Ordinary peoples, criminal and peaceful, had farmed the low-lying plains to the north of the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara for generations. Suddenly, the Bosporus cork gave way. A mass burst that no one had realized formed a dam, and, stemming from the Mediterranean, brackish torrents poured out in cataracts into this low country, inundating furrows and villages as they passed, likewise killing humans and animals. In less than ‘forty days and forty nights’, a small lake widened to the dimensions of the Black Sea. This event took place in the now dated times of deglaciation, during which similar populations, residing at the bottom of the Strait of Dover, witnessed, just as powerless, an irresistible invasion of water. Whether geologists or prehistorians, some people imagine that the Bible recorded the Eastern European event under the name and via the story of Noah. For over the course of the preceding weeks, an astute sage could have heard the high barrier cracking and persuaded his family and friends to prepare for catastrophe; Noah, a son saved amid the dead and a father of the survivors.
How should we define an event? As that bomb whose contingent newness interrupts a state of affairs that has been formatted for a long enough time to make people believe in its perenniality: a people was going about its business in calm, it disappeared; one family alone remained; an ancient lake of reduced dimensions expanded; a fragment of history bifurcated.
Rare, news of this type astounds when it is told; it tears apart the old formats.
The consequences of the event
Supposing the experts were not mistaken about the reality or the date of this event, nor about its interpretation, not only is the rupture of the Bosporus interesting to those men or women who were unaware of it and thereby learn that such climatic fluctuations can return, but this rupture in truth also had an enormous impact: it destroyed the civilization whose ruins we discover on submerged shores; it reshaped a notable part of the global map and opened Russia up to the sea by giving rise to new maritime exchanges; it staged a hero whose role as a new Adam caused exegetes to ponder …; in short, it renewed our view of time and the face of the Earth. Strictly physical, the event had a historical and religious effect.
When, translated into the majority of languages, the Bible penetrated cultures and mentalities, the story of Noah (the deluge, the bank-ark of visible living things and the invention of the first biotechnology, wine, through domestication of an invisible ferment …) spread even farther than the waters. Supposing, I repeat, that the aforementioned rupture truly took place, there and during the times stated, the consequences of the event surpassed the simple mechanical effect, whether physical or one of terror, that could be brought about by cascade or cataract. The verb ‘surpass’, used intentionally here, doesn’t merely designate the quantity or volume of action, but also a change of nature and quality: the appearance of space and the direction of history. The map of Eurasia was redrawn; some people even started human history from zero or saw it deviate. Global and cultural consequences ensue from a physical and local event: from one format, another one.
Causes
Are there other events, comparable, that, by their strength, seem to be an exception to the usual chain of causes, in which consequences are equivalent to their conditions, in which the entire effect is found in the full cause? The physics of the Earth dates five eradications of the majority of living things fairly exactly, catastrophes due, it seems, to volcanism or an aerolite strike, a normal eruption or a chance impact bringing about what could be called a nuclear winter; the dust made to shoot up into the atmosphere by these occasions, put into orbit, plunged the globe into a long and icy night. Local cause, universal effect; physical cause, biological effect. The consequences bifurcate in nature as well as in scope.
What should we call an event? When known causes unfold in such a way that the expected effects remain similar to what precedes, the sequence plunges into a format that’s predictable by the ordinary rule of causality: the hours follow one another, duration flows; everyone gets bored or lives their share of happiness. But should a colossal occurrence suddenly arise that brings about unexpected effects in size or nature, and should the monotonous format of previous rules deviate, in direction for example, then we call them events.
I am now talking about them and newness.
On little causes
Am I mistaken? The millions of horsepower unfolded by the Bosporus rupture, the impact of an aerolite in Mexico or Siberia, ten volcanic eruptions in Iceland or the Sunda Islands can, by their power, produce a thousand devastating effects, and universal to boot. So these events could be used as examples of the normal development of the ordinary format: tremendous causes, enormous effect. But there are other ones where the strength of the causes diminishes down to the minimum and even to zero and whose effects nonetheless surpass all proportion.
Thus history, both Roman and universal, deviated at the sight of Cleopatra’s nose, whose curve was appreciated by Caesar and Antony in turn.1 Causes with almost zero strength or actions that are ridiculous today, becoming decisive tomorrow, will produce effects that shake singular existences and global empires. Who can be certain that the Soviet regime wasn’t shaken at all by the Vatican institution, so weak that Stalin derisively asked how many divisions it had? Who knows how to weigh the power of a symbol that is apparently without any strength?
Can we assess the consequences of words? A piece of gossip grows into rumour and, spreading into slander, drives a victim to suicide. Who can predict this propagation? The remark kills: unexpected, the effect surpasses tremendously an imponderable cause. Do words change the human adventure? The fact that reading shapes the body, decides actions and enchants the world is shown by Don Quixote. Historians have trouble filling this gap between heavy consequences and the lightness of language. Who can evaluate the effectiveness of an announcement, of a lie, of a truth? We rarely master the effects of our productions, whether words or things.
Nature and cultures
We also don’t always know how to assess the consequences of our equations: words and phrases from another language. Newton discovered universal gravitation; ever since then, no one sees the sky or the stars in the same way, nor the Earth or the apples in the yard. Conceive of grace as the opposite of gravity. Three letters, a sign and a figure (e = mc 2 ) provided us with the access key to forces from which we drew bombs destructive enough for the terror caused by them to change international relations. In manipulating the atom, the chain of genes or cloning bacteria …, aren’t we playing with fire? We have risked fires ever since the supposed domestication of flames; neglected, a match can set hectares aflame.
We shall soon laugh at those who told of mastering technologies. Who can guess if and how some object, common however and come from our industry, can be diverted someday into a symbol, an icon, nay, into a divinity? Our ancestors venerated, it is said, fetishes-logs that they had just cut; worse, they sometimes sacrificed their children to them; the blind worship of certain products of our economy kills our families on the freeways. Fearing seeing their statues move, the Greek sometimes covered them with chains. What could be more commonplace than to adore idols sculpted by our hands or banal stars on brightly coloured advertisements?
A flint knife hunts but also murders. The pursuit of aurochs helped them survive; was this pursuit running towards the eradication of the species? Who knows? What we shape and think we master departs to seek its fortune in the world, being born to a life of its own. The anxiety attached to the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice has affected Homo faber from its first productions and haunted our technologies and our sciences all the way up to this morning.
Generalization
The reader might be surprised that the preceding pages went from casual slander to scientific formulas, and lastly to our fabrications in general. All these examples are united by the break in proportion between little causes and gigantic consequences, whether favourable or disastrous, a union resulting from linking the scale of information, so delicate it plunges down to the minuscule weaknesses that are verbal utterances or psychological energies, to the scale we started from, that of earthquakes.
For we also don’t always know how to assess the consequences of a purely physical phenomenon: thus, before chaos theory, Poincaré demonstrated that the Earth could, without warning, leave the solar system and depart, it too, to seek its fortune in the world. So the cause quits the enormous so as to descend, even in mechanics, to the imperceptible and join there, in the minuscule, Cleopatra and slander. Laugh at historians who remain deterministic in human affairs, while the hardest sciences accept that unpredictable effects linked to initial conditions that can’t be perceived by the most minute observation can occur.
The loop closes: the same disproportion can affect inert and human-caused phenomena just as much; from the most imperceptible to the astronomical, from nature to cultures, on every scale of force …, the possibility of a gap between cause and consequence can be found. A tiny mutation can lead to the emergence of a living species whose numbers will occupy the globe. The concept of event becomes universal. While it used to seem so slight and circumstantial … that, to express these qualities, we said ‘event-oriented’ [événementiel], it is now losing its character of being an exception so as to join, if not a rule, at least a crowd. This book celebrates the access of contingent singularities to the universal. Narrative unites with the law.
The observer and his interest
I just talked about things themselves as though no one was perceiving them. Yet an event is measured in relation to the interest an observer takes in it. If he gets bored, he will run to the news; so an unexpected announcement interests him: yesterday morning, Santorini exploded, destroying the Minoan culture; yesterday evening, Newton invented universal gravitation … The interest increases with the newness; the subject no longer gets bored.
But how does he recognize an event? If the occurrence that happened maintains no relation with his previous experience, will it interest him? Who among his family gave credence to Noah’s apocalyptic opinions, alone with his ark on his hands? There was no prophet in the region … But shepherds must also have already, for a long time, raised livestock on the narrow shores of the old Black Sea for the cataract to have devastated their history. Please reread, above, the two first sentences: … for generations. Suddenly … Here are the two acts of the event: before it, a kind of monotonous format reigned, inducing habit or boredom, and, all of a sudden, a contingent break occurs in this regime. Is it truly a matter of a totally new thing?
Not really: every bifurcation displays two stems. Scientists before Newton must have already asked a few questions and missed the right answer regarding the cause of motion; houses, palaces, a noteworthy social organization and a few fumaroles must have appeared on the island of Thera; the victims of a love-at-first-sight thunderbolt must have experienced two or three things regarding love … Does newness descend from the sky, indecipherable? Not really. Granted, the Greek language was ignorant of the word volcano; granted, astrobiology claims that the first coded RNAs arrived on Earth on board aerolites …, but, most of the time, the news maintains some relation with a usage that precedes it and which the news shakes up. Something exists beforehand, which the bifurcation disfigures. A father dictates the law; his son disobeys it.
When Saint Paul announced the Good News, he grafted the Christian branch onto the Jewish tree and its Pharisean bough; the graft was born on the rootstock. ‘If you, being cut off a wild olive tree to which you belong by nature, have been, contrary to your nature, grafted onto a cultivated olive tree, how much better would these natural branches be grafted onto their own olive tree to which they belong by nature!’ (Rom. 11.24). In the shape of a ramification, each of these examples, chosen deliberately for their difference in nature or cultures, presents a stem, stable, and a branch, new.
Action and thought
Just as the event, universal and singular, in fact traverses every scale of power, from the colossal to the minimal, so it crosses the border separating the raw occurrence, in which a new thing separates off from the format, separating the raw occurrence, as I was saying, from the observer wakened by the news. He who gets bored experiences the uniformity of a sequence of repeated occurrences; strong and keen, on the contrary, interest suddenly springs up when the newness of the event shoots up from the rule …, when the graft diverges from the rootstock. Leaping from his torpor to the news, the observer finds himself torn and divided on this double schema, along with the things around him, things subjected to a suddenly broken law. The explosion of a seventh chord breaks up the greyness, and the ear wakes up. This book celebrates the waking at the fork-point between the stem and the branch because these days we are living on this double point of tangency, from which the word contingency was derived.
So not only does the observer get up from bed but so does the possible actor. Who can assess the effectiveness of his practices on things, living beings, humans and circumstances? Vast investments prove to be powerless; a flick of a finger decides a triumph. However powerful he may see h imself, the master has less power than he thinks; however weak we may see ourselves, each of us has more power than we think. However feeble my weakness may be experienced to be, more strength comes from my arm than from a butterfly’s wing; if this wing can trigger a hurricane, what will my fingers be able to achieve? Neither the tyrant nor the slave assesses their scope. Tomorrow, the former will fall, of himself, and the latter will scorn taking power in order to try to establish a less stupid world.
Jubilation, gambling
This ignorance of the effect … inspires hope for action, joyous decision, freedom of destiny. Through the inexpertise it grants me, contingency gives rise to an inexhaustible jubilation of willing, thinking, undertaking. A solitary essayist throws his works out like dice; it’s tough luck if he doesn’t write Phèdre, at least he will have lived, that is to say, attempted. Within every newborn, the adventure of the Messiah, hoped for or already come, is at stake. We don’t so much live plunged in a fated sequence of predictable causes, in an incontestably necessary real … as in an extraordinary game of chance in which the actual and the probable can lose their weight of seriousness in relation to the inactual, the symbolic, the unexpected, the invented at leisure, the mad and the weak. Something that, here and now, appears dramatic and pressing disappears into smoke a bit later, and something whose importance no one sees becomes, patiently or lightning fast, the most important thing. Today’s necessary quickly turns into the impossible, and the contingent suddenly changes into necessity, the reasonable into imbecility and the insane into rational.
The thinker wagers. The man of action gambles. The artist risks. Cook launched into the Coral Sea without knowledge; Gallois discovered groups before dying in a duel at dawn. When more conventional people engage in what we call actuality, they sometimes lose their status of being a thinker and the effectiveness of their actions. Realism proposes bad bets. If you want to lose your soul, work to save it; for he saves it in the end who appears to have lost it. Play for high stakes. Imagine, invent, plan, something of it will always remain. Fortune, sometimes, smiles on daringness, alone reasonable; learned ignorance thinks.
Four new things
Conversely, are you getting bored? I will therefore announce four events to you.
Here, first of all, is our news: millions of years ago, Homo sapiens appeared; quadrumanous, it invented walking; made fire; left Africa; disembarked in Australia, then in Alaska, by the Aleutian Islands; carved and polished stones; a mammoth hunter, boldly crossed the Atlantic, from ice floes to fragments of pack ice, from southwest France to America; domesticated the dog; raised sheep and cattle; farmed corn and wheat; crossbred pigeons as well as apple trees; massively stoning the corpses of kings, built multiple pyramids; prohibited human sacrifice; discovered universal gravitation and non-commutative geometry; wrote the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, the Essays …; composed Le Tombeau de Couperin …; will it practice the only motto compatible with its survival: love one another? … How should we define humanity? By this narrative of new and contingent events that are unpredictable before they occur but formatted as a semi-necessary chain when drawn descending towards us.
Before the human adventure, the living species, gasping for breath, succeeded one another; almost with the birth of the Earth, a coded RNA arose, maybe from elsewhere, capable of duplicating itself; bacteria reigned for three billion years; multicellular organisms exploded; Burgess Shale dates the arrival of hard parts, already evoked; so the immense tree of kingdoms, orders, genuses and families unfolded, as surprisingly as our own inventions, its multiple ramifications and twigs. How should we define life? By this narrative of new and contingent events that are unpredictable before they occur but formatted as a semi-necessary chain when drawn descending towards us.
Are you getting bored? Only new announcements interest you? But what events should we call interesting? Here you are: adventures, discoveries, life, even time itself … incessantly flit from one thing to another.
Before these two arborescences, let’s not omit, for the sake of still ridding ourselves of boredom, the news of the world. Over the course of its expansion, the incandescent universe cooled; having reached some given temperature, ionization stopped, which was preventing particles from fastening to nuclei; matter could then become separated from light; the latter continues, the former concentrates: after the brilliant homogeneity of the state of youth, in which even atoms hadn’t yet formed, the distribution of galaxies followed, separated by a semi-void. We know how to date this knot of change, especially ever since we have been able to observe the cosmic microwave background and measure its residual heat. The old stem, present, continues to vibrate; the new branch forms the observable universe. Just as the classification of living things summarizes a temporal evolution in which branches continually surge up, always new, the classification Mendeleev drew up for the simple chemical bodies likewise summarizes the arborescence of their formation according to time. How should we define some metal? By the date of its birth, of its newness. What should we say, as well, about some star, dwarf or supergiant? Red old age; blue youth.
I shall stop, so as not to bore you, this series of examples, nevertheless so interesting; these four new things – material bodies, universe, life, humanity … – can be summed up in a single word, nature. How should we define it? By its original meaning: that which was born, that which is born, that which will be born; that is, a narrative of newborn and contingent events that are unpredictable before they occur but formatted as a semi-necessary chain when drawn descending towards us.
Everything we learn shoots forth; everything we produce surges up; everything that exists invents … The Grand Narrative resembles a universal arborescence of contingent events and of new things. Necessity, where does your victory fall to pieces? You no longer wound with your sting. Has boredom just breathed its final breath in order to leave a cradle for the joyous interest of the new?
Boredom
Why are you bored? Because long chains of reason always go over the same formats again; rocks fall, rivers flow, hours strike, predatory species reign by programme: lion, Alexander; jackal, Louis XIV; hyena, Stalin; vulture, Pinochet …; eagles: Napoleon won and lost battles, England conquered a thousand colonies, America is mastering the world …; each line falls into line with monotonous rules, always modelled on the same format of power and death. Things that are predictable before they occur and forming necessary sequences, without any information. Such formats, methodical, dominate. Force kills but doesn’t invent much. Old, Satan criti cizes, God creates the new.
Boredom repeats laws. Heavy bodies attract each other; fire cools; order runs towards disorder; organisms deteriorate; genetic automatons repeat their programmed behaviour. Nothing learns anything. Don’t slap, the mosquitoes will come back to harass you; don’t harass these humans, they will return to battle. The universe is running to the big crunch, a terminal crushing, symmetrical to the big bang; the Sun is running towards its nova, the final explosion; stem cells are running towards a series of inhibitions; species are running towards their extinction; invention towards repetition; new thought towards litany; works towards commentary; violence towards violence, power towards power, both towards death. Boredom kills.
The deadly melancholy of ‘news’
Are you still bored? Run to the news. So what do you call by this common name? Words and images of power and glory play musical chairs in which the name of he or she being talked about changes, but the law for gestures is repeated: conquering power, abandoning it, being expelled from it. To seize it, you must kill. Killing ever since eagles and lambs, Cain and Abel, Alexander and Stalin …, hunting, the struggle for life.
Run to the news: TV channels, said to be informational, at all hours drum out with a monotonous sound the norm of death, seasoned with terror and pity. Murders, corpses in large numbers. Their dismal links in a chain imprison with death. How would news emerge from these melancholic programmes, which are as necessary as the laws of the deadly falling of bodies? True news announces adventure, life, inventions, contingency.
New praise of format
A norm nevertheless presents a semi-interest. A tic, repetition imprisons, of course, but, an adjuvant for work, habit lightens effort. To flee these chains or not, that is a real question.
For if the law binds, it aids, as I have said. If uniformity puts to sleep, if monotony stiffens and subjugates to its drug, they nonetheless regularize. Having two aspects, a clock repeats and announces, rocks us to sleep and wakes us up, makes time pass and sounds reveille, in the day’s schedule as well as in biology. Dense with twenty watches, our body suffers from their disturbance when it crosses meridians. Training allows us to progress following the cadenced return of gestures and exercises. Would we learn without the imitation done by mirror neurons? From the body to the work, the same programme: rhythms have the double role of benumbing us into sleep and carrying out tasks. A work requires following a repeated shift for writing. Nulla dies sine linea: not a single day without a line. A rule has two functions: enslaving and freeing. Art is born from constraints and dies from freedom. But when, conversely, academicism kills it, it will be reborn tomorrow from untying its attachments. Jumbles of commentary strangle intelligence, which is rendered stupid by absence of tradition. There can be no style without grammar, whose rules don’t create style. Wise, measure counts and orders; meticulous, it rigidifies the inventive impetus. Without form, there can be no new work, which occurs outside form.
Natural, clocks follow the circuit of the planets but mark with their strikes heartbeats, coups d’état and coups de théâtre;2 there can be no life without the law-abiding return of the dawn nor can there be spring without the eternal return to the vernal point, no poetry without rhythm, no harmony without the anharmony of sevenths or style without the breaking of style, no solar system without the chaos that can make a planet bifurcate from its ellipse. Time runs towards entropy or, bifurcating, cadences the expansion of the universe and vital evolution.
Peter and Paul exit prison; the more Jewish one, sensitive to signs, freed by the Angel; the more Greek one, sensitive to reason, by an earthquake. Exiting, untying bonds …, suddenly their News emerges. Socrates refuses to let anyone free him and quits life rather than the bars. Should we flee or seek the law, and which one? Nature is characterized by format and news, death and newness, just as much as our cultures are.
Freedom from death
And once again, what is there that’s interesting? That which shoots forth from out of prison, from out of rules and the uniform: the exit. The arrival of a poison, oxygen, killed, but let burning organisms be born. On the backs of birds, feathers launched crawling reptiles high. The Fertile Crescent’s monotheism thundered as new amid the idolatries. Abraham, the father, no longer killed the son. Anaximander imagined the indefinite at the origins of geometry. Sometimes, rarely, peace arrives. What is there that’s interesting? Arrival. Birth. The rare heat, not the law-abiding cold. Wakefulness; neither sleep nor dream. The invention of survival. The exiting from the cave, the exiting from the tomb. Always think about exiting. About being born to defeat death.
And what else? The information known as news keeps trotting out lethal invariances, the inert laws of gravity or those, animal, of the jungle. But in the precise, yet opposite, sense of this word, information nullifies these repetitions in order to launch rarity. What is there that’s interesting? Divergence, emergence. An exception to nothingness: the big bang; to entropy: organization; to the bacterial kingdom: multicellular organisms; to quadrupedalism: erect posture; to the dirty, murderous hands of doctors and nurses: Semmelweis, then Pasteur; to the sinister rules of violence: extremely rare love; to platitude: the work. What is there that’s interesting? The exit from death pangs: life, inventive thought, heat, love, benevolent courage. Birth, the victory of contingent life over necessary death.
The theory of four truths
Are you still bored? I will lastly tell you your four truths. For, quadruple, formats and newnesses concern, as I just said, inert nature, life, humans and their productions. Bifurcating from an incandescent and homogeneous universe, galaxies, new, scattered off one after the other; leaving prokaryotes, eukaryotes, new carriers of nuclei, announced a different reproduction for the living things to come; soon upright, Lucy’s family to come would leave Africa and travel the world … Italian music abandoned the Baroque; Poincaré amended Laplace in such a way that the world revolved differently; when will we change our constitution? Sciences, philosophies, arts, religions, politics … invent newnesses the way genes mutate or particles bifurcate.
Talking in this way scandalizes. How are we to say, with one voice, every type of event? How are we to unite the examples given without distinguishing them? Deprived of the discipline that would synthesize them, this book, an orphan son, lacks the language in which it could express their concordance, that of the newness whose ramification is found in every place and concerns us as well.
Us, in this story
That was the narrative relating events that are material, living, historical or cultural …, and here now is the very person who recounts, whether me or others. His sentences don’t merely objectively follow a succession of states of affairs but can transform the one who announces it and those who will hear it. Evolution changes the relations between particles, the species of living things and the customs of groups; its narrative can change the one who tells it and those who hear it. Does a told event create us?
Certain narratives harbour this hardly described strange force of transformation. La Fontaine evaluated it in ‘The Power of Fables’ (Book VIII, Fable 4), in which the fable it recounts captures attention. The scene takes place in ancient Athens, when Philip, at the gates of the city, was putting the country in danger. From the height of the tribune, in powerful rhetorical figures of speech, the orator Demades was describing an emotional situation … ‘Vain and fickle’, the people were chattering away. Consequently, changing methods: ‘“Ceres”, he began, “was travelling one day with the Eel and the Swallow. A river stopped them, and the Eel, by swimming, as well as the Swallow, by flying, soon crossed it.” The assembly instantly shouted as one, “And Ceres, what did she do?” – “What did she do? First, a swift wrath angered her with you.”’ Filled with ire, Demades then drew his fellow citizens out of apathy.
How did the orator transfix the assembly? How did he strike up attention? Narrative succeeds where warning, the violence of words, eloquence, peril all fail. Narrative, yes, but which one? Recall the phrase I began with, already quoted: … for generations. Suddenly … In La Fontaine’s super-Fable (I am calling it this because it evaluates the power of fables), the same rhetorical figure appears: … was travelling … A river stopped them … They were going about their business; the Flood killed them. They were walking along a path; the river blocked them. At a point, a discontinuity breaks a continuous path. There, a catastrophe of cataracts, in a few days, interrupted centuries of ploughing; here, a river crossing the path stopped, at a point, the trip. A dam breaking or another blocking, to be crossed, tears a system of transit apart. A newness blocks the law. The event cuts off the course of the format. This is the knot where the branch leaves its trace on the ordinary trunk. Interest grows with the intersection that forbids: yes, read the ramified form of the narrative three times: in what it recounts; in the form by which it is related; in the soul of the person who listens to it. I flit from one thing to another, therefore I listen.
Better yet, the fabulist appeared in person; he said: ‘If “Donkey Skin” had been told to me, I would have taken an extreme pleasure in it.’ What pleasure, ye gods? Must the new event also change me, the teller, orator or rhymester, who changed readers and listeners so well? The Athenians woke up, became moved; the narrative recreated them …; I never cease to delight in ‘Donkey Skin’; even if I know it by heart, it recreates me. Our soul …, does it resemble a tree exploding with branches and bouquets? But what pleasure, oh ye gods? That of attention, which metamorphoses beasts into beauties. This new state appears at the point where the branch is grafted onto the stem. This graft transforms the law repeated in the stem into another course; sighing with boredom, I shake myself; sleepy, I wake up from my dogma; imitating, I invent; a trunk, I become a branch; fastened into the donkey skin, I exit. I convert. Dead, I am reborn.
This newness rectifies the course of internal time, whose flow murmurs with vocalises and phrases. This course bends with the narrative. Suddenly the sense changes sense; sense is born when sense changes, whether it is a question of direction or signification.3 When a flow bifurcates. When a donkey becomes a girl. What song, what spell, what metamorphosis … make these mute animals talk in the Fables? Silent, do children also learn language there?
Old, I rejuvenate. La Fontaine, at the end, leaves the ambassador to which he dedicated his fable, the Athenian orator, politics, war, the devil and everything that goes with him, to write: ‘The world is old, they say: I believe it; yet, we must still amuse it like a child.’ The same form of the branch returns once more, but human: the old man and the child. The obstacle to the path, the interesting narrative, the flow of my soul, genealogy itself, the son and the father …, do they obey the same schemas?
Narratives
That is the power of fables, the power of narratives: arousing attention, of course, but also metamorphosing the fickle people into combatants. Where does the miracle come from? A cock-and-bull story stirs up a population and brings it to the walls before the enemy. Plato too evaluated the force of rhetoric and the influence of the sophists on politics with distrust. Are we unaware today of the omnipotence without any countervailing power of the media, sounds and images? When I was relating the Grand Narrative, the only attention I was paying was to its objective truth. The latter is my passion but doesn’t carry away very many people. Its power flows less from its truth than from this passion-arousing capacity on the part of narrative. La Fontaine evaluated it by recounting that an orator transformed the listeners’ attention by himself recounting the ramification I have described: in the spot where a stem breaks off, he placed a graft. He grafted. The strange power that creates miracles lies in the branch. Narratives stage it. How? At least by speaking.
A vain people think the prophecies of the Bible, the parables of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles or the Epistles of Saint Paul are full of sermonizing. Not at all: history and old wives’ tales are recounted there endlessly. Inexhaustible, Stephen repeated the genealogy, father and son, of the family of David before dying under the rocks; from synagogues to ports, Saint Paul recounted the Resurrection … The aoidoses, the Homeric poets, the griots recited. Montaigne: ‘Others form man; I recite him.’4 Without stories, there can be no culture; there can be no culture without literature, whether popular or distinguished; there can be no religion without a narrative. It alone converts; it alone transforms groups and persons. Speech creates.
The ramification of languages
Plosives, fricatives, labiodentals …, consonants constrict the emission of vocalises or vowels in their passing. Lips, tongue, teeth and palate form complicated barriers, closures or baffles …, whose arrangement incessantly breaks, intersects and reorients the vocal flow. The voice crosses difficult apertures that articulate it. It stumbles with every obstacle, negotiates them and, in getting around them, finds itself swerved by this. If it didn’t r ecount any deviation, it would only utter hootings. Without any change of sense, there can be no sense. Even the vocalises of music break a continuity by means of inflections. Incessantly bifid, tongues multiply branches.
Sculpting, in the mouth, articulated oral language in this way, the couple consonant-vowel repeats the fable of Ceres’s trip and the river encountered by the animals and goddess. Flying or swimming, the two brutes accompanying her cross the river without any difficulty, while the goddess bumps into a problem: animals don’t dispose of this language that causes gods and men to stumble along exquisitely serrated channels … They whistle, bay or bell … Ceres bumps into the bank the way voice hits the teeth. Are our languages articulated by flow and barrier just like the path and the river, just like narratives, just like the time of our consciousness, just like our lives and our works, just like the world …? Does the ramification carried out by an event on a format unite – oh, marvel – the signifier and the signified? Does the medium of the message imitate the content?
Do you seek to recount? Tell how language itself speaks. The form furnishes the content. Every story in the world lies in lexicon and grammar, in consonants and vowels. My entire philosophy cries out in letters and voice. La Fontaine sang of the power of fables; I celebrate and cultivate the power of language. To each language, its branch.
The ramification of consciousness and of desire
Better. Why do the people, flitting from thing to thing, listen with bated breath when the ford brings the goddess to a halt? L’Arlésienne’s storyteller asks: where, yesterday evening, did our story stop? And the child answers: at ‘and then’ …5 You were talking, and then went silent; the barrier of the night formed an obstacle to the flow of your story. We left off at the suspension of desire. A river of sleep made the soul’s travelling drowsy, … and then … the soul woke up …, and then the Bosporus’s cork burst, and then Homo sapiens emerged, and then Saint Francis took his clothes off … Yesterday evening, I went to sleep; upon waking, I found the branch again: and then … Why does this suspense cause such a festival in my soul?
Not having any golden bough or branch to illuminate the mysteries, like Dante’s bough, which led him through the Divine Comedy, I don’t know the self, so named by others. I have never known how to descend into this Underworld. But I feel it, and I feel myself carried away as it were by what was formerly called the flow of consciousness. The internal consciousness of time coincides with the time of consciousness, and this latter no doubt coincides with time in and of itself. Rousseau let himself go, fluctuating, lying on the flat bottom of a bark on Lake Bienne; Lamartine suspended its duration on Lake Annecy; from on top of Mirabeau Bridge, Apollinaire watched the Seine flow; Bergson evoked the stream of consciousness; Whitehead described the flowing that passes; Geometry (p. xxxiv) analysed the expression: it does not pass [cela ne passe pas], in which the same word is repeated, with the verb expressing the flow and the adverb its stoppage. The foot advances a step [pas], but rises, motionless, stunned and taken aback, as though to deny it.6 The eel and the swallow pass across, but Ceres does not pass across [ne passe pas]: and then … Time and consciousness mix the obstacle to the step with the obstacle-free passage: the suspense of the narrative, the suspension of desire. Does desire ramify like language? Who will ever know which one starts things off? Does narrative ramify like desire, desire like language, the latter like consciousness and all of them together like time? And then …
Branch-time
Many linguists give the Latin tempus two opposing Greek roots, the verb τείνω [teinō], to stretch out, continuously … and another one, τέμνω [temno], to cut up or interrupt: again stem and branch. Émile Benveniste thought that the set of its strictly Latin compounds, such as tempering, temperance, temperature, tempest …, which designate a mixture, expressed its meaning more originarily. Thus time, le temps qui passe, Zeit, would come closer to weather, le temps qu’il fait, wetter, about which we say that it mixes hot and cold, dry and wet, shadow and light.7 When we say that time flows [coule], we forget that the Latin verb colare means filtering a mixture. Thus time percolates more than it flows: it filters. It passes and doesn’t pass.
Time mixes the continuousness of tension with the discontinuousness of rupture, a flux that flows with a filter that prevents it from passing. Like narrative, whether grand or small, like desire … The nature of time lasts, whereas a time-counter cuts it up. Thus, a number precedes or follows the interval between it and another number on an endless line or a fragment that’s as small as you please; the power of the continuous scatters to infinity as many discrete multiplicities. Like the old Nile, the father-river is broken up into daughter-filter-cataracts. And then … the water no longer passes the way it used to pass. Likewise, a fresh wind is fringed into light squalls; it causes the lateen yards to incline multiply. On the open sea, waves divide up into wavelets. Swaying and diverse, the rolling sways but jostles: the vessel is passing over a pile of rocks. Flames descend split into tongues of fire. And then … everyone speaks the hundred dialects that have diverged since the time we separated. Pulverized by mutations and the deadly filter that is selection, evolution explodes into bouquets, droplets and jets of life. I think from intuitions to deduction, from vivid sights to developments; I love from loves at first sight to long faithfulnesses. And then … I don’t think the way one used to think. I sing of flows and inflections. I remember and forget … and then … forgive. Time allows me to understand that I love a little, a lot, passionately, madly and not at all … at the same time. I hear a passing lull in the conversation, but tinnitus murmurs in my ears with legions of jinns. Globally and in the instant, my time wakes and sleeps, flows and breaks up, counts and murmurs, sings and dances, escapes me and persists, by pizzicati and held notes, quarter rests and fermata, vowels and consonants.
Made of time, consciousness mixes the day-to-dayness of custom, traditions, habits and laws, which keep it now similar to i tself, with the newnesses that awaken and change it. I live, act and think by exchanging this same and this other, fluctuating on this vernal point in which, at the crossing of two roads, springtime is born. My ramified time is suited to the ramifications of the Grand Narrative.
This suitability founds all knowledge.
Disquietude
In the literal sense of the Latin in-quies or the German Un-ruhe, disquietude tears one from rest, from the calm of a stable state: it removes from equilibrium. And then … the pendulum of the clock beats, without remaining vertical, from left to right. A ball descends into a pit and, with its momentum, climbs back up one of its slopes, suddenly stops there, falls back down, overshoots the bottom and climbs the facing slope. And then … a spring vibrates: the removal of equilibrium compresses it, accumulates, on this side, a power that abruptly releases the spring on the other. Hidden in the depths of the clock and united with the pendulum’s periodical movement, this spring counts time. Time is measured by spring and disquietude.
I meet with some obstacle opposed to my project: pressed against a wall, the flow of consciousness, as though elastic, accumulates energy there which, if it finds a path to get around this obstacle, overcomes it, infiltrates elsewhere, surges up via an unexpected exit, like a new branch, in a different direction than the project diverted by this obstacle. Disquietude produces my spring and my resource, counts my time and gives me its motor. Invention and conversion shoot forth from this resource. Would a newness surge up in my time without alarming me? What risk drags me out of my bed early in the morning?
In the same literal sense, ex-istence drags me out of rest or removes me from equilibrium. Thus ex-istence launches me into time. Rocks and the dead rest, serene. Without disquietude, would I exist? This question does nothing but repeat two equivalent words. I exist means: I am disquieted. I am disquieted, therefore I exist. Descartes’s famous cogito says it without saying it since penser [thinking], in the literal sense again, means weighing: assessing a weight on a balance. There can be no weighing or seesawing without little or big deviations from equilibrium. I exist; therefore my time has this motor. Without this disquietude, I do not exist; without it, my state is equivalent to death; disquietude resurrects. A branch has the forked form of a deviation and the motor function of an accumulator, without either of which there can be neither time nor existence, whether objective or subjective, natural or cultural. By removing ourselves from deadly equilibrium, disquietude causes us to be born.
Gather in and store the treasures of disquietude; it throws one into existence. Without the deadly dangers being run today …, would we know how to transform some event into an advent: would we invent a new world?