O my body, always make me a man who questions!
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Minerva at bay.—Philosophy borders madness. It lingers there, sometimes, extracting itself more or less successfully. But the successes that are too successful cancel out philosophy, as the Principle of reason that ought to guide it becomes a pure Principle of identity. If philosophy is “the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness,”1 this assurance is always put into question, perpetually destabilized. Like existence. Like life, love, and the universe: Barely contained chaos, indistinct among the quarks, the universe is a system that is far from an equilibrium; it thwarts attempts by contemporary physics to explain not only its origin but also its persistence. To think totality is only the splendid excess that must be measured by thought itself. Still, we have tried to integrate this excess into a system, a pure logic, ordered propositions, and a program of equivalences. But nothing remains integrated for very long: Disorder returns; an unexpected world; already another form of thought announces itself—and fortunately. For as long as everything holds too well together, nothing happens. No life, no existence, no love: the flat equilibrium of death, inertia, Lucretius’s straight lines, the rain of atoms but without clinamen, with neither deviation nor encounter.
Look at our world. We talk about flux, about flexible subjectivities, and about becomings where everything changes and anything can happen. And if this were only a superficial diagnosis that the reactionaries and the progressives share? Or what if the flux of information, capital, and affects were—just the opposite—regimented, channeled, secretly immobile, as absolute flux, wherein ultimately nothing truly or deeply changes? For there are two kinds of flux. On the one hand, there is flux in straight lines, or lines that form circles that close back in on themselves; on the other, there is turbulent flux, spirals that never meet back up, dis-archic tops. Our world tends to produce flux at a constant speed, like a treadmill, where one advances without taking a step. The treadmill versus the top. Becoming without ever undergoing the test of loss, loving without venturing outside oneself: This is what is proposed as a “way of life.” We say that our epoch is one of changeability, of relativity, and of finitude. Never so much as today, however, have we been in inertia and absolute facade; never have we believed so much in immortality, be it cryogenic or the result of the uploading of a brain to a computer (techno-financial questions worked over hard by Silicon Valley).2 We would have to proceed “after finitude” (Quentin Meillassoux) even though we have never known how to think a society in which relations between human beings and between humans and non-humans would be truly commensurate with existence and its biological fragility. Alas we continue to feel and to experience, with the assistance of techno-sciences and cemented Ideas, believing that we are eternal—even as the conditions of possibility for the living are ecologically and psychically compromised. We believe ourselves immortal, unaffected by existence. And so we are able conscientiously to destroy the world on the basis of an intact humanism no critique can displace.
Fettered existence, diminished life: This is the double condition that forces me not to write a sort of timeless “What is philosophy?” but rather a manifesto, a worried intervention in the field of theory. To bend the timeless, and the philosophical tradition, to the requirements of time, so as to introduce into these concepts and philosophical formulas that which our age demands. To wager that philosophy is engaged with what today concerns the fate of the psyche as well as of life itself. The owl of Minerva symbolizes in vain while owls in flesh and blood are dying.
The situation of contemporary thought.—The world of absolute flux corresponds to a certain ontological regime, that of saturated immanence, in which everything remains perpetually inside, without any hope of exit. “There is no more outside,” Hardt and Negri assert in 2000. Bruno Latour, for his part, argues in 2001 that there are no longer “externalities.”3 This repudiation or foreclosure, to use Lacan’s concept, of the outside has stunted contemporary thought to the point that all separation, all radical interruption of the regime of saturated immanence, appears at best as an impossibility, at worst as a crime. Separate oneself? Madness. A first step toward terrorism. Even as we talk of globalization, networks, flux, and hybridization, it appears necessary that everything have a place, an identity, a temporal location, a portable substance, and a strict territory that reinforces the idea of saturated immanence to the detriment of all existential disjunction. And here is what is truly strange: Are we not living in a time when we come to question the Great Divides, between inside and outside, other and self, nature and culture, human and non-human? Are we not living the end of identity?
According to Latour,4 the Moderns have never stopped producing hybrids, even as their system of representation rests on Great Divides (nature/culture, nature/society, and so on). The Moderns, Latour argues, have never ceased to “translate,” even as they have believed that they are “purifying” the ontological domains (on the one hand science; on the other, politics). But, in fact, we live something entirely different, something that seems far from what Latour argues: Even as we “translate” ceaselessly, we keep recreating pure domains, undamaged entities. This apparent paradox is resolved if we understand that hybridization and identity are in no way incompatible: The more difference is erased, the more identity is reinforced. It is one thing to maintain that there is no substantial Other, no transcendent Outside, no super-Nature or wilderness other than that which is socially constructed;5 it is another to affirm that there is no Other at all, no outside, and that nature—as concept and as substance—must be eliminated. The first wave of poststructuralism (Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, and so on) fought the disastrous splits [clivages] (between human and non-human, masculine and feminine, “nature” and “technology,” and so on) in the name of differences. The second wave—the one that currently dominates the field of theory—wrongly concluded that all deep difference is a split. Writers as diverse as Latour, Slavoj Žižek, and Timothy Morton can thus maintain that nature does not exist, is nothing but a chimerical order, a product of ideology, or a Romantic transcendental principle.6 This position leads them to privilege a constructivist ontological7 option by which the exteriority of nature no longer has any meaning. For them, as for the majority of contemporary thinkers, everything is inside.8
Object-oriented ontology, or speculative realism, sometimes risks reinforcing this exophobic situation, at least in part. Yet the fundamental intention of this protean group was good: to be wary of a relational mode of thought that would admit no way of thinking that which escapes relations; to contest the primacy of the human subject; to reject the thesis that being is only conceivable as a corollary of the human psyche, in the form of a cultural or linguistic construction. But one does not escape the anthropological cage simply by affirming that there is something—an object, or the “ancestral” (Meillassoux)—exterior to the human brain and the relations it makes with the world. To claim that matter existed before human subjectivity, and that this matter can be mathematized, is a proposition that leaves the split between inside and outside intact.9 This split traps the human being inside, letting her dream of an Outside that could be contemplated and, through reason, made to obey a reassuring mathematics. Graham Harman, who forged an object-oriented philosophy, also seeks the outside out there, in a “substantial form” that escapes relations—but should we not argue that relations themselves are what lead us to the outside? This is, in fact, the real problem: What does it mean to live as out-siders, caught in the time and the history of an existential plane? That the outside is rapping on the window of a poorly deconstructed subjectivity in no way indicates the essential: the manner in which this outside resonates in each existing being. The outside is not the extinction of the sensible, a dead, glacial land beyond all experience. On the contrary, it is experience as such, burning and alive.
When everything is inside, when each real distance is considered a sacrilege, when everything is re-thought beginning from substance, when the anthropological hierarchy that stems from a privileged “access” to being disappears, everything can equally be said to be an “object.” Differences would thus be held to be identical: “‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ contends that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone.”10 Harman, furthermore, puts “cars, subways, canoe varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists” all on the same “metaphysical footing.”11 How has ontology gotten to this point? How has immanence, as a category necessary for contesting the spiritualities that negate life, come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences, a mill for grinding out a sort of ontological flour, an ontology spread flat? We might say that this way of thinking immanence has only pushed the Deleuzian stance regarding the univocity of being to its limits: The being of God must be said as we say any other living being. But Deleuze, in fact, was very clear on this point: The most important thing is not that there is only one way of saying being, but that “it is said in a single and same sense of all its individuating differences.”12 The preposition in italics is here fundamental, indicating a way to read this as the priority of differences over being. Thus “the words ‘Everything is equal’ may therefore resound joyfully on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal univocal Being.”
For Deleuze, there is indeed a hierarchy, from the point of each existent and its own power (puissance), from its capacity to express what it is, from its special individuation. As soon as an existent is “separated from what it can do,” there is no meaning in speaking of ontological equality. To continue to speak of the equality of “objects”—while ontology, reduced to its economical and technological form, leads to the irreversible damaging of the world—fuels the production of a general discourse founded on the denial of the only tenable objectivity under such circumstances: that which would refuse the temptation of pure speculation while it is subjected to the programmed forgetting of politics. This is the forgetting of the economic, ecological, and political conditions of the process of singularization that drives some proponents of object-oriented ontology to their passion for lists without hierarchy—a toaster, a quasar, a book, a bonobo—an inventory in the style of Prévert, but missing the repeated “raccoon,” without differential repetition (the thing Deleuze insists we hold simultaneously with “nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy”).13 Yet a political and ecological consideration of the conditions of singularization drives us to realize to what extent the living is today cut off from what it can do, to what point its precarity requires us not to reduce it to the world of objective equivalences. The raccoon is resolutely not an object; but it objects to that which prevents it from being.
The critique of the Great Divide was undoubtedly beneficial: It was necessary to deconstruct the repressive binary oppositions that always sacrificed one term (the feminine, passivity, the animal, the non-Western, etc.). This task is still not fully achieved, neither politically nor juridically. But without at the same time re-making non-repressive differences, without a positive and creative trans-valuation of values, the result ends up like a kind of bland soup, in which each notable singularization must be preventively sentenced to having its head cut off, sometimes in the name of an ontology of general equivalence thoroughly consistent with capitalism. The concept of the object does not permit us to feel the wind of the outside and to lay to rest an intact humanism. Today, the task of thought is to re-think difference starting from existences, and not identity starting from objects.
Atopia, existence, and relation.—This book begins by analyzing the theoretical and practical conditions of saturated immanence, which is nothing other than a world immunized against the outside, a paradoxical world which turns the undamaged—the untouchable, the exception, the substantive object, the monad set behind impermeable immunological barriers—into a contagious substance, susceptible to being found in anything and anyone. To use Benjamin’s famous formula, the exception has become the rule, spread throughout the body of theory as throughout that of society. Against this immanence, we make recourse to a special form of transcendence that takes as its own the virtues of an iconoclastic immanence—what Deleuze, after Nietzsche, exemplifies—without falling into the traps of the immanence-object: transcendence ≈ x. This is not a monotheistic Transcendence removed from the world (God, the Absolute, or Infinite Substance), but rather a form of being-in-the-world as being-in-the-outside (see the sections “The Undamaged and the Contagious” and “Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x” in Book I).
Philosophy is conditioned by such a link to the outside. Socrates’s “atopian” remarks—strange, unplaceable, almost queer—were held against him. Atopia is first of all a non-place, and it is thanks to its relation to this non-place that philosophy poses one of the most vital challenges to the cognitive regime of saturated immanence. Fundamentally, philosophy recoils from the untouchable as from a contagious process. Certainly it would be possible to find counter-examples, and it might be argued that there are numerous philosophers inclined towards the exception: an exit from the world, a retreat from tumult. Others, on the other hand, aspire to be advisors to the Prince, experts commissioned by some Secretary of State, heralds of the “democratic” causes of the West. It is the profoundly atopian character of philosophy that can lead those who embody it either outside the world, or—on the contrary—fully into it, all the way to the most shameful worldliness. In these two cases, philosophy denies itself in the form of a wisdom (a spirituality, a dogmatic mastery) or an enterprise of advertisement (usually a self-promotion). The wager of this book—the nature of its Manifesto—is that philosophy, through its atopian character, attests to transcendence ≈ x, to the outside as a relation between thought and the world, and not as an object or a substance that escapes it (see the section “Socratic Divergence” in Book I).
After framing this disagreement as one between the powers of the undamaged that construct a flat immanence, and the thought that carves out its singular atopia, we will be able to unfold the meaning of being-outside. For thought does not define the outside, but prolongs it, draws it out. Thought experiences the outside around which it is formed; this formation is nothing more than the simple fact of existence. Existing is being-outside. This is the novel existentialism that thought needs today, radicalized beyond Sartre and his separation between being in-itself and for-itself, beyond Heidegger and the privilege he accords to Dasein.14 Taken at the root, existence designates a spacing, a deviation, a diversion, the ek- that emerges without pre-determined ontological basis, as an individuation having neither the pole of the subject, nor that of the object, as materia prima. Then life appears in all its precarity—but also everything that emerges from an Earth whose roots are suspended, as well as the physics of the universe in which we wander. Each existence—but without equivalence. Each existence obliged to be eccentric in order to be. Neither the replication of a norm, nor the position of untouchable exception. Eccentric, the existents inhabit an existential field (see the section “Being-Outside” in Book II).
This is one of the delicate points of this project: how to think each existence—one by one—without juxtaposing it with other singular existences, in the manner of object-oriented ontology? By thinking existence before all ontology. It is because each manner of existing is primary and special that it disallows any ontological equivalent. In other words, nothing can be individuated except what slips free from that which might relate existence to a norm, or a pre-determined common discourse. This freedom is dangerous; it exposes individuation to the risk of pure individuality, to an immunological atomization that would both feed into the dominant neoliberalism and be to its profit. But it is at this price that it becomes again possible to think the common as something other than the product of human work, either material or immaterial. Thus the concepts of freedom, of the subject, and of community must simultaneously be rethought, starting from the concept of existence: what does it mean to be a subject outside?
1. It means to individuate oneself starting from an outside—an empty case, a fissure, a dis-joining, a madness;
2. For each subject, this outside comes first; it is not constructed but is the spacing that appears at the heart of all construction, the unconstructible spacing;
3. This fissure of individuation is the ek- that relates existing beings to the world. This cannot be overstated: We are in the world thanks to the diversion of existence. Thus it will not be a matter of getting rid of the category of the subject, but of thinking it as derived from the category of the trans-ject. This concept is to be developed alongside forms of animal subjectivation, not to impose human subjectivity onto them, but in order to show that a subject is not set in opposition to animality: A subject is that which situates itself at the edge of an existential trans-ject. A trans-ject is not a trajectory, something flexible, to be modified at will, but persistence, marked by a history that characterizes each existence in its own way. We will call this form of community created by those who are subject to the trans-jects of existence an adventurous coalition (see the sections “Coalitions” and “On the Subject of Animals” in Book II).
World and outside, relation and atopia: this book seeks to map the encounter between these terms. To favor relation in order to undo anthropocentrism, and to undo the position of exception characteristic of metaphysical humanism—but simultaneously to leave a determining place for atopia in order to avoid transforming relation into an exophobic system of interconnection. Existence is always experienced in separation, in the irremediable tragedy of existential difference (no one may live or die in my place). This separation is, however, not a split, nor the guarantee of identity or of substance: It is that which relates me to others. This relation is interior before being an exchange between distinct individuals: It designates an interior disjunction by which existence is towards-the-world. It is by this disjunction lived as precarious relation, fragile being-together, tragic consciousness of the irremediable fact-of-being, that a certain type of existence experiences its condition of being alive—a condition that is not that of a quasar or a toaster. Our era requires a new philosophy of existence capable of specially making way for the living against all the forms of ontological immunization, those which flow with capital or which seek to exempt themselves from it entirely. As long as the absolute encounters flux, the non-place is necessary to rediscover relation.
To think, to leap, to imagine.—What is the place of philosophical activity in this process? To think thought requires tools, or what we call concepts, and Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that philosophy consists in creating them. We must put this hypothesis to the test. A concept, Nietzsche says, is a certain type of metaphor—or precisely that which remains of it. The more this metaphorical origin is forgotten behind this remainder, the more we believe ourselves able to extract a pure logic from it. In 1931, Carnap proposed that “originally every word [. . .] had a meaning”15; metaphysics would stem from a certain degradation of the strict original meaning. To escape this delirium of metaphysics would mean to rectify language. This rectification is at work in the existing forms of translation, which, following Naoki Sakai, we will call “homo-lingual”: an immunological conception of language that splits some languages from others, and thus from themselves—that is to say from their metaphorical powers as well as their radiating imaginations.16 But language is not a code, even if it is to the code that the logic of identity and automatized translation refer. Language is initially the game of the child who plays with his tongue, who tries, and stumbles, and tries again—experience and imagination that require the excess of the signifier over the signified that Lévi-Strauss points out.17 There is something uncodifiable in language that incites us to speak, and which always surprises the addressee and addressor.
It is one thing to identify the logical function of empty signifiers, capable of being tied to any kind of signifieds; it is another to enclose this function within a crystal of logic, protected from imagination and experience. As soon as we perceive the imagined part of concepts, we understand that philosophy has the task of developing metaphysical propositions. A proposition is an advance that can be revoked—it is to the concept what the raw is to the cooked. Of course, a metaphysical proposition can come to be fixed as a concept. But here again, a more exact understanding of the nature of philosophical creation is missing. All philosophical creation is a transgression of the principle of the excluded middle. Neither A, nor not-A, then both A, and not-A. All transgression of this principle implies a leap into the unknown. Hic Rhodus, hic Salta—as Marx as well as Badiou would say at their decisive philosophical moments. And we will see Bergson and Heidegger leap, too (see the sections “The Transgression of the Principle of the Excluded Middle” and “The Unlocatable” in Book III).
These leaps and metaphysical transgressions have a precise goal, which involves the function of philosophy. Intellectual inclined toward universality (Sartre), or “specific” intellectual (Foucault)?18 Neither one nor the other, both the one and the other: a sort of peripheral medium working through the madness of its out-of-place. This experimentation prompts philosophy to escape itself in order to experience the relation that it maintains with its others: science, art, politics, and love, those “conditions” of philosophy, its “truth procedures.”19 For Badiou, to whom we owe these last expressions, philosophy is the “pincers” of truth. I would say that each time a truth is seized it cries out—it is hurt or tickled, according to its disposition. When philosophy seizes its truth, it muffles its meaning, which is to say the incalculable, and not the guaranteed and immutable result of a truth. As if the ultimate limits of philosophical questioning must return at each event of meaning. Extra-vagant questions, for the one who faces them. Questions that lead the imagination to the point at which it falters before the enigma of existence (see the sections “The Madwoman of the Out-of-Place” and “Science(s), Art, Politics” in Book III).