Subject and object give a poor approximation of thought. Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth. Kant is less a prisoner of the categories of subject and object than he is believed to be, since his idea of Copernican revolution puts thought into a direct relationship with the earth. Husserl demands a ground for thought as original intuition, which is like the earth inasmuch as it neither moves nor is at rest. Yet we have seen that the earth constantly carries out a movement of deterritorialization on the spot, by which it goes beyond any territory: it is deterritorializing and deterritorialized. It merges with the movement of those who leave their territory en masse, with crayfish that set off walking in file at the bottom of the water, with pilgrims or knights who ride a celestial line of flight. The earth is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace while using one or another of them to deterritorialize territory. Movements of deterritorialization are inseparable from territories that open onto an elsewhere; and the process of reterritorialization is inseparable from the earth, which restores territories. Territory and earth are two components with two zones of indiscernibility—deterritorialization (from territory to the earth) and reterritorialization (from earth to territory). We cannot say which comes first. In what sense, we ask, is Greece the philosopher’s territory or philosophy’s earth?
States and Cities have often been defined as territorial, as substituting a territorial principle for the principle of lineage. But this is inexact: lineal groups may change territory, and they are only really determined by embracing a territory or residence in a “local lineage.” State and City, on the contrary, carry out a deterritorialization because the former juxtaposes and compares agricultural territories by relating them to a higher arithmetical Unity, and the latter adapts the territory to a geometrical extensiveness that can be continued in commercial circuits. The imperial spatium of the State and the political extensio of the city are not so much forms of a territorial principle as a deterritorialization that takes place on the spot when the State appropriates the territory of local groups or when the city turns its back on its hinterland. In one case, there is reterritorialization on the palace and its supplies; and in the other, on the agora and commercial networks.
In imperial states deterritorialization takes place through transcendence: it tends to develop vertically from on high, according to a celestial component of the earth. The territory has become desert earth, but a celestial Stranger arrives to reestablish the territory or reterritorialize the earth. In the city, by contrast, deterritorialization takes place through immanence: it frees an Autochthon, that is to say, a power of the earth that follows a maritime component that goes under the sea to reestablish the territory (the Erechtheum, temple of Athena and Poseidon). In fact, things are more complicated because the imperial Stranger himself needs surviving Autochthons and because the citizen Autochthon calls on strangers in flight—but these are not at all the same psychosocial types, any more than the polytheism of the empire and the polytheism of the city are the same religious figures.1
Greece seems to have a fractal structure insofar as each point of the peninsula is close to the sea and its sides have great length. The Aegean peoples, the cities of ancient Greece and especially Autochthonous Athens, were not the first commercial cities. But they are the first to be at once near enough to and far enough away from the archaic eastern empires to be able to benefit from them without following their model. Rather than establish themselves in the pores of the empires, they are steeped in a new component; they develop a particular mode of deterritorialization that proceeds by immanence; they form a milieu of immanence. It is like an “international market” organized along the borders of the Orient between a multiplicity of independent cities or distinct societies that are nevertheless attached to one another and within which artisans and merchants find a freedom and mobility denied to them by the empires.2 These types come from the borderlands of the Greek world, strangers in flight, breaking with empire and colonized by peoples of Apollo—not only artisans and merchants but philosophers. As Faye says, it took a century for the name philosopher, no doubt invented by Heraclitus of Ephesus, to find its correlate in the word philosophy, no doubt invented by Plato the Athenian: “Asia, Italy, and Africa are the odyssean phases of the journey connecting philosophos to philosophy.”3 Philosophers are strangers, but philosophy is Greek. What do these emigres find in the Greek milieu? At least three things are found that are the de facto conditions of philosophy: a pure sociability as milieu of immanence, the “intrinsic nature of association,” which is opposed to imperial sovereignty and implies no prior interest because, on the contrary, competing interests presuppose it; a certain pleasure in forming associations, which constitutes friendship, but also a pleasure in breaking up the association, which constitutes rivalry (were there not already “societies of friends” formed by emigres, like the Pythagoreans, but still somewhat secret, which found their chance in Greece?); and a taste for opinion inconceivable in an empire, a taste for the exchange of views, for conversation.4 We constantly rediscover these three Greek features: immanence, friendship, and opinion. We do not see a softer world here because sociability has its cruelties, friendship has its rivalries, and opinion has its antagonisms and bloody reversals. Salamis is the Greek miracle where Greece escapes from the Persian empire and where the autochthonous people who lost its territory prevails on the sea, is reterritorialized on the sea. The Delian League is like the fractalization of Greece. For a fairly short period the deepest bond existed between the democratic city, colonization, and a new imperialism that no longer saw the sea as a limit of its territory or an obstacle to its endeavor but as a wider bath of immanence. All of this, and primarily philosophy’s link with Greece, seems a recognized fact, but it is marked by detours and contingency.
Whether physical, psychological, or social, deterritorialization is relative insofar as it concerns the historical relationship of the earth with the territories that take shape and pass away on it, its geological relationship with eras and catastrophes, its astronomical relationship with the cosmos and the stellar system of which it is a part. But deterritorialization is absolute when the earth passes into the pure plane of immanence of a Being-thought, of a Nature-thought of infinite diagrammatic movements. Thinking consists in stretching out a plane of immanence that absorbs the earth (or rather, “adsorbs” it). Deterritorialization of such a plane does not preclude reterritorialization but posits it as the creation of a future new earth. Nonetheless, absolute deterritorialization can only be thought according to certain still-to-be-determined relationships with relative deterritorializations that are not only cosmic but geographical, historical, and psychosocial. There is always a way in which absolute deterritorialization takes over from a relative deterritorialization in a given field.
It is at this point that a major difference arises depending on whether relative deterritorialization takes place through immanence or through transcendence. When it is transcendent, vertical, celestial, and brought about by the imperial unity, the transcendent element must always give way or submit to a sort of rotation in order to be inscribed on the always-immanent plane of Nature-thought. The celestial vertical settles on the horizontal of the plane of thought in accordance with a spiral. Thinking here implies a projection of the transcendent on the plane of immanence. Transcendence may be entirely “empty” in itself, yet it becomes full to the extent that it descends and crosses different hierarchized levels that are projected together on a region of the plane, that is to say, on an aspect corresponding to an infinite movement. In this respect, it is the same when transcendence invades the absolute or monotheism replaces unity: the transcendent God would remain empty, or at least absconditus, if it were not projected on a plane of immanence of creation where it traces the stages of its theophany. In both cases, imperial unity or spiritual empire, the transcendence that is projected on the plane of immanence paves it or populates it with Figures. It is a wisdom or a religion—it does not much matter which. It is only from this point of view that Chinese hexagrams, Hindu mandalas, Jewish sephiroth, Islamic “imaginals,” and Christian icons can be considered together: thinking through figures. Hexagrams are combinations of continuous and discontinuous features deriving from one another according to the levels of a spiral that figures the set of moments through which the transcendent descends. The mandala is a projection on a surface that establishes correspondence between divine, cosmic, political, architectural, and organic levels as so many values of one and the same transcendence. That is why the figure has a reference, one that is plurivocal and circular by nature. Certainly, it is not defined by an external resemblance, which remains prohibited, but by an internal tension that relates it to the transcendent on the plane of immanence of thought. In short, the figure is essentially paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical, and referential (the arts and sciences also set up powerful figures, but what distinguishes them from all religion is not that they lay claim to prohibited resemblance but that they emancipate a particular level so as to make it into new planes of thought on which, as will be seen, the nature of the references and projections change).
Earlier, in order to move on quickly, we said that the Greeks invented an absolute plane of immanence. But the originality of the Greeks should rather be sought in the relation between the relative and the absolute. When relative deterritorialization is itself horizontal, or immanent, it combines with the absolute deterritorialization of the plane of immanence that carries the movements of relative deterritorialization to infinity, pushes them to the absolute, by transforming them (milieu, friend, opinion). Immanence is redoubled. This is where one thinks no longer with figures but with concepts. It is the concept that comes to populate the plane of immanence. There is no longer projection in a figure but connection in the concept. This is why the concept itself abandons all reference so as to retain only the conjugations and connections that constitute its consistency. The concept’s only rule is internal or external neighborhood. Its internal neighborhood or consistency is secured by the connection of its components in zones of indiscernibility; its external neighborhood or exoconsistency is secured by the bridges thrown from one concept to another when the components of one of them are saturated. And this is really what the creation of concepts means: to connect internal, inseparable components to the point of closure or saturation so that we can no longer add or withdraw a component without changing the nature of the concept; to connect the concept with another in such a way that the nature of other connections will change. The plurivocity of the concept depends solely upon neighborhood (one concept can have several neighborhoods). Concepts are flat surfaces without levels, orderings without hierarchy; hence the importance in philosophy of the questions “What to put in a concept?” and “What to put with it?” What concept should be put alongside a former concept, and what components should be put in each? These are the questions of the creation of concepts. The pre-Socratics treat physical elements like concepts: they take them for themselves, independently of any reference, and seek only the good rules of neighborhood between them and in their possible components. If their answers vary it is because, inside and outside, they do not compose these elementary concepts in the same way. The concept is not paradigmatic but syntagmatic; not projective but connective; not hierarchical but linking;* not referential but consistent. That being so, it is inevitable that philosophy, science, and art are no longer organized as levels of a single projection and are not even differentiated according to a common matrix but are immediately posited or reconstituted in a respective independence, in a division of labor that gives rise to relationships of connection between them.
Must we conclude from this that there is a radical opposition between figures and concepts? Most attempts to fix their differences express only ill-tempered judgments that are content to depreciate one or other of the terms: sometimes concepts are endowed with the prestige of reason while figures are referred to the night of the irrational and its symbols; sometimes figures are granted the privileges of spiritual life while concepts are relegated to the artificial movements of a dead understanding. And yet disturbing affinities appear on what seems to be a common plane of immanence.5 In a sort of to-ing and fro-ing, Chinese thought inscribes the diagrammatic movements of a Nature-thought on the plane, yin and yang; and hexagrams are sections of the plane, intensive ordinates of these infinite movements, with their components in continuous and discontinuous features. But correspondences like these do not rule out there being a boundary, however difficult it is to make out. This is because figures are projections on the plane, which implies something vertical or transcendent. Concepts, on the other hand, imply only neighborhoods and connections on the horizon. Certainly, as François Jullien has already shown in the case of Chinese thought, the transcendent produces an “absolutization of immanence” through projection. But philosophy appeals to a completely different immanence of the absolute. All that can be said is that figures tend toward concepts to the point of drawing infinitely near to them. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Christianity made the impresa the envelope of a “concetto,” but the concetto has not yet acquired consistency and depends upon the way in which it is figured or even dissimulated. The question that arises periodically—”Is there a Christian philosophy?”—means “Is Christianity able to create proper concepts?” (belief, anguish, sin, freedom). We have seen this in Pascal or Kierkegaard: perhaps belief becomes a genuine concept only when it is made into belief in this world and is connected rather than being projected. Perhaps Christianity does not produce concepts except through its atheism, through the atheism that it, more than any other religion, secretes. Atheism is not a problem for philosophers or the death of God. Problems begin only afterward, when the atheism of the concept has been attained. It is amazing that so many philosophers still take the death of God as tragic. Atheism is not a drama but the philosopher’s serenity and philosophy’s achievement. There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion. This was already true in Jewish thought: it pushed its figures as far as the concept, but it arrived at that point only with the atheist Spinoza. And if it is true that figures tend toward concepts in this way, the converse is equally true, and philosophical concepts reproduce figures whenever immanence is attributed to something. The three figures of philosophy are objectality of contemplation, subject of reflection, and intersubjectivity of communication. It should be noted that religions do not arrive at the concept without denying themselves, just as philosophies do not arrive at the figure without betraying themselves. There is a difference of kind between figures and concepts, but every possible difference of degree also.
Can we speak of Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, or Islamic “philosophy”? Yes, to the extent that thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by concepts. However, this plane of immanence is not exactly philosophical, but prephilosophical. It is affected by what populates and reacts on it, in such a way that it becomes philosophical only through the effect of the concept. Although the plane is presupposed by philosophy, it is nonetheless instituted by it and it unfolds in a philosophical relationship with the nonphilosophical. In the case of figures, on the other hand, the prephilosophical shows that a creation of concepts or a philosophical formation was not the inevitable destination of the plane of immanence itself but that it could unfold in wisdoms and religions according to a bifurcation that wards off philosophy in advance from the point of view of its very possibility. What we deny is that there is any internal necessity to philosophy, whether in itself or in the Greeks (and the idea of a Greek miracle would only be another aspect of this pseudonecessity). Nevertheless, philosophy was something Greek—although brought by immigrants. The birth of philosophy required an encounter between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence of thought. It required the conjunction of two very different movements of deterritorialization, the relative and the absolute, the first already at work in immanence. Absolute deterritorialization of the plane of thought had to be aligned or directly connected with the relative deterritorialization of Greek society. The encounter between friend and thought was needed. In short, philosophy does have a principle, but it is a synthetic and contingent principle—an encounter, a conjunction. It is not insufficient by itself but contingent in itself. Even in the concept, the principle depends upon a connection of components that could have been different, with different neighborhoods. The principle of reason such as it appears in philosophy is a principle of contingent reason and is put like this: there is no good reason but contingent reason; there is no universal history except of contingency.
It is pointless to seek, like Hegel or Heidegger, an analytic and necessary principle that would link philosophy to Greece. Because the Greeks are free men they are the first to grasp the Object in a relationship with the subject: according to Hegel, this would be the concept. But, because the object is still contemplated as “beautiful,” without its relationship to the subject yet being determined, we must await the following stages for this relationship to be reflected itself and then put into movement or communicated. Nonetheless it remains the case that the Greeks invented the first stage on the basis of which everything develops internally to the concept. No doubt the Orient thought, but it thought the object in itself as pure abstraction, the empty universality identical to simple particularity: it lacked the relationship to the subject as concrete universality or as universal individuality. The Orient is unaware of the concept because it is content to put the most abstract void and the most trivial being in a relationship of coexistence without any mediation. However, it is not clear what distinguishes the antephilosophical stage of the Orient and the philosophical stage of Greece, since Greek thought is not conscious of the relationship to the subject that it presupposes without yet being able to reflect.
Thus, Heidegger displaces the problem and situates the concept in the difference between Being and beings rather than in that between subject and object. He views the Greek as the Autochthon rather than as the free citizen (and, as the themes of building and dwelling indicate, all of Heidegger’s reflection on Being and beings brings earth and territory together): the specificity of the Greek is to dwell in Being and to possess its word. Deterritorialized, the Greek is reterritorialized on his own language and its linguistic treasure—the verb to be. Thus, the Orient is not before philosophy but alongside, because it thinks but it does not think Being.6 Philosophy does not so much evolve and pass through degrees of subject and object as haunt a structure of Being. Heidegger’s Greeks never succeed in “articulating” their relationship to Being; Hegel’s Greeks never came to reflect their relationship to the Subject. But in Heidegger it is not a question of going farther than the Greeks; it is enough to resume their movement in an initiating, recommencing repetition. This is because Being, by virtue of its structure, continually turns away when it turns toward, and the history of Being or of the earth is the history of its turning away, of its deterritorialization in the technico-worldwide development of Western civilization started by the Greeks and reterritorialized on National Socialism. What remains common to Heidegger and Hegel is having conceived of the relationship of Greece and philosophy as an origin and thus as the point of departure of a history internal to the West, such that philosophy necessarily becomes indistinguishable from its own history. However close he got to it, Heidegger betrays the movement of deterritorialization because he fixes it once and for all between being and beings, between the Greek territory and the Western earth that the Greeks would have called Being.
Hegel and Heidegger remain historicists inasmuch as they posit history as a form of interiority in which the concept necessarily develops or unveils its destiny. The necessity rests on the abstraction of the historical element rendered circular. The unforeseeable creation of concepts is thus poorly understood. Philosophy is a geophilosophy in precisely the same way that history is a geohistory from Braudel’s point of view. Why philosophy in Greece at that moment? It is the same for capitalism, according to Braudel: why capitalism in these places and at these moments? Why not in China at some other moment, since so many of its components were already present there? Geography is not confined to providing historical form with a substance and variable places. It is not merely physical and human but mental, like the landscape. Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency. It wrests it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the power of a “milieu” (what philosophy finds in the Greeks, said Nietzsche, is not an origin but a milieu, an ambiance, an ambient atmosphere: the philosopher ceases to be a comet). It wrests it from structures in order to trace the lines of flight that pass through the Greek world across the Mediterranean. Finally, it wrests history from itself in order to discover becomings that do not belong to history even if they fall back into it: the history of philosophy in Greece must not hide the fact that in every case the Greeks had to become philosophers in the first place, just as philosophers had to become Greek. “Becoming” does not belong to history. History today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they may be, from which one turns away in order to become, that is to say, in order to create something new. The Greeks did it, but no turning away is valid once and for all. Philosophy cannot be reduced to its own history, because it continually wrests itself from this history in order to create new concepts that fall back into history but do not come from it. How could something come from history? Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical. Psychosocial types belong to history, but conceptual personae belong to becoming. The event itself needs becoming as an unhistorical element. The unhistorical, Nietzsche says, “is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate and with the destruction of which it must vanish.” It is like a moment of grace; and what “deed would man be capable of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of the unhistorical?”7 Philosophy appears in Greece as a result of contingency rather than necessity, as a result of an ambiance or milieu rather than an origin, of a becoming rather than a history, of a geography rather than a historiography, of a grace rather than a nature.
Why did philosophy survive in Greece? We cannot say that capitalism during the Middle Ages is the continuation of the Greek city (even the commercial forms are hardly comparable). But, for always contingent reasons, capitalism leads Europe into a fantastic relative deterritorialization that is due first of all to city-towns and that itself takes place through immanence. Territorial produce is connected to an immanent common form able to cross the seas: “wealth in general,” “labor tout court” and their coming together as commodity. Marx accurately constructs a concept of capitalism by determining the two principal components, naked labor and pure wealth, with their zone of indiscernibility when wealth buys labor. Why capitalism in the West rather than in China of the third or even the eighth century?8 Because the West slowly brings together and adjusts these components, whereas the East prevents them from reaching fruition. Only the West extends and propagates its centers of immanence. The social field no longer refers to an external limit that restricts it from above, as in the empires, but to immanent internal limits that constantly shift by extending the system, and that reconstitute themselves through displacement.9 External obstacles are now only technological, and only internal rivalries remain. A world market extends to the ends of the earth before passing into the galaxy: even the skies become horizontal. This is not a result of the Greek endeavor but a resumption, in another form and with other means, on a scale hitherto unknown, which nonetheless relaunches the combination for which the Greeks took the initiative—democratic imperialism, colonizing democracy. The European can, therefore, regard himself, as the Greek did, as not one psychosocial type among others but Man par excellence, and with much more expansive force and missionary zeal than the Greek. Husserl said that, even in their hostility, peoples group themselves into types that have a territorial “home” and family kinship, such as the peoples of India; but only Europe, despite its national rivalries, will propose to itself and other peoples “an incitement to become ever more European,” so that in this West the whole of humanity is connected to itself as it never was in Greece.10 However, it is difficult to believe that it is the rise “of philosophy and the mutually inclusive sciences” that accounts for this privilege of a peculiarly European transcendental subject. Rather, the infinite movement of thought, what Husserl calls Telos, must enter into conjunction with the great relative movement of capital that is continually deterritorialized in order to secure the power of Europe over all other peoples and their reterritorialization on Europe. Modern philosophy’s link with capitalism, therefore, is of the same kind as that of ancient philosophy with Greece: the connection of an absolute plane of immanence with a relative social milieu that also functions through immanence. From the point of view of philosophy’s development, there is no necessary continuity passing from Greece to Europe through the intermediary of Christianity; there is the contingent recommencement of a same contingent process, in different conditions.
The immense relative deterritorialization of world capitalism needs to be reterritorialized on the modern national State, which finds an outcome in democracy, the new society of “brothers,” the capitalist version of the society of friends. As Braudel shows, capitalism started out from city-towns, but these pushed deterritorialization so far that immanent modern States had to temper their madness, to recapture and invest them so as to carry out necessary reterritorializations in the form of new internal limits.11 Capitalism reactivates the Greek world on these economic, political, and social bases. It is the new Athens. The man of capitalism is not Robinson but Ulysses, the cunning plebeian, some average man or other living in the big towns, Autochthonous Proletarians or foreign Migrants who throw themselves into infinite movement—revolution. Not one but two cries traverse capitalism and head for the same disappointment: Immigrants of all countries, unite—workers of all countries. At both ends of the West, America and Russia, pragmatism and socialism play out the return of Ulysses, the new society of brothers or comrades that once again takes up the Greek dream and reconstitutes “democratic dignity.”
In fact, the connection of ancient philosophy with the Greek city and the connection of modern philosophy with capitalism are not ideological and do not stop at pushing historical and social determinations to infinity so as to extract spiritual figures from them. Of course, it may be tempting to see philosophy as an agreeable commerce of the mind, which, with the concept, would have its own commodity, or rather its exchange value—which, from the point of view of a lively, disinterested sociability of Western democratic conversation, is able to generate a consensus of opinion and provide communication with an ethic, as art would provide it with an aesthetic. If this is what is called philosophy, it is understandable why marketing appropriates the concept and advertising puts itself forward as the conceiver par excellence, as the poet and thinker. What is most distressing is not this shameless appropriation but the conception of philosophy that made it possible in the first place. The Greeks suffered similar disgraces, relatively speaking, with certain sophists. But what saves modern philosophy is that it is no more the friend of capitalism than ancient philosophy was the friend of the city. Philosophy takes the relative deterritorialization of capital to the absolute; it makes it pass over the plane of immanence as movement of the infinite and suppresses it as internal limit, turns it back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people. But in this way it arrives at the nonpropositional form of the concept in which communication, exchange, consensus, and opinion vanish entirely. It is therefore closer to what Adorno called “negative dialectic” and to what the Frankfurt School called “utopian.” Actually, utopia is what links philosophy with its own epoch, with European capitalism, but also already with the Greek city. In each case it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point. Utopia does not split off from infinite movement: etymologically it stands for absolute deterritorialization but always at the critical point at which it is connected with the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu. Erewhon, the word used by Samuel Butler, refers not only to no-where but also to now-here. What matters is not the supposed distinction between Utopian and scientific socialism but the different types of utopia, one of them being revolution. In utopia (as in philosophy) there is always the risk of a restoration, and sometimes a proud affirmation, of transcendence, so that we need to distinguish between authoritarian utopias, or utopias of transcendence, and immanent, revolutionary, libertarian utopias.12 But to say that revolution is itself utopia of immanence is not to say that it is a dream, something that is not realized or that is only realized by betraying itself. On the contrary, it is to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed. The word utopia therefore designates that conjunction of philosophy, or of the concept, with the present milieu—political philosophy (however, in view of the mutilated meaning public opinion has given to it, perhaps utopia is not the best word).
It is not false to say that the revolution “is the fault of philosophers” (although it is not philosophers who lead it). That the two great modern revolutions, American and Soviet, have turned out so badly does not prevent the concept from pursuing its immanent path. As Kant showed, the concept of revolution exists not in the way in which revolution is undertaken in a necessarily relative social field but in the “enthusiasm” with which it is thought on an absolute plane of immanence, like a presentation of the infinite in the here and now, which includes nothing rational or even reasonable.13 The concept frees immanence from all the limits still imposed on it by capital (or that it imposed on itself in the form of capital appearing as something transcendent). However, it is not so much a case of a separation of the spectator from the actor in this enthusiasm as of a distinction within the action itself between historical factors and “unhistorical vapor,” between a state of affairs and the event. As concept and as event, revolution is self-referential or enjoys a self-positing that enables it to be apprehended in an immanent enthusiasm without anything in states of affairs or lived experience being able to tone it down, not even the disappointments of reason. Revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people.
Absolute deterritorialization does not take place without reterritorialization. Philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept. The concept is not object but territory. It does not have an Object but a territory. For that very reason it has a past form, a present form and, perhaps, a form to come. Modern philosophy is reterritorialized on Greece as form of its own past. German philosophers especially have lived the relationship with Greece as a personal relationship. But they indeed lived it as the reverse or contrary of the Greeks, the symmetrical inverse: the Greeks kept the plane of immanence that they constructed in enthusiasm and drunkenness, but they had to search for the concepts with which to fill it so as to avoid falling back into the figures of the East. As for us, we possess concepts—after so many centuries of Western thought we think we possess them—but we hardly know where to put them because we lack a genuine plane, misled as we are by Christian transcendence. In short, in its past form the concept is that which was not yet. We today possess concepts, but the Greeks did not yet possess them; they possessed the plane that we no longer possess. That is why Plato’s Greeks contemplate the concept as something that is still very far away and beyond, whereas we possess the concept—we possess it in the mind innately; all that is needed is to reflect. This is what Hölderlin expressed so profoundly: the “Autochthon” for the Greeks is our “stranger,” that which we have to acquire, whereas our Autochthon is what, to the contrary, the Greeks had to acquire as their stranger.14 Or, as Schelling put it, the Greeks lived and thought in Nature but left Mind in the “mysteries,” whereas we live, think, and feel in the Mind, in reflection, but leave Nature in a profound alchemical mystery that we constantly profane. The Autochthon and the stranger are no longer separate, like two distinct personae, but distributed like one and the same double persona who unfolds into two versions in turn, present and past: what was Autochthonous becomes strange; what was strange becomes Autochthonous. With all his strength Hölderlin calls for a “society of friends” as the condition of thought, but it is as if this society had suffered a catastrophe that changes the nature of friendship. We reterritorialize ourselves among the Greeks but according to what they did not possess and had not yet become, so that we reterritorialize them on ourselves.
Philosophical reterritorialization therefore also has a present form. Can we say that philosophy is reterritorialized on the modern democratic State and human rights? But because there is no universal democratic State this movement implies the particularity of a State, of a right, or of the spirit of a people capable of expressing human rights in “its” State and of outlining the modern society of brothers. In fact, it is not only the philosopher, as man, who has a nation; it is philosophy that is reterritorialized on the national State and the spirit of the people (usually those of the philosopher, but not always). Thus Nietzsche founded geophilosophy by seeking to determine the national characteristics of French, English, and German philosophy. But why were only three countries collectively able to produce philosophy in the capitalist world? Why not Spain or Italy? Italy in particular presented a set of deterritorialized cities and a maritime power that were capable of reviving the conditions for a “miracle.” It marked the start of an incomparable philosophy. But it aborted, with its heritage passing instead to Germany (with Leibniz and Schelling). Perhaps Spain was too subject to the Church and Italy too “close” to the Holy See. Perhaps it was the break with Catholicism that saved England and Germany spiritually, and perhaps Gallicanism* was what saved France. Italy and Spain lacked a “milieu” for philosophy, so that their thinkers remained “comets”; and they were inclined to burn their comets. Italy and Spain were the two Western countries capable of a powerful development of concettism, that is to say, of that Catholic compromise of concept and figure which had great aesthetic value but which masked philosophy, diverted it toward a rhetoric and prevented a full possession of the concept.
The present form is expressed thus: we have concepts! The Greeks, however, did not yet “have” them and contemplated them from afar, or sensed them: the difference between Platonic reminiscence and Cartesian innateness or the Kantian a priori derives from this. But possession of the concept does not appear to coincide with revolution, the democratic State, and human rights. If in America the philosophical enterprise of pragmatism, so poorly understood in France, has continuities with the democratic revolution and the new society of brothers, this is not true of the golden age of seventeenth-century French philosophy, or of eighteenth-century England, or of nineteenth-century Germany. But this is only to say that human history and the history of philosophy do not have the same rhythm. French philosophy already speaks in the name of a republic of minds and of a capacity to think as something that is “the most widely shared” and that will end up being expressed in a revolutionary cogito. England will constantly reflect on its revolutionary experience and will be the first to ask why revolutions turn out so badly in reality when in spirit they promise so much. England, America, and France exist as the three lands of human rights. As for Germany, it will continue to reflect on the French revolution from its side, as that which it cannot do (it lacks sufficiently deterritorialized towns; it suffers from the weight of a hinterland, the Land). But what it cannot do it undertakes to think. In each case philosophy finds a way of reterritorializing itself in the modern world in conformity with the spirit of a people and its conception of right. The history of philosophy therefore is marked by national characteristics or rather by nationalitarianisms [nationalitaires*], which are like philosophical “opinions.”
EXAMPLE 8
If we moderns possess the concept but have lost sight of the plane of immanence, then the tendency of the French persona in philosophy is to manage this situation by supporting concepts through a simple order of reflexive knowledge, an order of reasons, an “epistemology.” It is like the inventory of habitable, civilizable, knowable or known lands that are summed up by an awareness or cogito, even if this cogito must become prereflexive, and this consciousness must become nonthetic, so as to cultivate what is most barren. The French are like landowners whose source of income is the cogito. They are always reterritorialized on consciousness. Germany, on the other hand, does not give up the absolute: it makes use of consciousness but as a means of deterritorialization. It wants to reconquer the Greek plane of immanence, the unknown earth that it now feels as its own barbarism, its own anarchy abandoned to the nomads since the disappearance of the Greeks.15 It must also constantly clear and consolidate this ground, that is to say, it must lay foundations. Amania for founding, for conquering, inspires this philosophy; what the Greeks possessed Autochthonously, German philosophy would have through conquest and foundation, so that it would make immanence immanent to something, to its own Act of philosophizing, to its own philosophizing subjectivity (the cogito therefore takes on a different meaning since it conquers and lays down the ground).
England, from this point of view, is Germany’s obsession, for the English are precisely those nomads who treat the plane of immanence as a movable and moving ground, a field of radical experience, an archipelagian world where they are happy to pitch their tents from island to island and over the sea. The English nomadize over the old Greek earth, broken up, fractalized, and extended to the entire universe. We cannot even say that they have concepts like the French and Germans; but they acquire them, they only believe in what is acquired—not because everything comes from the senses but because a concept is acquired by inhabiting, by pitching one’s tent, by contracting a habit. In the trinity Founding-Building-Inhabiting, the French build and the Germans lay foundations, but the English inhabit. For them a tent is all that is needed. They develop an extraordinary conception of habit: habits are taken on by contemplating and by contracting that which is contemplated. Habit is creative. The plant contemplates water, earth, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides, and sulphates, and it contracts them in order to acquire its own concept and fill itself with it (enjoyment*). The concept is a habit acquired by contemplating the elements from which we come (hence the very special Greekness of English philosophy, its empirical neo-Platonism). We are all contemplations, and therefore habits. l is a habit. Wherever there are habits there are concepts, and habits are developed and given up on the plane of immanence of radical experience: they are “conventions.”16 That is why English philosophy is a free and wild creation of concepts. To what convention is a given proposition due; what is the habit that constitutes its concept? This is the question posed by pragmatism. English law is a law of custom and convention, as the French is of contract (deductive system) and the German of institution (organic totality). When philosophy is reterritorialized on the State of Law, the philosopher becomes philosophy professor; but for the German this is by institution and foundation, for the French it is by contract, and for the English it is solely by convention.
If there is no universal democratic State, despite German philosophy’s dream of foundation, it is because the market is the only thing that is universal in capitalism. In contrast with the ancient empires that carried out transcendent overcodings, capitalism functions as an immanent axiomatic of decoded flows (of money, labor, products). National States are no longer paradigms of overcoding but constitute the “models of realization” of this immanent axiomatic. In an axiomatic, models do not refer back to a transcendence; quite the contrary. It is as if the deterritorialization of States tempered that of capital and provided it with compensatory reterritorializations. Now, models of realization may be very diverse (democratic, dictatorial, totalitarian), they may be really heterogeneous, but they are nonetheless isomorphous with regard to the world market insofar as the latter not only presupposes but produces determinate inequalities of development. That is why, as has often been noted, democratic States are so bound up with, and compromised by, dictatorial States that the defense of human rights must necessarily take up the internal criticism of every democracy. Every democrat is also the “other Tartuffe” of Beaumarchais, the humanitarian Tartuffe, as Péguy said. Of course, there is no reason to believe that we can no longer think after Auschwitz, or that we are all responsible for Nazism in an unwholesome culpability that, moreover, would only affect the victims. As Primo Levi said, they will not make us confuse the victims with the executioners. But, he says, what Nazism and the camps inspire in us is much more or much less: “the shame of being a man” (because even the survivors had to collude, to compromise themselves).17 It is not only our States but each of us, every democrat, who finds him or herself not responsible for Nazism but sullied by it. There is indeed catastrophe, but it consists in the society of brothers or friends having undergone such an ordeal that brothers and friends can no longer look at each other, or each at himself, without a “weariness,” perhaps a “mistrust,” which does not suppress friendship but gives it its modern color and replaces the simple “rivalry” of the Greeks. We are no longer Greeks, and friendship is no longer the same: Blanchot and Mascolo have seen the importance of this mutation for thought itself.
Human rights are axioms. They can coexist on the market with many other axioms, notably those concerning the security of property, which are unaware of or suspend them even more than they contradict them: “the impure mixture or the impure side by side,” said Nietzsche. Who but the police and armed forces that coexist with democracies can control and manage poverty and the deterritorialization-reterritorialization of shanty towns? What social democracy has not given the order to fire when the poor come out of their territory or ghetto? Rights save neither men nor a philosophy that is reterritorialized on the democratic State. Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. A great deal of innocence or cunning is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends, or even of wise men, by forming a universal opinion as “consensus” able to moralize nations, States, and the market.18 Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights. Nor is it only in the extreme situations described by Primo Levi that we experience the shame of being human. We also experience it in insignificant conditions, before the meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies, before the propagation of these modes of existence and of thought-for-the-market, and before the values, ideals, and opinions of our time. The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered appears from within. We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continue to undergo shameful compromises with it. This feeling of shame is one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs. We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them. And there is no way to escape the ignoble but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves): thought itself is sometimes closer to an animal that dies than to a living, even democratic, human being.
If philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it does not find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic State or in a cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection. We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of capitalism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples. Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation. It is not populist writers but the most aristocratic who lay claim to this future. This people and earth will not be found in our democracies. Democracies are majorities, but a becoming is by its nature that which always eludes the majority. The position of many writers with respect to democracy is complex and ambiguous. The Heidegger affair has complicated matters: a great philosopher actually had to be reterritorialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to meet up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question and sometimes absolving it through such complicated and convoluted arguments that we are still in the dark. It is not always easy to be Heideggerian. It would be easier to understand a great painter or musician falling into shame in this way (but, precisely, they did not). It had to be a philosopher, as if shame had to enter into philosophy itself. He wanted to rejoin the Greeks through the Germans, at the worst moment in their history: is there anything worse, said Nietzsche, than to find oneself facing a German when one was expecting a Greek? How could Heidegger’s concepts not be intrinsically sullied by an abject reterritorialization? Unless all concepts include this gray zone and indiscernibility where for a moment the combatants on the ground are confused, and the thinker’s tired eye mistakes one for the other—not only the German for a Greek but the fascist for a creator of existence and freedom. Heidegger lost his way along the paths of the reterritorialization because they are paths without directive signs or barriers. Perhaps this strict professor was madder than he seemed. He got the wrong people, earth, and blood. For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race—the very ones that Kant excluded from the paths of the new Critique. Artaud said: to write for the illiterate—to speak for the aphasic, to think for the acephalous. But what does “for” mean? It is not “for their benefit,” or yet “in their place.” It is “before.” It is a question of becoming. The thinker is not acephalic, aphasic, or illiterate, but becomes so. He becomes Indian, and never stops becoming so—perhaps “so that” the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else and tears himself away from his own agony. We think and write for animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else. The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy. Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth. The philosopher must become nonphilosopher so that nonphilosophy becomes the earth and people of philosophy. Even such a well-respected philosopher as Bishop Berkeley never stops saying, “We Irish others, the mob.” The people is internal to the thinker because it is a “becoming-people,” just as the thinker is internal to the people as no less unlimited becoming. The artist or the philosopher is quite incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and it cannot be concerned any more with art or philosophy. But books of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance in common—their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present.
Deterritorialization and reterritorialization meet in the double becoming. The Autochthon can hardly be distinguished from the stranger because the stranger becomes Autochthonous in the country of the other who is not, at the same time that the Autochthon becomes stranger to himself, his class, his nation, and his language: we speak the same language, and yet I do not understand you. Becoming stranger to oneself, to one’s language and nation, is not this the peculiarity of the philosopher and philosophy, their “style,” or what is called a philosophical gobbledygook? In short, philosophy is reterritorialized three times: on the Greeks in the past, on the democratic State in the present, and on the new people and earth in the future. Greeks and democrats are strangely deformed in this mirror of the future.
Utopia is not a good concept because even when opposed to History it is still subject to it and lodged within it as an ideal or motivation. But becoming is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not of it. In itself it has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu. It is thus more geographical than historical. Such are revolutions and societies of friends, societies of resistance, because to create is to resist: pure becomings, pure events on a plane of immanence. What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing as concept, escapes History. Psychosocial types are historical, but conceptual personae are events. Sometimes one ages in accordance with History, and with it, sometimes one becomes old in a quite unobtrusive event (perhaps the same event that allows the problem “what is philosophy?” to be posed). And it is the same for those who die young—there are several ways of so dying. To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is. What is in the process of coming about is no more what ends than what begins. History is not experimentation, it is only the set of almost negative conditions that make possible the experimentation of something that escapes history. Without history experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It is philosophical.
EXAMPLE 9
In a great work of philosophy, Péguy explains that there are two ways of considering the event. One consists in going over the course of the event, in recording its effectuation in history, its conditioning and deterioration in history. But the other consists in reassembling the event, installing oneself in it as in a becoming, becoming young again and aging in it, both at the same time, going through all its components or singularities. It may be that nothing changes or seems to change in history, but everything changes, and we change, in the event: “There was nothing. Then a problem to which we saw no end, a problem without solution … suddenly no longer exists and we wonder what we were talking about”; it has gone into other problems; “there was nothing and one is in a new people, in a new world, in a new man.”19 This is no longer the historical, and it is not the eternal, Péguy says: it is the Aternal [Internel]. Péguy had to create this noun to designate a new concept. Is this not something similar to that which a thinker far from Péguy designated Untimely or Inactual—the unhistorical vapor that has nothing to do with the eternal, the becoming without which nothing would come about in history but that does not merge with history? Beneath the Greeks and States, it launches a people, an earth, like the arrow and discus of a new world that is never-ending, that is always in the process of coming about—“acting counter to time, and therefore acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” Acting counter to the past, and therefore on the present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future—but the future is not a historical future, not even a utopian history, it is the infinite Now, the Nun that Plato already distinguished from every present: the Intensive or Untimely, not an instant but a becoming. Again, is this not what Foucault called the Actual? But how could the concept now be called the actual when Nietzsche called it the inactual? Because, for Foucault, what matters is the difference between the present and the actual. The actual is not what we are but, rather, what we become, what we are in the process of becoming—that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other. The present, on the contrary, is what we are and, thereby, what already we are ceasing to be. We must distinguish not only the share that belongs to the past and the one that belongs to the present but, more profoundly, the share that belongs to the present and that belonging to the actual.20 It is not that the actual is the utopian prefiguration of a future that is still part of our history. Rather, it is the now of our becoming. When Foucault admires Kant for posing the problem of philosophy in relation not to the eternal but to the Now, he means that the object of philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal or to reflect history but to diagnose our actual becomings: a becoming-revolutionary that, according to Kant himself, is not the same thing as the past, present, or future of revolutions. A becoming-democratic that is not the same as what States of law are, or even a becoming-Greek that is not the same as what the Greeks were. The diagnosis of becomings in every passing present is what Nietzsche assigned to the philosopher as physician, “physician of civilization,” or inventor of new immanent modes of existence. Eternal philosophy, but also the history of philosophy, gives way to a becoming-philosophical. What becomings pass through us today, which sink back into history but do not arise from it, or rather that arise from it only to leave it? The Aternal, the Untimely, the Actual are examples of concepts in philosophy; exemplary concepts. And if one calls Actual what the other called Inactual, this is only in virtue of a combination of the concept, in virtue of its proximities and components, the slight displacements of which entail, as Péguy said, the modification of a problem (the Temporally eternal in Péguy, the Eternity of becoming according to Nietzsche, and the Outside-interior with Foucault).