For the periphery of science has an infinite number of points. Every noble and gifted man has, before reaching the midpoint of his career, come up against some point of the periphery that defied his understanding, quite apart from the fact that we have no way of knowing how the area of the circle is ever to be fully charted. When the inquirer, having pushed the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself, and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception, a tragic perception, which requires, to make it tolerable, the remedy of art.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
The Undamaged and the Contagious
“Where am I?” asks the sleeper who wakes with difficulty. He doesn’t recognize the room, the furniture. It is too dark; lingering parts of the dream slip into the surroundings, giving them a strangely worrying air. But are we not living the inverse situation today? Prolonged awakening, work without the limit of time, excessive light, surplus of information, electronic links, mechanized solicitations, attentional capture: This is the reality that, penetrating the virtual dimensions, transfuses them with a suddenly flattened aspect—so poor, so slow, quasi-immobile.
We no longer know “where” we are, starting from the moment we seek to know it. We consult the sky, the stars, the compass; we wish we had a GPS. What is the significance of this “where”? We say that we are in a space. But what might this mean, to be in, depending on whether we are in transit (and why?), in motion (at what speed?), waiting (but for what?), or sleeping (under what sedative?). If we are inside, there must be one, two, or several outsides—but which? Are they other forms of the outside, or do they foretell other worlds, other forms of life? Who knows? But this is exactly what we must know: how to be oriented in thought itself.
Where are we?—“Where” always designates a thought-world. We travel, we live, we work, or we entertain ourselves, and space is divided into places, functional localizations that are symbolized, constructed, arranged by living beings with a more or less open imagination. Always connected, these places form networks of communication and representation. These have now attained a level of density unparalleled in history, both in the history of humanity and of the entire planet. When we speak of networks and of communication, we think first of the processes of informational and technological globalization. We also refer to the circulation of goods and to transnational capitalism. We must additionally take into consideration the network of natural cycles, the ecosphere and its equilibria, homeostases and at least partially autonomous processes. The existing global network is defined by this triple globality, entangled to the point that it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between the financial, the technological, and the ecological planes. The problem of climate change is perfect evidence of the reality of this fusion between the bio-sphere and techno-capitalism. The cloud of Chernobyl was composed of the technological and the natural, inextricably, just as the repercussions of Fukushima are today. This global entanglement is so dense that forms of being bleed into each other: GMOs contaminate the spaces that surround them, nanoparticles promise infiltrations we cannot yet apprehend, images produced in one part of the globe are transformed into affects on the other side of the world, all at such speed, without mediation, approaching a vertiginous instantaneity. The sleeper or the one who awakens—we no longer really know which—asks again, even more anxiously: “where am I”?
ImmunoGlobulin—Density, entanglement, fusion, epidemic communication: To define the ontological regime of such saturation in terms of its ultimate consequences, we must speak of saturated immanence. Immanence in the proper sense of the term, in manere: what remains in itself, always inside, without an outside, without exteriority. The globe is stifling; it has been made by swallowing all that it was not. Imperialism and colonialism have decimated all Others (“Exterminate all the brutes!”); capitalism has subsumed the economy; tele-technologies have locked down the planet at the same time the planet has revealed—thanks to Humboldt, Leopold, Lovelock, and every environmental thinker—its internal connections. A fusion of the tele-technological globe and of the ecosphere has occurred—but to the detriment of the latter, as any real political ecology must remind us. This asymmetrical fusion has placed humanity, the human form, in the position of a gigantic mechanical mouth, a “major geological force” keeping a giant eye on the disasters of the Anthropocene.1 Here is what we always forget to problematize: a Great Divide never collapses in the same way for both sides of the dividing line. With the end of the division “nature/culture,” nature is collapsing all the way into landfills of non-recyclables, subjected to the deadening effects of the wholesale substitution of the tele-technological. The problem of entanglement—of humans and non-humans, of the natural and the anthropogenic environments—wraps itself around our necks. Globally, God is dead, or at least a certain relation to Transcendence is, and the atmospheric pressure of the Anthropocene is felt equally on the shoulders of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Globally, no superman is on the horizon. This is the reign of the Man of conquering humanism, for whom nothing can remain alien—for whom nature must disappear, even if this means taking culture with it, as collateral damage. We must understand these two movements, which will be explained shortly, as a secret complicity: 1. The human being constructed himself in a position of radical exteriority vis-à-vis nature; 2. This exteriorization was the first step—and the concrete condition of possibility—of the engulfment of nature. Instead of endlessly asking ourselves about the relation between hybrids and the end of the Great Divides, we must understand that the plan of humanist transcendence has fused into immanence. But through its swallowing, its chewing-up of the outdoors, the humanist globe has also ended by rendering the spacing of the inside impossible.
Speaking of saturated immanence is not only a matter of describing extreme speed, vertiginous acceleration, or the conditions of panicked contiguity of psychic and political phenomena, but also a tendency towards the immobilization of phenomena at the horizon of their movement. Saturation describes the phase transition in which the varieties of flux that compose the global network end in a sort of inertial movement, which, without exterior perturbation, would remain the same. This seems counter-intuitive because we are told that our world is fluid, as are the subjectivities that inhabit it.2 However, a radical change in society would require a break with what today is the dominant form of change: inertial change. To understand the meaning of this expression, we must proceed by the following social genealogy:
1. The disciplinary societies described by Foucault aimed to re-do the wrongs of the past (undo the old traditions through the school, put the inmate back on the “right path” by the intervention of the prison, and so on).
2. Control societies, Deleuze continues, abandon the idea of a mold capable of giving the past a new form in favor of regulating the present in real time, and controlling behaviors continuously (from the prison to the ankle monitor).
3. But our clairvoyance societies take the future as their point of application: to predict the future in order to avoid it, to create a preventative police that would stop crimes before they happen by anticipating risk, by detecting the “precocious” signs of delinquency in children.3 The prison becomes temporal. Preventive immunization is the goal of clairvoyance societies: to prevent anything truly new from happening, to ward off all alterity, all alteration.4
This frightening form of anticipation cannot be solely explained by political hypotheses having to do with repression or the propensity for state police control. We must rethink these analyses within a psycho-biological, or even psycho-ontological framework. Saturated immanence is the result of an immunological drive that is not unique to our society but that has found a new form of expression thanks to technological development. The immunological drive is a fundamental tendency to immunize the self. It is the basis—adroitly hidden by the exegetes—of Spinoza’s conatus, or the “effort to persevere in its being” (Ethics, III, prop. VI and VII). The “drive to remain unscathed,” to take up Derrida’s expression, enlists the death drive to destroy all that might stand in the way of its ultimate goal: to be and to remain intact, sheltered from all harm, from all damage; to defend itself against the fragility of the living; to act as if death, mourning, loss, and nothingness did not exist.5 The immunological drive uses the powers of negativity to thwart the essential function of negativity: the untethering (déliaison) without which no expression of the living, no singularity, and no existence would be possible. As an extreme hypothesis, we might thus consider the globe, the hydroglobe of absolute flux, as the monumental result of this drive.6
A secret complicity.—This extreme hypothesis must, however, be qualified: certain zones of the globe are more immunized than others, more invested with the drives to remain undamaged. In fact, the saturated immanence of the hydroglobe is guaranteed by putting into relation the two processes that lead to the production of the undamaged and the contagious. In order to understand the secret complicity that unites these two processes, let us first consider two examples:
1. We know that a financial crisis has no boundaries and can spread everywhere, catching fire in every country; but the financial sphere and its rating agencies seem untouchable, sheltered from every attack, beyond the possibility of being called into question.
2. According to the central dogma of molecular biology, it is possible to predict the behavior of an organism using its genetic program. DNA is considered the heart of life, immaterial and immortal, a “digital river” (Richard Dawkins) capable of converting itself indefinitely into multiple forms of life7; but GMOs, the by-products of this theory, are liable to proliferate and to mutate beyond any expectations that could be established at a molecular level.
We can now propose the two following theses. Thesis 1: The more concentrated the zones of the undamaged, the stronger the contagion. Thesis 2: The denser the contagion, the more the zones of immunity seem impregnable. Everything happens as if the formation of the undamaged had a tendency to take away—to capture, to privatize—the separation between individuals, jealously keeping this separation only for itself, in the form of a split; by contrast, the web of contagion strains to eject those zones from itself so that they might escape the hold of continuity. Finally, a global absolute, which has integrated all difference, as well as a local residue that remains non-differentiated, seems to be formed. But the divide itself is not absolute. There is no re-creation of radical Transcendence to the extent that transcendence is always and indefinitely re-injectable into the world. The web of contagion seeks to immunize itself, to set itself as untouchable, and the undamaged seeks to diffuse itself across the globe. If the saturated immanence of the hydroglobe describes a limit-state in which the undamaged and the contagious converge, this limit-state does not exactly cover the entirety of the situations that make up the world. In each case, it remains to be described how (for example) finance invests consciousness, and economic and social practices, or the way in which individuals swept up in the flux of capital seek to expel part of themselves in order not to be submerged.
Philosophy today.—Hence the task of contemporary philosophy:
1. To analyze the immuno-political processes that have led to the formation of saturated immanence, and to desaturate it, to dis-integrate all the thinking and the modes of production that lead to the formation of the space-time of the undamaged.
2. This involves bringing to light the secret complicity of the undamaged and the contagious, between which the flows of the hydroglobe circulate. Against the formations of the undamaged, it is not primarily a matter of creating continuity: the psycho-political stakes consist of re-appropriating separation. But against contagion, it is not a matter—a reactionary hypothesis—of appealing to radical Transcendence, but to the creation of relation. To oppose continuity to the undamaged and Transcendence to the contagious will only keep the machine of immuno-contagion going.
3. The objective is not to prolong the assessment of the dissolution of subjectivity and presence but, on the contrary, to further the possibility of presence in itself. This is why our task is not a deconstructive one. In fact, the “pure” presence that Derrida analyzed is not presence at all, as he thought, but absence, which is to say a presence purified of existence. The problem is that, in the hydroglobe, existence is literally impossible, if we understand existence as a singular metabolism of relation and separation. In company with the “new materialists,” we must think anew the materiality of our presence towards-the-world—but we must insist on the fact that matter is not continuous, but broken, definitely lacerated.
4. In this sense, we must indeed carry out Nietzsche’s program: the aristocracy of singularity and the fight against all absolute Transcendence. But this program must be established on the basis of a spiral-contingency. The eternal return is not that which comes back to the same, but that which breaks, each time, into a new existence. That which repeats is not a substance, or an identity, but the failure of identity, the terrible and fascinating return of the groundless. This last term must be identified as that from which existence begins: empty field, atopia, spacing, deviation, clinamen. Existence is an originary clinamen.
5. Such a program of philosophy makes way for the imagination—that essential, forgotten, hidden element of philosophy. For the imagination is as dangerous as chaos, which is its source. If there is an alternative world to propose, then, it must be specified that this other world is not the other of that which is, but the other of that which is not. We must invoke the alterity of non-being—an alterity without which metaphysical propositions are reduced to mere operating concepts.
6. This alterity of non-being should set philosophy before its truth: its task is to give an explanation of the madness of the out-of-place, by loading existential trans-jects with a meaning. It cannot and must not seek more than this activity of transferring charge, but it must assure this in order to liberate time. The philosophical liberation of time must find ways of resonating with the only resistance possible to the saturated immanence of the hydroglobe: a chronological dis-joining, a new occupation of time.8
Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x
Over the course of the preceding section, the terms “transcendence” and “immanence” were used many times. If saturated immanence is the principal ontological enemy, does this mean that philosophy today must assert a form of transcendence? We have already indicated the danger of Transcendence, with a capital T, in the process of describing the secret complicity between the undamaged and the contagious. Must we refuse at once both immanence and transcendence? To reply immediately to such a question would only add to the confusion that reigns over the theoretical fights about the concepts of immanence and transcendence. It would be a major error to believe that these concepts are immediately univocal and that it would be enough simply to use them in order to understand what they mean. Instead, it is necessary, at least methodologically, to distinguish between three types of transcendence and immanence.
Ontological plurality.—It is necessary to distinguish between various types of transcendence. First of all, the monotheistic transcendence that we might call the concentrated transcendence of the One that posits a supreme being—the most originary and the most high—in its radical alterity. Next, the divided transcendence of the Two: we might think here of Schelling’s God in Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), a non-total and divided God who contains the internal exteriority of an Abgrund, an Ungrund (a Nature). And finally the pluralized transcendence of existences that is nothing other than the being-outside-of-oneself, which is to say the being-towards-the-world-in-multiplicity. Philosophy, except to deny itself, has always fought against the first transcendence (of the One); it is for this reason that Deleuze can assert that there is no philosophy except for immanence. To be opposed to the transcendence of the One means to refuse giving a different ontological status to the multiplicity of forms of being—or in other words, to assert the univocity of being: that which Deleuze sums up by saying “the tick is God,” it is such as God is, in opposition to all simple analogy. But if our world is that of a compact and static immanence, would it not be perilous still to insist on immanence, at the risk of opening up a “flat ontology,” indifferent to primary existential differences?
Before answering this question, let us note that immanence, too, is triple: the saturated immanence of the One, the divided immanence of the Two, and the pluralized immanence of in-sistence [insistences]. Concerning the divided immanence of the Two, we might take as a key example the subject of the Freudian unconscious, an unconscious that Lacan reduces to a simple “distortion” without depth, without back-world, in the prolongation of the blow of the Nietzschean hammer. The pluralized form of immanence also inherits the “twilight of the idols,” but it abolishes the dimension of God to produce a radical immanence. Deleuze and Guattari carry on the project of constructing pluralized immanence as a dimension that is not static or immune, but open to “lines of flight,” to becomings as well as to differences. For Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza represents the theoretician par excellence of this sort of immanence; for me, Spinoza is the thinker of the saturated immanence of the One—in other words, of absolute immanence. For Deleuze and Guattari (as well as Negri), absolute immanence is the marvel of marvels; for me, it is a horror, describing the abolition of all outside and the sempiternal return to the inside, to the same place, over and over again. I do not believe that Deleuze is, in the final instance, Spinozist. By getting rid of the first chapter of The Ethics, its head, its “substance,” Deleuze makes something entirely different appear: an immanence that has nothing to do with Spinoza’s. When Spinoza says that “we do not even know what a body is capable of,” this is not stated out of enthusiasm or excitement. Instead, Spinoza points explicitly to an ignorance that must be dispelled. But when Deleuze and Guattari take up this pronouncement, unlike Spinoza, they make it into a call for experience, and the knowledge to which this might lead requires a risky and contingent construction:9 We cannot know what might happen before it becomes. Existence is certainly not a Deleuzo-Guattarian term, and it is for this reason that I speak of in-sistence: intensive becoming that is prolonged in an unexpected way. It remains interior, perhaps, but this interior changes radically according to becomings. What, then, is the problem with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ontological orientation?
Transcendence ≈ x.—The problem is one of history, understood as an ontological history, that has affected immanence and transcendence: The saturated immanence of the One is the effect of a total transfusion of the concentrated transcendence of the One. “God, or nature,” Spinoza said, and he was right, unfortunately: It is practically the same thing whether God or Nature—or today’s tele-technological Capital—designates the Total Infinite Substance that makes impossible the self-consistence of finitude, which is always multiple and in this sense worldly. In this respect, we agree with Hegel when he states that Spinoza’s philosophy is “acosmical” (without world) and not pantheistic.10 In order that there might be a world, there must be existences, plural—which is to say, we might risk a mode of relation that goes through loss, the despair that comes from the definitive lack of the One and the irrevocable dis-joining that generates each singularity. From the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism of 1795 through the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809, Schelling had to confront Spinoza in order to make way for finitude, and this could only have been possible by leaving a conceptual place for freedom, Evil, and the groundlessness of God. For this reason, the defeat of saturated immanence requires the refusal of concentrated transcendence. It must, however, be said that a Deleuzo-Guattarian immanence is fully able to bring about this de-saturation, and we cannot reproach these proponents of schizo-analysis, geo-philosophy, and world-literature with being a-cosmic: Indeed, their philosophy is anti-Spinozist! It seems to me, however, that our world does need caesurae, ruptures, and movements of exteriorization, and it is for this reason that I opt for the model of a finite transcendence. The idea of radical change by strictly immanent transformation is certainly seductive, and it is not for nothing that it is accompanied—for Negri, for example—by the idea of necessity: Communism, for Negri, is unavoidable because it expresses the historical movement of history itself such as it is made by men, or the “multitude.” But this is precisely the transcendence-made-immanent of the One: the immanent over-power that shapes everything from the inside and that only stands in for a transcendent over-power (the substitution of the positive over-power of the multitude for the negative power of parasitic capital [that which, we might add, bears power only after having received it from God], substitution of constituent power for sovereignty, substitution of a “democratic living god” for a Hobbesian god of terror11).
The hypothesis of a radical interruption would be preferable, one that engages the uncertain multiplicity of liberated existences. Liberated for nothing, perhaps: to play, to live and die, at the risk of vanishing into the limbo that separates each from the other and from itself. The plural transcendence of existences, finite transcendence, having finitized infinity, being ab-solved of the Absolute—irremediably defenseless, exposed, without precaution, precarious—is poor in world, as much as an animal can be, because it must always imagine passageways or bridges, or take already existing natural canals with care.12 Against saturated immanence, transcendence ≈ x, where x does not mean an overhang; rather, via the sign ≈, it cracks or waves the pluralized world of beings to the outside.
The problem of problems.—But a doubt arises. Freedom, nothingness, Evil, limbo, transcendence ≈ x—in a general project called Atopias—do we not reinforce the humanism we critique? The non-place might, in fact, designate one of the possible consequences of the thesis that sees human beings as beings without essence, indeterminate, free and specifically capable of relation to non-being (néant), and so legitimated in their project of enframing Nature—Nature that reminds human beings a little too much of the unbearable existence of their living bodies. This problem must not be ignored, at the risk of canceling out my entire project. There is indeed a tremor in my work: I am not free of that which I confront. The drive to remain undamaged is inside me. But to face up to this problem requires time. We must go from the extreme end of our age, as we have just done, to the very origins of philosophy in order to come back to a modern lexicon, spiraling, patiently shaping the conceptual formula of atopia.
Socrates does not speak.
Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth
To speak of a philosopher always entails philosophical interpretation. But to speak of Socrates entails an interpretation of philosophical interpretation itself. Here the difficulties multiply and would not cease were it not for some ultimate metalanguage. In the same way, every possible interpretation of a philosopher or a concept, no matter how minor, calls upon philosophy as a whole. There are no—and this is again Socrates speaking—objects unworthy of philosophy. Hair, mud, dirt should be examined in themselves13 as valuable for their relation to a certain Idea of the totality of being and the hierarchy of meaning: A hair is not the heart, and mud does not change to gold without some skillful operation. To speak of Socrates requires not only an Idea of everything, but also an Idea that destabilizes the Idea of everything, as well as a counter-Idea that fractures the hope of an Idea of saying being adequately, and the fracture of this counter-Idea, and—but what happens to us, with Socrates? And what happens again, with philosophy? Precisely an antidote to saturated immanence.
Socrates divides Plato.—Something started with Socrates, but it is hard to say exactly what. This is without a doubt because this beginning is also a collapse: the beginning of philosophy proper on the basis of the destruction of wisdom—after Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides. As Socrates says to Theaetetus, “I am, then, not at all a wise person myself, nor have I any invention, the offspring born of my own soul.”14 It is well known that philosophy establishes itself upon non-knowledge: “I only know one thing, and that is that I know nothing,” Socrates said. This detonation spans the history of philosophy, giving rise to noise-canceling headphones, attempts to snuff out fires or to deactivate bombs that seem to reactivate themselves automatically in places where they are not expected. But we might recall Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker (2009): In order to avoid deadly explosions, aphasias—and still to hope to salvage a scrap of knowledge—the minesweeper-philosopher must remove her protections, leaving herself exposed. This exposure is danger itself: the danger of cognitive accidents and abrupt changes of direction. The integral safety of philosophy would lead to its loss.
With philosophy, at first, we do not know; we cannot understand; we interrogate; we question. This is the famous wonder of which Socrates (Theaetetus, 155d) and Aristotle spoke: “it is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize” (Metaphysics, A § 982b15). We wonder, says Aristotle, “that things should be as they are” (§ 983a), this way and not otherwise. But, he adds, once we have “examined the cause,” this affect should disappear, for its persistence denotes a bounded intellectual nature on the order of stupidity. It is the opposite wonder that must emerge: It would be incredible that things, once illuminated by Reason, could be understood differently than the way they are. For Reason, according to Aristotle, must lead to Identity; each contradiction must be dispelled. As if a tautology must finally appear, A=A, at the end of the philosophical investigation—like a pre-Socratic wisdom that would have successfully excluded its enigma. But a language that would exactly say being, without any enigmatic part, would extinguish in itself the detonation, the origin of philosophy. Science without a blind spot is certainly a myth, a fantasy specific to philosophy, but Socrates is the name of that which maintains the necessity, whatever the cost, of recurrently traversing this fantasy, using whatever comes to hand, intellectual or physical, with the help of Owls and other philosophical animals. The initial interrogation should remain at the heart of the response, stopping it from closing up, as a wound—the opening of death—or as a womb that prepares for childbirth—the opening of life. Aristotle adds, speaking of the surprise and the recognition of ignorance, “thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders.” Instead of radically rejecting mythic discourse, thus assuring its return at the last moment—as the repressed always comes back in the cardinal form of Absolute Knowledge—it is preferable to show that philosophy and myth have to do with the same thing: the wonder of the world, of being which is never what it is or what it might have been, of chaos that always organizes itself just enough not to be able to be called outright chaos.16
Socrates, minesweeper of minesweepers, analyst of philosophical fantasy, warding off frozen utterances—but isn’t our myth precisely there? For it is, in fact, Plato we are reading, and not Socrates. And Plato, in The Republic, does everything except apologize for non-knowledge; for him, philosophy aims at constituting knowledge in its proper form, i.e. as idea. We will thus pose the hypothesis that what begins with Socrates is an internal tension that makes up the Socrates-Plato couple, an actual division in philosophy. To use my own terms, I will say: Socrates divides Plato. Inside philosophy, anti-philosophy will always have been the only philosophy. The danger would, in fact, be to pose Socrates as a simple “elucidating fiction” of Plato—as Badiou does in 1991—to whom all of the destabilizing truths we would attribute to Socrates would have to be given back.17 Crucial here is our interpretation of the Good in chapter VI of the Republic. Like Badiou, I maintain that the Good is an interruption that escapes the chain of Ideas. But this is the very name of truth, not in terms of contents but in the way truth deposes any sort of stabilized knowledge. Truth is only anarchic—or, rather, dis-archic, refusing to turn anarchy into a substitute arche. This sort of truth can in no way fall to some individual or party: As anarchist French singer Léo Ferré reminded us, “the black flag is still a flag.” In the Republic, the Good as an anti-categorical category marks the insistent presence of Socrates, yet in a text that tries to dismiss him. To want to make Socrates into a fiction always risks closing up the gap of philosophy, the enemy of which is not so much the sophist or opinion as it is itself, when philosophy comes down to an anti-anti-philosophy. And it is not only that the truth is “not-all,” as Lacan argues, nor is it the location of a mystical point, that matters. Instead, it is essential to see how this point orients thought, how the not-all of truth ravages all truth, how the dementia—de-mens, literally “without spirit” or “out of one’s mind”—of being exceeds all frame. To ward off this extra-vagance, Socrates has to be neutralized; then reigns the dreadful myth of a pure science without a blind spot.
It is true that Socrates, as Sarah Kofman writes, “literally drove people crazy.” In the last paragraph of Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher, she writes:
If the problem of Socrates has caused so much ink to flow, in the final analysis, is it not because behind the “case” of this atopical and atypical monster, each interpreter is trying as best he can to “settle” his own “case,” to carry out his reading in such a way that all of his own certitudes will not collapse with Socrates, that his own equilibrium and that of his “system”—even if there is nothing obviously systematic about it—will not be too seriously threatened?
The problem is that Socrates is “neither knowing nor ignorant, neither tragic nor comic, neither grotesque nor sublime, neither feminine nor masculine”: like Eros, Socrates is “atopian, outside of all common places.”18 Neither-nor, both-and, between the two, participating and not participating; we become lost each time we try to locate Socrates; he escapes localization. Is he the lover? He is, rather, the loved—ask Alcibiades (The Banquet). Greek? Jewish, rather, according to Nietzsche (The Gay Science, § 340) because he is a dialectician, and the dialectic is a sign of ressentiment toward life (“The Problem of Socrates,” Twilight of the Idols). Kierkegaard compares him to Samson because he knows how to pull down the pillars of the temple of knowledge. Again according to Nietzsche—Plato would even be Christian . . . tragic Socrates? Too ironic! Besides, this is what Hegel cannot stand: An immoderately ironic Socrates is not recoverable in the Odyssey of the Spirit. Socrates, skeptic? Too negative! He wrote nothing—if not several Letters. And there is that strange postcard, in Derrida’s commentary, in which we see Socrates writing and Plato “behind him, smaller” (The Post Card). He speaks—but seems in spite of this to remain silent—“Socrates does not speak” (Foucault). Socrates? No, Plato (Badiou).19 Plato? No, Socrates. Male? No, midwife, and
those who associate with me are in this matter also like women in childbirth; they’re in pain and are full of trouble night and day, much more than are the women. (Theaetetus, 151a)
Socrates or the “most suspect character of Antiquity” (Nietzsche). Definitive atopia: all attempts to ward off atopia mean the death of philosophy.
Two Divide into One.—Let us summarize:
Socrates = Philosophy; Philosophy => Atopia.
Dangerous summary. We affirmed that “Socrates divides Plato,” but now the division is lost, to the prejudicial benefit of the undivided state of philosophy: S=P; P=>A. But everybody knows that philosophy is divided into two camps, materialists against spiritualists (or idealists), and we have heard that philosophy began with a disagreement between the atomists and the Platonists. The problem is that every time a philosopher places herself unilaterally either on one side or on the other, she loses philosophy, whether this is because, as a materialist or an empiricist, she lets go of so-called vain speculations for “Science” (economics, sociology); or because, as a spiritualist, religion, sometimes hidden beneath the name of ethics, is there to supplant philosophy. In the final analysis, the matter subject to science or the Other subject to respect will evacuate the question of the existence of being. In this way, knowledge will become situated or truth incarnated.
I do not want to contest the existence of fundamentally opposed tendencies at the heart of philosophy, but rather to understand what underlies the meaning of this internal divergence. If Foucault, in his last seminar, can differentiate between the two grand possibilities for Western philosophy—on the one hand philosophy as “knowledge of the soul” and “ontology of the self” and on the other philosophy “as a test of life, of bios, which is the ethical material and object of the art of oneself”—it is starting from the double line that he finds in Socrates, in the confrontation of the Alcibiades and the Laches. One line toward the “metaphysics of the soul”; the other toward a “stylistics of existence.” For Foucault, it is the cynics who will incarnate this second line, and it is this becoming which interests him, since it makes the “form of existence” into “the living scandal of the truth.”20 But let us look closer. For the conditions of possibility for cynicism are Socratic: the fact of being free of all ties, that exile which leaves the cynic without a homeland. It was not for nothing that Antisthenes—the first Cynic philosopher—was Socrates’s disciple.21 The cynics take Socrates to the limit, taking philosophy head-on at its word. Diogenes is not, as Plato claims, “a Socrates gone mad,” but the madness of Socrates incarnated.
Thus Foucault understands Socrates’s atopia in showing his mode of enunciating the truth to be profoundly multiple. For the truth, Foucault tells us, can be said in four ways: polemically (like the parrhesiast, he who has the courage of outspokenness), apodictically (like a prophet), demonstratively (like an expert of the transmission of knowledge) and enigmatically (like a sage). In fact, 1. Socrates has the courage necessary as far as the knowledge of the soul is concerned; 2. what is more, he has a mission from a God, of Delphi (Apology 21 a–e); 3. we must add that he knows not only the art of demonstration, but also that he does not totally repudiate the possibility of teaching virtue and the art of good governance; 4. finally, he maintains a relation to wisdom, on the model of that collapse mentioned above. We must insist for a moment on this last point. As Foucault writes, the sage is structurally silent,22 always in a sort of reserve, speaking as little as possible. If I keep quiet, Heraclitus will say to the Ephesians, “it is in order to let you speak.” And this restraint, this withdrawal (mise à l’écart) (the famous misanthropy of Heraclitus), this discursive atopia dwells in the speech of philosophy. Solitary Democritus, it is said, lived sometimes in the tombs. Zeno of Citium, founder of stoicism, “spoke little,” “briefly and without excess, as from far away.”23 As for the cynics, if they make so much of their bodies, their bios, their forms of life, the very showing of the truth, this is precisely because they know that speech—logos—is not and must not be reducible to the reasoned exposition of a science. To make speech into an act, to show more than to demonstrate, is a manner of remaining loudly silent. Once again, Socrates plays a pivotal historical role. While a prophet is an enigmatic spokesperson, the enigma of the sage reveals her status as a silence-person. It is this silence that Socrates still carries into his speech, but he has displaced it: Where the sage—the Pre-Socratic thinker—remains quiet because he knows, Socrates makes silence in his speech in order to listen to the other speak. This is what we must account for further on: Philosophical speech is in tune with the very fact of speaking.
Ectopia.—Atopia is not utopia, another place; it is the other of place. For Plato, there were never two split worlds, as it is wrongly said, but a chorismos—a separation—at the heart of the world, a tear in immanence.24 The biggest mistake would be to believe that this tear is a straight and timeless line, stemming from a divine norm, justified by a symbolic order that could not be unfixed. In fact, the chorismos must be understood in a Lucretian manner: It is the clinamen internal to the world. And philosophical divergence is none other than perpetual relaunching, the oblique throw of dice offered by each thought—whether materialist or idealist—that dares to diverge from straight lines. In the other of place, where the thought occurs, Socrates meets Epicurus. It is not a fictitious encounter, but the confirmation that the deviation is originary, that the straight line of the world was already a deviation, a curve. Everything is deviation from deviation, disruptive spray, geysers.
The world is not compact. It is not the saturated immanence that contemporary societies endeavor to produce by way of inertial flux: The world is outside-of-itself, atopia remaining in the hyphens that link these three words. All in all, metaphysics is only a conceptual incursion into the territories of dis-joining without which no relation would exist, but only compactness. Along with André Breton, each philosopher declares: “I seek the outside of time.”25 All difficulty henceforth consists in the definition of this outside, which makes atopia not the mark of an immunization in terms of place (a not-being-there) but, on the contrary, the condition of possibility for existence as ectopia. With Socrates haloed by a clinamen, let us resume.