Father-son: Deduction, induction
A painting, again: in The School of Athens, visible in the Vatican’s Stanze, Raphael painted Plato, the father of philosophers and scientists, standing in glory to the left of Aristotle, right at the top of the steps of a portico, with the Timaeus in hand: the Quattrocento still read the beginning of the world in this dialogue. The Renaissance, later, on the contrary, turned away from a demiurge preforming the universe by means of mathematical models, abandoned, likewise, the prime mover from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, to obligate itself to experimentation and humbly subject it to the decision of the real. Did it master the real, after having obeyed it in this way, as Bacon had dictated? Not quite: the Renaissance only falsified theory, as would be said later. Modern science quits mathematics in the Greek style, in which deduction commands, in favour of a more inductive method, which isn’t guaranteed success. Abandoning mastery for subjection, modern science erases the haughty image of the father Raphael painted in glory.
A few decades ago, Alexandre Kojève intuited that the dogma of the Incarnation had made, in the Renaissance West, the invention of this experimental science possible, a science turned towards the world as such and no longer deduced from abstract theories. The union of geometry and experimentation achieved by mathematical physics continued in some way, he said, the union of the divine and the human, of another world and this one. In his eyes, Christian theology constituted the cultural condition for this cognitive innovation. This Renaissance forgets the father and his deductive model; by itself, mathematics cannot predict what formula will explain a given phenomenon. A given equation, on the contrary, is born from experiment. Kojève was right: the new knowledge promotes the image of the son. From the top of Greek knowledge, the father deduces the world; the son submits to its reality.
Decenterings
What does the world show after this era? Fallen from its ancient royal situation of being centre, the planet Earth, after Copernicus, became marginal, a servant, the daughter of the Sun, which, in its turn, would later quit the central throne to become one star among others, the daughter of a galaxy, itself the sister of a plurality of other galaxies, nieces of dust, descendants of light. Dislodged from the central pole, the Earth turns around a star, which soon becomes shifted from the centre of the Milky Way, itself plunged in a universe in which all places, in the end, are equivalent. All the centres abandon the centre; all the kings abandon the throne: homogeneous and isotropic, the universe nowhere lets any place be seen where the father can sit and reign in glory and order movements. Astronomy and astrophysics, over four centuries, carried out as many successive decenterings that continually unhooked from the father-position. Laplace’s planetary system, deterministic in accordance with its paternal demon, becomes unstable in Poincaré, in which unpredictable chaos already appears, while chaos theory announces that the successors or sons, by turning around, can know their ancestor perfectly, but that this latter cannot predict or preform his succession. The father sat on the throne at the centre of the world, the possessor of strength and reason, the prime mover; each father, by turns, through revolution or desire, sought or took this polar place, held it for a time up until he quit it, lastly up until it disappeared. Now there is no longer any centre or even any notable place in a universal space without any privileged site. The big bang itself doesn’t enjoy any central position: the birth of the Universe took place in every one of its points. No more father, not even a first one. The universe expands in the image of the son.
Even better, The School of Athens ordered the space of knowledge around two centres, dominating the steps, Plato and Aristotle, the fathers of philosophers and scientists. The world revolved for a time around the two foci of an ellipse; spiritual and temporal, power displays its splendours around two thrones, the pope and the emperor, media and politics. In the parallelism of these three images, knowledge becomes confused with dominance.
No, knowledge doesn’t function like power, as the image of the father would have us believe. Reason doesn’t always and everywhere prove someone right. Necessary, certainly, but it isn’t sufficient. The world doesn’t arise from reason and reason alone; knowledge arises from reason, from humans and from the world. He who claims to hold knowledge loses it. Desirous of such an appropriation, we yield to the desire for mastery, to a social Darwinism, wrongly generalized from evolution, in which the dominant males, whether elephants or presidents, try to vanquish and kill, not to know. The cognitive continuously requires a humble self-abasement. The father orders, the son knows. I like the philosophers crouching on the lower steps.
Scientists-sons
Not only Diogenes, the dog, or Pyrrho, the sceptic … Gödel stated the incompleteness of formal systems; Heisenberg declared the indeterminism of quantum mechanics; general mechanics ended up at chaos. From the heart of the most rigorous axiomatic system to the most refined equipment of experimentation, the history of our science continually augments the same retreating movement from every position of certainty and puts them in doubt. Discovery-daughter: the universe, contingent, evolves contingently, functions according to contingent laws and constants having contingent values. The world and our science quit necessity. We no longer lay claim to full mastery, not in fact, not in principle and not by deduction. A similar contingency shapes the evolution of living things; amid the evolution of species, sapiens sapiens loses its situation of being the human-source, of being the centre, I was going to say of being the trunk, to take on the situation of being a branch. The subject of this knowledge-daughter takes the place of the son. A book-son, Branches plunges into contingency.
Not only Epicurus, Lucretius and the clinamen … Look at, during the French Revolution, the glory of the father Lazare Carnot, a classical mechanist, the organizer of victory, the president of the Committee of Public Safety, and the poverty of the son Sadi Carnot, dying crazy in the Charenton hospital and the inventor of the new thermodynamics. The one killed in the name of a deadly past; the other, dreaming of the new, constructed the future. The history of science repeats this canonic couple over and over again. Descartes ended his days while staying with Queen Christina; Pascal defended Port-Royal, razed by Louis XIV, Stalin’s bewigged ancestor. After the Discourse on Method, the one invented a geometry that didn’t go beyond Greek geometry; the other discovered new ones and the path to future algorithms. Cartesian past, Pascalian future. Abel, the well-named algebraist, whose discoveries were lost by Cauchy in the Academy; Gallois, the author of modern algebra, dead in a duel at the a ge of twenty; Mendel, alone and unread in the depths of his monastery; Boltzmann, driven to suicide in Trieste; Semmelweis, condemned by scientific Europe for having saved the lives of the pregnant; Wegener, ridiculed for his intuition of tectonic plate theory …: scientists-sons whose views were ahead of their times abound and incarnate the adventure of knowledge, intuition, heroic wandering, invention … Crushed by Cuvier, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and his unity of plan in organic composition heralded homeoboxes; Pouchet, defeated by Pasteur, had prepared the ground for the prebiotic soup …; in the conflicts opposing men or schools, often look for the defeated; many Nobel Prize winners saw their projects rejected by ad hoc committees presided over by male and female mandarins. Truth comes on dove’s feet; the silent thief arrives unexpectedly in the night. Neither the bird of peace nor Hermes the pickpocket figures among the fathers in The School of Athens. Living science was born daughter. But who, better than her, follows the law?
Father and Son
How many ideas that were so sure they were taken to be dogmas have disappeared from knowledge? How many ideas that were reputed to be absurd founded knowledge in reason? Even Newton’s idea, one of the great successes of modern science, at first appeared to be crazy, and for good reason: how can bodies, without any magic, attract each other at a distance? From irrational numbers, imaginary numbers and other circular points at infinity all the way to plate theory and large molecules of the protein type, which no one believed in, how many impossible intuitions took reason by surprise and replaced it? Called the big bang as a term of abuse and scorn (the stupid big bang, Fred Hoyle said), it became true as soon as the background radiation of the universe was revealed. How many people believed, at their beginnings, in the impossible intuitions of quantum mechanics? Bohr’s response is known: the truth doesn’t establish itself through its own content but because the preceding generation goes into retirement. This is an excellent definition of science and its history: the father continually goes into retirement in it; the son holds a hesitant and temporary place.
Whether rationalist or not, epistemologists and philosophers took and take a position with regard to atheism, creationism, preformationism …, in short, with regard to God the Father. Few people meditated on the Son, except Pascal, sometimes and not particularly well, since he opposed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the God of philosophers and scientists; except Leibniz, as we have seen; except Nietzsche, who, after the camel and the lion, sang of the child; except, above all, Saint Paul and, after him, Montaigne. ‘I think’, says the omniscient father, laying claim to an absolute knowledge. ‘What do I know?’, hesitates the son. ‘We know’, affirm classical rationalism, logicism, formalism, hypercriticism itself … ‘For how long?’, replies the historian of science, following Montaigne’s example.
Possession or contract?
Bacon, I repeat, advised obeying nature in order to command it; going one further, Descartes recommended becoming its master and possessor. As advances continue, more and more things in fact depend on us. Today we understand that we will never attain definitive mastery, for we increasingly depend on the very things that formerly and recently depended on us. In the face of antibiotics, microbes that are penicillin resistant are returning; we are paying for our waste of energy with water and air pollution. Our formats are contracting debts. A mastery acquired in one place brings into play, endlessly, a new obedience in another place. The entirety of our dominations gives rise to constraints that impel us from behind. The dominant one, a killer, commits suicide at the limit of his practice; for lack of new victims, microbes die at the end of the epidemic; so it is for predators, for lack of prey. We must renounce the father’s dream. Symbiosis, obligatory, opens on to a natural contract. The father dictates the law; the son negotiates agreements. Knowledge takes on a contract form.
Juxtaposed to these scientific and epistemological discoveries is the weakening of the pater familias’ kingly rights, which stem from anthropological memories. Will a politics be born from new contracts? Let’s dream that a republic-daughter will accompany the knowledge-daughter.
Birth and newness
The son is born, new, but will not reign. There can be no science without birth, newness, perpetual invention, refreshing the landscape … without ramifications. Should the father, from his retirement, return one evening, he wouldn’t recognize anything anymore – everything would have changed. If he wanted to stay with dogma in order to maintain himself, he would pillage the future …, or he would adapt and then become son again: everything new is fine. He is reborn.
Ulysses returns to Ithaca: he puts everyone there to death because everything appears in a new way around Penelope, where the suitors were crowding. The father can’t stand invention or change, especially not one where his wife, who he has been cheating on for some time, enjoys seeing herself surrounded by admirers. He pierces them with his arrows. And, in killing, becomes centre again, potentate, petty king of his laughable island … and so ceases to know, stops his discoveries, takes his retirement, him, the ancient inventor of islands, the explorer of known and unknown lands, the lover of Circe, of Nausicaa, the prisoner of father-Cyclops, the dinner companion of king Alcinous … He was reborn each time he was shipwrecked. This is the scientist: disembarks, washes ashore, wakes up, stands up, exhausted, is born, on the beach, before a new landscape, where he encounters, playing ball on the beach with her companions, Nausicaa, who takes him with her to her father-king’s home. Alcinous gives a banquet where Ulysses, in the position of a shipwrecked sailor, of a stranger, of an impoverished starveling, in short, in the situation of an adoptive son, recounts at the father’s table the encyclopaedia of his discoveries. To my knowledge, Ulysses doesn’t kill Nausicaa’s father. He honours his table and his daughter.
This old picture book, tied to the Trojan War, already recounts the murderous connection between knowledge and power. Among our violent drives, I hope that knowledge will abandon the position of strength held by the father; this latter kills all better because he knows, drunk with a reason transfixed by ideology, bringing about the conviction of the less educated. Peace can in part come from a knowledge in the position of son, from a culture-daughter, peaceable, who would not kill her mother.
Mother, black widow
In high school, we learned to revere Andromache, the pious and faithful widow, the loving mother, devoted to the memory of her dead husband, whose image she finds in her son Astyanax, hostage like her with their victorious enemies. Her constancy shines forth in a hallucinatory narrative in which the fall of Troy and the murders of that night blaze: may that night, she says, remain eternally. ‘Should I forget?’, she repeats. No, I live in the immortality of memory and reject the course of history: I shall no longer live, no longer love; I shall consult my husband’s voice over his tomb; I shall only be addressing him when speaking to others …; lastly, I shall kill myself right after my second wedding … The dead require nothing but death.
A tragedy of remembrance, whose actors Racine designated by the name of son and daughter (of Helen, Agamemnon or Achilles), Andromache relates the misery of the second generation. What could be more terrifying for a child than to hear his mother tell him: when I hold you in my arms, Astyanax, I am embracing Hector, your dead father …, than to obligate him to carry in his body an adult in the form of a corpse? The mother-widow teaches the sons and daughters of the finished war to do nothing but cry or die again from war, the way their parents died from it; not at the point of weapons, but from the deadly disease of remembering.
At the end of the play, Andromache brings off the feat of marrying her enemy and becoming a widow, once again, so as to reign, sovereign, over the dead and the madness of those around her, a double-headed widow, a double queen, of the Greeks and of the Trojans, a black culprit of murders. We called her spider’s motionlessness perseverance; we turned her time-disease, indifferent to every change, into a virtue, faithfulness, but also into a knowledge, history. Its deadly cost must be calculated: around and because of Andromache, tragic murders increase despair and frenzy. She alone will survive and reign, a black widow, an abusive mother, saturated with the death instinct, a repetitive spider in the centre of the web, devouring with her old teeth those fine and strong young people, who only asked to live, to love, to hope in the future. Let’s suppose that conversely she had let the dead bury the dead, agreed to live, followed the course of the living present, run to new loves, conceived a project …, then life would have taken despair’s place. The ancients had seen things correctly: Mnemosyne, the Memory mother, engendered the Muses, among them Tragedy, terrible.
Who can deny it? Without history, we would return to being animals. So an obligation to remember is necessary, a tie that holds us to language and no doubt to consciousness; but a duty to have projects is especially necessary. More difficult than the first, the second requires imagination, discernment, a sense of the present, of anticipation, a will to survive for the sake of following the heading decided on, enthusiasm, courage … transcendent virtues in comparison to repetition, itself falling towards the instinct of death.
History and tradition sustain us, of course, but they only find their meanings through the rereading a sustained future makes of them. We don’t die so much from enemies or obstacles as from the lack of descendants or production, in the bed of immobile anamnesis’s infinite detail. Without firm intention, the past falls into forgetfulness; a collective without resolve no longer knows how to write its history; without invention or living contemporary works, a culture is dying. Memory digs our grave and, on this closed foundation, projects build our abode.
Christmas and Palm Sunday [Rameaux]
The Son is born: son-event, event-son. The branches [rameaux] never stop shooting up; the branches of the year, of the season, of time, those that bifurcate, those of unexpected history, fragile, slender, bristling, trembling in the wind. Every morning, in his office, in his laboratory …, the son tells himself a story he didn’t know the day before. He tests, tries, risks and doesn’t repeat or copy. Of the arborescence, he deals with the green foliage, the grafts, the suckers, the points of the twigs. Being reborn, he observes things being born. Nature, natura, that which is going to be born. He signs the natural contract every morning with a partner who is newborn entirely new. Naturus, he who is going to be born. Deus sive naturus, God or the Messiah to be born.
The scientist resembles the travelling Ulysses; before he returns to Ithaca, a murderer – he tries to escape the black widow. Or he resembles Christopher Columbus … a new world announces itself. The explorer leaves Ithaca, Venice or Spain, the quay, port, capital and palace, in which the nobles, divided into pressure groups, fight one another to decide things they know nothing about. Departing, he left the social and political theatre, the representations of power, the unreal drug of parasite relations. He is born every morning to the adventure of the real, itself always fluctuating. The Son is born, not in a palace, but in the straw of a stable; goes away, leaves his family, wanders, a prodigal son, teaches nonetheless to pray to the Father …, and when, before dying condemned, he returns to Jerusalem, he appears perched on a donkey, amid palm branches.
Knowledge
Knowledge is different from what is said about it: approximate, disquieted, ignorant and naive, obedient to experiment, running in proximity to error, always put to the test, changing and patient, light and mobile, often lost, always ardent, impassioned to the point of madness, resigned to strange intuitions and to never savouring victory. Authentic discovery is ahead of its time to the point that no one understands or hears it, like, just now, the night burglar. The public reserves its understanding for formats it already hears or understands, therefore for repetition, rarely for invention. Glory consecrates the repetitive fathers. Wandering and wayfaring, knowledge – not true knowledge, but a genuine knowledge – abandons power for knowledge, society for objects, glory for intuitive flashes, short life for the long term, this world for the other one, politics for curiosity; it undertakes three travels.
A trip around the world first; there is only one world, and amid the mountains and seas, plains and glaciers, deserts and shores, seagulls and whales, tarantulas and kangaroos, algae and trees, knowledge, local and meticulous, incomplete and lacunary, gets lost, however long and carefully it may have travelled a thousand lands. Get up, grab your staff and walk, leave your country, throw away your sandals, run across space, know, if you lose your way, that in the open space of landscapes, beauty expands. We shall have to talk about the plurality of worlds.
A trip through society next; there is only one humanity; knowledge gets lost there, from bargemen to the ultra rich, from the poor to functionaries, from farmers to presidents, from Australians to African Bushmen, from the Aborigines to the Japanese, from the Chinese to the Bolivians …, a knowledge that’s local, friendly, incomplete and lacunary, however long and attentively it may have encountered its fellows. Get up, leave culture, class and language, have the courage for alterity; deep down in humans lies goodness. Melt your soul into so many belongingnesses that a new culture will not frighten you.
A trip through the sciences lastly; there is only one Grand Narrative, te mporally gigantic, and knowledge gets lost there among the sciences and their history, algebra and biochemistry, cosmology and botany, geography and logics …, Greek geometry and Newtonian chemistry, classical infinitesimal calculus and the mathematics said to be modern …, a knowledge that’s always local and meticulous, incomplete and lacunary, however precisely and rigorously it may have examined a thousand pieces of knowledge.
But while this wandering knowledge, a daughter, lacks completeness and authority, it does provide the incomparable joy of connecting together, here, there or elsewhere, the maps of the three trips: this glacier with the Moroccan guide and the physics of the globe; this Australian tree with the Aborigine and biochemistry; the River Garonne with my bargeman father, ignorant of fluid mechanics, and with my rock-breaker brother, ignorant of crystallography. Knowledge follows the path of the crest – dangerous, thrilling and often broken – of concordance.
What a quasi-religious jubilation, linking together science, humans and the world. Oh knowledge, daughter of joy.
Wandering or exodus
The Odyssey describes the voyages of father-Ulysses, the master of ruses, a king before the abominable Trojan War, restored upon his return among the corpses; Exodus relates the voyage of Moses, Aaron and Joshua, guides, just men, fathers of the chosen people, victors over the Pharaoh and the Sun; in the Latin Aeneid, Anchises still crushes Aeneas’s spine with his weight.
We wander in knowledge like in the Telemachy, accompanied by chance mentors who are only right for a time but who we never cease to respect. An adoptive son, Jesus wandered in Galilee, Judea, Samaria …; who knows the address of his house since he lived homeless? Another traveller, Saint Paul widened his wanderings to the oecumene, sleeping outside or with a chance host, in circumstances he himself recounts, hunger, thirst, cold, wild beasts and chanced-upon bandits, fatigues, illnesses …, always goaded by a thorn buried in his flesh. In exodus rather than methodus, our science has no abode: nor stable assurance, nor definitive certitude, nor closed axiomatic system, nor sure prediction, without hearth or home. It haunts tent or tabernacle, like the Hebrews in the desert. Our knowledge extends this wandering to the universe, a universe equipped with the arborescent voyage of its Grand Narrative, followed by the astray unpredictability of the human adventure. Through its global contingency, through local and temporary hesitations, knowledge constructs its weakness from filial wanderings that lead it to humility; no more triumphal roads to royal certainty. The universal space of the world and knowledge no longer takes one back to the island or the Eternal City, nor to the valley where milk and honey flow.
Metaphysics and metanomics
Long after the Presocratics had invented physics, the Greek librarians who had to categorize Aristotle’s works called the books following the ones in which the master had written his Physics metaphysics; they thus designated their place on the shelf. Later, modern scientists had the generous wisdom to accept that a metaphysics existed, a genuine discipline beyond their knowledge, as exception or complement, a strange knowledge whose title the Latin languages preserved in Greek. Since it deals with non-falsifiable questions, this metaphysics ensures the sciences an exactness announced by Popper’s criterion. Why did the sciences become falsifiable? Because they had the properly filial humility to leave undecided questions to an associate metaphysics, which would thus ensure a protective roof – others would say a convenient garbage can. As soon as physics adopted the status of science-daughter, it accepted, as higher than it, a sort of science-mother, non-falsifiable; a father, the metaphysicist is right without limits. Science merits this title if and only if science is not always and everywhere right: in other words, when the scientist becomes son.
To measure the advantage of having a metaphysics above oneself with exactness, it is enough to compare this division of tasks with the state of the social sciences. We who, in an often dishonest way, use the term sciences for the disciplines that study cultures and collectivities have had neither the generosity nor the wisdom to accept that phenomena exist that exceed their limits and their claims. And therefore we haven’t wanted to invent a supercultural domain that could have given said sciences a metanomic extension – a discipline that would, for its part as well, have dealt with their non-falsifiable questions. But, by that yardstick, almost all this knowledge would have been transported to this new extension. On balance, authentic sciences become daughters; should the other scientists remain in the state of fathers, they will miss knowledge.
Reason [raison] in the sense of arraisonnement – the forcible boarding and inspection of one vessel by another, stronger, one – issues from the father; reason in the sense of knowledge issues from the son. Everything dies from power: the Persian and the Roman Empires … So much for history; and this, now, is in order of evolution: species disappear; the human animal is subject to the temptation of mastery; happily, humbleness came to it on the blessed day it knew: and could then know death. We find ourselves devoted to humility in our active behaviour as well as in contemplation. Philosophy wouldn’t be worth one minute of trouble without this gentleness.
Learning, inventing
From having learned, we know. A truth, a piece of information were found amid the internet’s ocean, in a tradition, by way of an interlocutor, at a chance person’s home …, and we received it through education, communication, hearsay or effort. So we join an expert group, participate in a community, even in an institution, whether school, research unit, library or data bank.
Thus acquired, knowledge extends towards three dimensions: by the first one, cognitive, I know some theorem; by the second one, collective, I am part of those who know it and who, sometimes, put it to good use. I readily call the third of these dimensions stony, inasmuch as this information doesn’t transform me any more than it does a rock I hold in my hand, which I can transmit, of course, but can also forget or let drop. I know but don’t comprehend.1 I can teach this theorem; it can thus be spread, but I take said knowledge, objective like this stone, to be as cold and dead as it is. In the ad hoc discipline, we do indeed speak of dead information.
And all of a sudden, by means of a process I can only shed light on by comparing it to digestion, which transforms a piece of bread into active biochemical elements in my body, or to pregnancy, which transforms an oocyte into a fetus, I make this theorem mine. The time it takes is indeterminate: a f raction of a second or decades; how many times, two or three decades having passed, have I violently felt, from my thighs to my thorax, that this digestion, that this conception were finishing their work and that I was entering into a true comprehension of what I had merely known. Quickly therefore or little by little, the theorem passes into my head, my eyes, my original perception of my landscape, my genitals even, my active life; I walk in its space, place my hands and feet according to its measure, inhabit and caress its forms in such a way that I recreate it, reinvent it from its foundations; this objective changes into subjective. I no longer know it – I feel it, live it, comprehend. On this pebble and other ones, I build my bones, my body and its habitat. So I can generalize said theorem, enter into the geometry modelled by it …, but, yet again, I see and repeat structures already produced by others before me …, and the digestion, gestation and incorporation recommence … up to the point that I haunt these structures like a house that’s become mine, a lodging I fix up and repaint, whose walls I make plumb again, whose garden I cultivate, whose blueprints I redraw, which I try to reconstruct by making it bigger …, this habitat describing, metaphorically, the very site of my bodily life …, flesh and dwelling becoming subjective and objective at the same time …; this is the time of inventing. I find myself close to childbirth, to that externalization I shall later call exo-Darwinian.
Whether lightning fast or slow, this passage from knowledge to comprehension and from learning to invention is experienced and lived by anyone who devotes his time and existence to a meditative labour. But what should we call this experience I have just called digestive or impregnated, this transformation of an outside object into personal and carnal subject, this incorporation, if not transubstantiation, formerly a miracle, an experience that’s inward, evident, vital, and which changes bread and wine into body and blood? I can testify to the fact that daily labour wouldn’t amount to very much if this thaumaturgic mutation of the pebble-theorem into bone and muscle didn’t take place continuously and this very morning. Consequently, knowledge becomes unforgettable, both for me, since it has to do with my blood, and for a few others, since knowledge can, afterwards, become objectivized, setting sail from the body as new inventions.
So mysterious that its method can’t be given by anyone, the art of inventing commences in this metamorphosis: the objective transforms into subjective; knowledge changes into comprehension; bread transubstantiates into body, and, once again, body into bread. For it sometimes happens, next, that this very body becomes externalized as a new object through this kind of exo-Darwinism: the subjective produces something of the objective and of the collective. The group then re-appropriates the things thus externalized. I promise to talk about this latter process in connection with technological objects.
The escient of consciousness
To give this living comprehension another name, I would like, poetically, to reincorporate into my language the old noun escient, whose use today is reduced to a few locutions used absentmindedly.2 The root of the word, the Low Latin ablative absolute meo sciente, me knowing that, had already completely united the subject of knowledge and the object. À bon escient describes this way my body lives with the object of its research for a long while, through it, with it and in it, so close to it that, inseminated in me, this bread becomes my body, develops in it without me, then, if I invent, it can find itself condemned by peer pressure, but has a chance, tomorrow, of defeating this death. Comprehension implies a metamorphic and shifting life; life implies this productive comprehension that’s victorious over death. Eroded from below, it is said, by the unconscious, might consciousness, above, draw its own fibre out by the escient or living comprehension, before invention, the ultimate fibre of sur-vival or super-life, quasi supernatural? We experience that the escient exists and can believe credible witnesses about it since they give tangible signs of it, their discoveries, unlike the underlying boxes, hypothetical and black.
On balance, this (cognitive, objective, collective) changes into subjective. Dead information becomes living, resurrects. Newness appears in the cognitive body. Everything changes: the world and me, me seeing a new world and the world seen by me, new. There is no comprehension except for this birth, this advent. All the rest reduces to transmissions of stones from pocket to pocket, reduces to communications of information without any change, empty zero-sum games, dormant dead-sum exchanges. Genuine knowledge changes the body and the speech of the one who receives it, who gives it, who becomes transformed and transforms the bodies of others through his invention burning like a tongue of fire sent down over their heads.
This cognitive change of death into life – announcement, birth, deliverance from death … – is called Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection or Pentecost by an ancient tradition. Its carnal experience encounters this kerygma, without any other mystery than this subtle transformation of bones and of the world carried out by the Word, than this imminent childbirth. Thinkers earn their living fighting against dead information, against the ice and numbness of things, of self and of others. In thus fighting against the rocks and the dead, from humble failures to painful defeats, they encounter the image of this Son, a humble carnal model of overcome failure: the Resurrected One. Good news and the art of inventing, as a pair, celebrate the era of the Son.
Communion of saints
Before invention, the objective becomes subjective. As soon as invention appears, the subject gives birth to an object a numerous group can recognize. As though, by dint of transiting, knowledge, up till then subjective flesh, then became again, via externalization, objective and collective. After the invention, the group again exchanges flesh become bread again. I incorporate knowledge into myself; invention makes it set sail from my body; an institution becomes incarnated around this new object. Famous moments in which the history of knowledge concentrates social forces and produces marvels.
I dream of the Solvay Conferences, during which the science of the twentieth century was built (relativity, quantum mechanics, information theory …) through lightning fast transmission of refined and rapid inventions between inventors. And of the beginnings of the Bourbaki school, in which Chicago neighboured Nancy …, of that post-war period in which biochemists travelled, constructing the genetic code by exchanging regarding the phage … Of course, we only comprehend what we incorporate into ourselves; of course, we only invent on condition of this externalization. But who can guarantee that this genuine knowledge will in fact become a true knowledge, that this subjective body will be able to correspond, in its turn, faithf ully, to something objective, to a new stone, soon exchangeable between ourselves, rather than to the previous one, if not the gathering of those who, bodily, entered together into this genuine knowledge? Without this collective, there is no truth, at least temporary truth; without this church, there is no salvation.
A cheerful parallel between the history of science and that of the church has continually shone forth before my eyes my entire professional life long: the same universality of a simple and difficult language in the case of mathematics, easy and complex in the case of parables; a similar contingent faith in a transcendent reality; the same fluctuations from a closed and semi-dead society under cardinals or mandarins to an open collective, light-hearted and dolorous, welcoming the mysticism of saints gone astray and of sequestered discoverers; the same dynamic in invention and conversion; the same dogmatic inflexibilities, upstream, the same incomprehension of innovation, even bifurcations, downstream, bifurcations sometimes called paradigm shifts; the same tribunals, the same fires, the same condemnations of heresy, as a curb, the same posthumous and hagiographic rehabilitations, the same type of education spreading a thousand tics for generations … debates, hatreds, similar fervours … Despite these myriads of faults, the fact remains that even the purist mystic, even the most brilliant inventor … can’t isolate themselves under pain of a paranoiac idiolect. So without these two chapels, there is no salvation. A return to the format-father.
Who doesn’t dream of a community speaking every language, beneath the fire of inventions shooting forth from all sides, so that Greeks, Levantines, Romans, Scythians, Jews and Galatians … understand everything that is said, each in their language, because they understand the real through their bodies? The Last Supper, the festival of the Spirit, Pentecost, today’s sciences. Who today attains, without any pretension, universalities of language, of object, of history, of community …, a peaceful globalization, if not this knowledge? The collective animal Plato called, out of derision and disgust, the Great Beast, and Hobbes, out of fear, Leviathan … transforms into communion of saints. It produces inventors in return. Filled with reason …, we need, nowadays, sons of course, but above all we need saints.
But the historical and social tripod of the saint, the genius and the hero wobbles, rickety. The latter two, lifted on high, hoist themselves up there with great effort, while the first one, anonymous, doesn’t seek any niche; only his counterfeit perches there. The only great humans are the saints, absent from the list of great humans.
Is this a naive view when war rages everywhere?
The end of war during the era of the Son
A return to the father, I said. What are we to do about the fury I just talked about? Listen to his cry: ‘That he die!’ …3 The old Horatius offers the life of his son to the country by calling on the Curiatii sons to dispatch him properly. Trumpeted out, these words cost him nothing and yield him glory on the stage. Who today, without being base, can call this cry sublime, this cry demanding an ignoble execution, advised by Roman law, this sacrifice of a child? Hominescence defined war as a contract signed between two fathers for the children of the one to be willing to kill the children of the other: to murder sons. Neither our presidents nor our generals fight, to my knowledge, but send their children to be executed. The fathers sacrifice the sons on the altar of the collective beast.
How should we define war? As a threefold limitation on violence: first, a historical limitation, in which a time (quasi cyclical) binds war (productive of the institution of the state) to the government (the institutor of war); a juridical limitation, next, since the declaration (prior), the law of nations (concomitant) and an armistice or a treaty (duly signed at the end) contain, through law, the misdeeds of vengeance, which could never stop; a ritual limitation, lastly, since, in putting the sons to death, the fathers behave as sacrificers. Politics, law and rite limited violence by, in return, rendering it productive of these archaic institutions. Through the state, the law and the sacred, war limits the total number of dead that violence in its free state would relentlessly produce all the way to possible eradication, a threat we formerly and recently held before our blind eyes, but our eyes today are clear in the face of this possible horizon.
‘That he die!’ … I hear here, as for me, a persistence of antiquity, the bitter remains of the era of the Father: Greek sage, legislator, patrician and Latin pater familias … The tragedy takes us back to this barbarous age, that of Agamemnon, the killer of his daughter Iphigenia, and of Andromache, the black widow. Fathers govern, legislate, sacrifice. They doubtless sacrifice to dictate law and laws. We haven’t pulled ourselves out of this sacrificial age, even though the age of the Son has long struck: Abraham held back the knife over Isaac’s throat; Jesus Christ died on the Cross but resurrected and lastly sits to the right of the Father, both of them having become peaceful. The religion of the Son, Christianity in principle ought to have inaugurated that era, which I finally see coming, for time and history have worn out our old juridical, political and ritual instrument for limiting violence, war, become ineffective, interminable, prohibitively costly and counterproductive: wiser than the decision-makers, who remain fundamentalists, global opinion – let’s hail the recent birth of this universal subject – vilifies the victor more than the defeated, ranked among the victims. The age of the victim or era of the Son. Today, we are living through the death of war.
So a violence without known limit inescapably explodes since it is without law. So another barrier, a new one, is built, juridical once again, bound precisely to knowledge: a drift towards the objective. Today, environmental law is concerned about future generations. Strange and innovative, this respect for sons is the counterpart of the end of war, by sending the limitations on the violence of subjects to objects, of collectives to the world. The natural contract, the sole guarantee of peace? Further on, this book will renew its terms.