which surges around us, then we perceive how the craving of an insatiable optimistic knowledge which appears in an exemplary form in Socrates, is transformed into tragic resignation and need for art [. . .] At this point, we knock with stirred emotions at the gates of the present and the future: will this ‘transformation’ lead to ever new configurations of genius and precisely of Socrates as maker of music? Will the net of art which is cast over existence, whether under the name of religion or science, be woven ever more tightly and delicately or is it destined to be torn to shreds in the swirling restlessness and barbaric turmoil which now calls itself the ‘present’?—Anxious yet not disconsolate, we stand to one side for a moment, as contemplative bystanders to whom it has been granted to witness these great struggles and transitions. Oh! it is the magic of these struggles that whoever observes them must also enter into the fray!” Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 92–93.