On 2 May 2015, Louise Fessard, a journalist for the Mediapart website, reported a telephone conversation she had had with D., a ‘young Frenchman who seems to be looking for media exposure’, a Catholic who ‘later converted to the Muslim religion’, until, while in prison for drug trafficking, he tipped over ‘into a sectarian and apocalyptic logic, advocating armed struggle against “unbelievers” in Syria. […] D. has only one project when he gets out of detention: “To emigrate, to fight overseas for Allah and not return”.’1 This is obviously a suicidal discourse, related to the 10,000 successful suicides each year in France and the 200,000 attempts, together amounting to so many souls wounded by the absence of epoch. It is also the discourse of a ‘repeat offender’:
When he was first incarcerated, D. was about twenty years old. He has received several convictions for drug trafficking and violence, and has spent time in a dozen or so prisons. Coming from a Catholic Caribbean family without economic hardship, D. grew up in a regular suburban household. His universe fell apart when his parents separated and he wound up in a small apartment. ‘I’ve committed sins and not by half, because when I do something, I go all out’, he said. ‘I’ve smoked, I’ve been a dealer. I’m forsaking all this for Allah.’2
He was first approached by the ‘brothers’ of Tabligh, a preaching movement ‘born in India and that arrived in France in the 1960s’. ‘These ascetics crisscross the French suburbs in order to “awaken a dormant faith, put to sleep by comfort, lust or economic gloom, in a society of over-consumption where money rules”.’3 Then, in prison, he met an inmate ‘who had wanted to go to Syria, but was reported by a friend. He introduced me online to other brothers in Syria. I was able to speak with them on Facebook.’4
This is somewhat reminiscent of what happened to Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X,
also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a defender of African American rights, assassinated on 21 February 1965 […] [who] participated in drug-dealing, gambling, racketeering and burglary. […] He was arrested in Detroit in 1946 for larceny and breaking and entering […]. He was sentenced to ten years (serving seven) in the Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts. […] Malcolm was addicted to cocaine, which he had begun to consume when he was in the underworld.5
In prison, Malcolm Little discovered reading, as he writes to a friend from his cell:
I’m just completing my fourth year of an 8 to 10 year term in prison … but these four years of seclusion have proven to be the most enlightening years of my 24 years upon this earth … and I feel this ‘gift of Time’ was Allah’s reward to me as His way of saving me from the certain destruction for which I was heading.6
It was under the influence of the Nation of Islam, a movement then led by Elijah Muhammad,7 that Malcolm began to read intensely. He was not accompanied in his prison studies by a generous and demanding mind like that of Gérard Granel, but he struggled against the relentless segregation to which African Americans were subject, in Alabama, Detroit and Chicago.
Nation of Islam, an anti-white heterodox Muslim movement, was advocating the creation of a black state in the southern United States, and asserting that white people are demons. Four of Malcolm’s uncles ‘were killed by whites, including one who was lynched’.
In 1931, his father was found dead, run over by a streetcar. Malcolm said that the cause of death had been questioned by the black community. He himself later refused to accept it, arguing that his family had often been the target of the Black Legion, a white supremacist group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan whom his father had accused of setting fire to their house in 1929. At that time, Michigan had 70,000 KKK members, five times more than Mississippi during the same period.8
I myself first became aware of Malcolm X from the cover of an Archie Shepp record entitled Poem for Malcolm. It was recorded in 1969, at almost the same time as Yasmina, a Black Woman, with the musicians of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. After that, Noah Howard, Bobby Few and Muhammad Ali, whom I met with and visited in Paris in 1969 and 1970, talked to me about him. Eventually, in 1971, I learned about his life and his influence in a book by Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz/Black Power.9
Much later, I saw Spike Lee’s film, Malcolm X.10 At the end of the film, Spike Lee has a Harlem schoolteacher address her students by saying ‘I’m Malcolm X’, and she makes them say aloud and together:
‘I’m Malcolm X.’
It would be interesting to undertake a detailed analysis, seventy-one years after Adorno and Horkheimer heralded the advent of a new form of barbarism, of what a statement such as ‘I’m Malcolm X’ could mean in 1965 in Harlem, compare it with what was said in Paris on 11 January 2015, ‘Je suis Charlie’, and ask what occurred during this intervening half-century that has seen the epoch of the absence of epoch take hold, along with its new forms of madness, symptoms of barbarism on the rise.
I myself, no doubt, and without ever having thought of it prior to writing it here and now, I myself said to myself, in the early 1970s, in a bar where I made the night owls of Toulouse listen to and discover black music:
I’m Malcolm X.
I said this to myself by idealizing Malcolm X and identifying myself with him, and, of course, by deluding myself.
I, who am not black, was inhabited by the spirit of which Malcolm X was an incarnation, which is the spirit of non-submission, a spirit that affirms another, extra-ordinary plane, which John Coltrane sought ever more rigorously in each new album, and of which sublime African-American music, beginning with the blues, was a manifestation at once tragic and joyous, fantastic and colossal.11
Besides the education I received from my family, my friends, as well as my political education and my attraction to books – which provided a sentimental education in what used to be called, in a sense that is now almost totally forgotten, the humanities and humanism12 – the passion for jazz played a significant role in my psychosocial individuation, starting from the age of fourteen.
Jazz created a collective: it was a machine to make friends through listening to the improbable. I was introduced to it when I happened to listen to two albums13 belonging to my uncle Jacky Stiegler, my father’s brother, and later by my brother Dominique, and then by Saada N’Diaye, a wonderful Malian who became my best friend. In 1977, ten years after this discovery, and so as to be able to listen to jazz and allow others to do so, I opened a bar in Toulouse, ‘L’Écume des jours’, a nocturnal musical joint closed down by the police shortly before my arrest.
Like Malcolm X in the 1940s, and like myself in the 1970s, D., according to the statements reported by Louise Fessard, observes and declares that in prison, where he has been radicalized, ‘there’s more time to learn, more time to talk about the real issues in life. To focus on more important subjects.’14
When I met Derrida in February 1983, after being released from prison, he asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted. I told him that I would like to have a meeting with someone from the government in order to urge them to do something so that time spent in prison should turn out not to have been a complete waste – so that it should not be irremediably lost, along with reasons for living and hoping, which prisoners commonly lack, given that in order to survive, they are often left with little choice but to reoffend.
Derrida arranged a meeting with Jean-Pierre Colin, a law professor from Reims but also a theatre figure, who had been seconded to the office of the culture minister, Jack Lang. During the interview, I proposed to this charming, affable man that we should establish the conditions required so that real studies could be undertaken in prison, in various fields, and by starting, firstly, with sport, then circus arts, the theatre, and therefore reading, writing and so on – and through the development of a genuine curriculum.
In the detention centre from which I’d just been released, I had seen some extraordinary athletes, some of whom had been incarcerated when they were quite young, and had already accumulated close to twenty years inside. They had become great sportsmen, but, in addition to the fact that they had nowhere to play except in prison, they also ran up against the difficulty of not having the opportunity of turning their athlete’s body into a circus performer’s body, or an actor’s, and so on, through which the world would begin to beckon to them, to make sense [faire signe]: to signify, to transindividuate – from the microcosm that is the body and that in this way opens itself to the κόσμος, and, in its admiration, opens up the macrocosm that is society within the κόσμος.
Jean-Pierre Colin listened attentively, but nothing ever happened. After meeting Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from the Ministry of Culture, who had decided to support the research proposal that Thierry Gaudin offered me, and very busy with this new affair that would make such a difference to my life, it ended up that I myself forgot about my own project to support prison studies based on processes of ἐποχή and conversion of the natural attitude, and in the encounter with the extra-ordinary towards which prisoners are not infrequently inclined, as both Malcolm Little and D. observed, each in their own way.
I have often made proposals to the worlds that I have passed through or in which I have lived, and I have done so in order to change these worlds. The world is what changes, and it is what must change. I conceive of life in noetic existence as the assumption of this fatum, of this fate that is a fact, and it is a question of transforming this fact into a law and a right. Noetic, then, means neganthropic. And we know, today, that the reason for this is entropic becoming and what it produces as negentropic future, that is, as evolution, and therefore as organogenesis, which, some two or three million years ago, becomes exosomatic, which is to say pharmacological.
After reading Simondon in 1986, I began to use the term ‘individuation’ to refer to that change of the world – whose rhythms are themselves constantly changing – resulting from technical individuation.
I conceive of philosophy, which has become my principal activity, as merely a way of creating the conditions for proposals to be elaborated and conceived so as to change the world in law, and not just in fact. Today, in contrast to the tragic age of the ancient Greeks, this question and this imperative arise in the context of the ordeal of nihilism. For Nietzsche, the roots of this nihilism lie deep in Socrates, but in my view this is completely wrong:15 it is not Socrates but Plato who lays the foundations of nihilism, precisely by reversing, point by point, that which constitutes Socrates’ parrhēsia – which is tragic through and through. This is what I have tried to show in the courses of pharmakon.fr.
How the world changes has always been conditioned by this world insofar as it is composed, above all, of relations and reticulations between tertiary retentions, and, through them, between psychic individuals and collective individuations. This retentional condition is formed through what Heidegger describes as a system of ‘references’,16 that is, of significance,17 and in a sense close to what Simondon describes (but on a completely different basis) as the formation of the transindividual.
Today, this system of reference constituting the transindividual is conditioned by the digital pharmakon, such that, in the absence of a politics worthy of the name, it turns disindividuation into an industry. The price to be paid for industrializing disindividuation is that transindividuation regresses to the stage of transdividuation, prefigured, specifically in terms of the mass control of secondary retentions, by Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of a new form of barbarism.
Philosophy is not just an academic discipline: it is firstly a way of living – as has always been insisted upon, and which Foucault, at the end of his life, made the motive of his research, doing so, undoubtedly, as a way of dying and of preparing to die. This is how, in particular, he interpreted Crito and Phaedo18 – we will come back to this question.19
In addition, however, and prior to this, philosophy is a relation to collective individuation, when, by forging a new relationship to law, a new relationship that arises from the appearance of literal tertiary retention, this collective individuation is transformed into politeia – into citizenship, a way of living politically, according to a positive law that, henceforth governing all social relations in this sense, comes to see in customary collective individuation a regressive form, that is, something barbarous and unreasonable. In the eyes of Greeks of the fifth century, such are those they call οι βάρβαροι: barbarians.
This, then, is how I understand the philosophical task, as a distinction of law within facts and beyond facts, as occurred in my phenomenological ‘conversion’ in prison, and while awaiting my trial. And, because I understand the task in this way, I began – starting from 11 September 2001, a day in whose events I saw signs of a precipitation towards the worst, which I had been fearing, a fear that I had confided to Barbara Stiegler and Julien Stiegler in 1993 – to myself write only in an absolutely direct, visible, legible and primary relation to questions of political economy: by politicizing phenomenological questions.
I am convinced that it is for want of an economic and political proposal capable of projecting beyond the Anthropocene that barbarian behaviour multiplies – including in everyday life and including behaviour referred to as ‘uncivil’, which does not just involve those young people that Jean-Pierre Chevènement thought fit to call ‘savages’. In addition to a number of public figures in positions of (political or economic) power, it is sometimes ‘the aged’ who become uncivil – especially with respect to the younger generations, whom they then see only as such ‘savages’, and of whom they take no care, being more concerned about their journeys through the ‘third age’ than about their descendants, condemned as the latter may be to unemployment.
Our sole possibility of struggle is through an economic and political proposal capable of projecting beyond the Anthropocene: to struggle with what remains of civilization in the epoch of the absence of epoch, and against barbarities that are as internal as they are external. This is what Marie Peltier succeeded in showing after the attack carried out on a Thalys train on 21 August 2015:20 ‘A society does not become gangrenous on the outside if it is not firstly gangrenous within. Barbarism breaks out when the soil becomes propitious, “fertile”, when solidarity recedes, evaporates or weakens.’21 This state of emergency led me to put on hold (but not to leave dormant) the writing of volumes four to six of Technics and Time,22 in favour of writings aimed at elaborating a new critique of political economy, including when it presents itself as an inherently anti-political economy – which is the case with the libertarian ideology of disruption.
The reason I refer here to political economy is because I have not forgotten what I learned when I passed through circles and times when Marx was read, and, in the first place, in the French Communist Party in the late 1960s – after spending time in the Trotskyist movement, which I had frequented in 1967–68, up until the May riots.
As never before, I am convinced that today, and ever since the Renaissance, politics must be thought in direct relation to economics. It was the Renaissance that laid the foundations of what would become globalized industrial capitalism as the exploitation of tertiary retentions. It did so in the wake of the printing of sacred books, as well as the printing of those books that constitute the preindividual funds of the humanities, and, finally, the creation of account books, which, with the rise of monetary tertiary retention,23 accompany the transformation of logos into ratio.
It is because politics must today, and as never before, be thought in direct relation to economics that I was led to write books that are directly and simultaneously addressed to the political and the economic worlds. The Re-Enchantment of the World, co-authored with Ars Industrialis, was addressed to Laurence Parisot, who at the time had just joined MEDEF.24 Some imbeciles interpreted this choice of addressee as a submission. ‘To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us’ was dedicated to those who voted for the National Front. Ditto.
In 2007, as a way of intervening in the French presidential campaign, I published La Télécratie contre la démocratie, which bore the subtitle, Lettre ouverte aux représentants politiques. At one and the same time, this book denounced the populism of the two main candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, analysed the consequences and lessons to be drawn from 21 April 2002, especially for the left, and put forward positive proposals for the future, irrespective of the outcome. I was invited by the host of the talk show ‘Ce soir (ou jamais!)’, Frédéric Taddeï, to appear on the programme. The following morning, I received a call from Jack Lang, who suggested I meet with him at the Socialist Party headquarters, on Rue de Solférino.
Lang was at that time head of Ségolène Royal’s campaign. He wanted to discuss the themes of this campaign. I explained to him the main points of what, since Disbelief and Discredit, I had analysed as a major evolution of capitalism, containing the seeds of an equally major crisis, one that needs to be anticipated, and on the basis of which all economic and political axioms would need to be reconstructed.
This was less than six months before the so-called ‘subprime’ crisis, and just over a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which would trigger an enormous recession whose consequences continue to affect Europe more than ever – like no other industrialized continent. I spoke with Lang about the 2005 Ars Industrialis manifesto, and about our analysis of the imminent crisis of consumer capitalism.
Lang replied that we should avoid using the word ‘capitalism’, and that these were questions that belonged to the past. As for ‘telecracy’, he wanted to use it – for Ségolène Royal’s campaign. What he wanted wasn’t concepts, but slogans. He saw himself as part of the ‘Mitterrand generation’, and did so through a ‘communicative’ denial25 that would lead directly to what would become the Strauss-Kahn generation.26 The latter figure would, five years later, just days before his arrest, be ‘on the campaign trail’, riding around in a Porsche27 with his PR handlers, his ‘communicants’.
The full force of the disastrous effects of this submission by resignation [soumission par la demission] would be felt only with the election of François Hollande, for whom the Sofitel affair was a windfall, becoming the ‘left candidate’ in 2012 at the end of a calamitous ‘primary election’. In February of that year, I, together with Ars Industrialis, published an article on the Télérama website that introduced a blog that we had conceived, written and filmed with about fifteen participants, members of Ars Industrialis and invited guests, such as Patrick Bouchain and Philippe Meirieu. Télérama asked us how the election campaign struck us.
This article, ‘Capables et incapables’, which was placed on the blog’s home page28 – and which put the question of what Amartya Sen calls capability at the core of our proposals for an economy of contribution – argued that the real stakes of the 2012 election were the 2017 election, and that the quinquennium between 2012 and 2017 would turn on the following issue. After 2008 and its shattering effects, especially in Europe:
As we pointed out in our 2010 manifesto, we did not conceive of this telluric episode of global capitalism – the globalization of capital being a major agent of the Anthropocene – as a mere financial crisis, but as a radical mutation of industrial societies. And we suggested that if Europe, confronted with this mutation, fails to propose for the world to come some path other than the Silicon Valley model, then it will become a colony, firstly of the United States, then of the ‘emerging countries’. European populations are shifting towards various far right positions, and this is the path towards which France is moving as it heads into 2017, and it is even in the vanguard of this movement, with the help of Michel Houellebecq (but this last point was something we could not have predicted).
We argued that we must take stock of the immense problems exposed in 2008 (problems that were already at stake in our 2005 manifesto) in order to install, in France and towards Europe, a completely new politics. And we argued that unless this is done, the new candidate of the left after the Sofitel affair may well end up thrusting the National Front into the forefront of the 2017 presidential campaign, and the far right may well end up with a presence in government – if not the presidency of the French Republic.
In 2013, we published Pharmacologie du Front national, including an Ars Industrialis lexicon compiled by Victor Petit. In March 2015, after the government’s dismal failure in the 2014 municipal and European elections, Manuel Valls, who became prime minister, gave a speech in Limoges in which he declared the following:
The National Front is on the way to becoming the number one party in France, not, this time, in the European election, like last spring, but here, in the departmental elections. And the department is a French symbol. […] So, what? Will we stand idly by, watching as this National Front threat becomes a reality? Will we ‘take note’, as an inevitability, that this will soon happen? […] And I ask: where are the intellectuals, where are the great consciences of this country, the men and women of culture, who, too, must enter the fray?30
Now, we await the 2017 election, without François Rebsamen, labour minister in the Valls government, who resigned in anticipation of a coming unemployment disaster – having done nothing to address the immense problems highlighted by Oxford University, MIT, the Bruegel think tank in Europe and the Roland Berger consultancy in France. Nor did the prime minister do anything to address these problems, instead discarding his responsibilities by shifting them onto ‘intellectuals’, and nor did the president of the Republic.
On 26 June 2015, an attempted attack on an industrial gas production plant in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier took place, following a murder whose perpetrator was named Yassin Salhi and whose victim was Hervé Cornara:
Yassin Salhi seems to embody the new form of hybrid terrorist who uses the barbaric methods of an Islamist torturer to exact personal revenge, involving a combination of relationship crisis and workplace conflict. Confronted by the police, Salhi eventually admitted the murder of Hervé Cornara, commercial director of the transport company he had joined in March.
His plan was worked out in 48 hours, after he was reprimanded by his boss for a history of dropping pallets.31
Salhi’s case is typical of the powerful effects of combining psychic disindividuation with collective disindividuation. This joint destruction of the primordial narcissisms of the I and the we is increasingly leading to all manner of ‘acting out’ [passages à l’acte], from insult to suicide, and it can end in the kinds of homicidal madness we see today – of which Dylann Roof in Charleston and Yassin Salhi in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier are cases.
Concerning Salhi:
the police believe they are dealing with what they call a ‘hybrid case’, a mixture of personal motivations and ideological commitment. […] This profile of violent perpetrators, mixing psychological fragility and a claim of identity, is being encountered by police with increasing frequency. […] A senior intelligence officer worries: ‘[…] we are seeing the emergence of atypical personalities, sometimes at the limits of psychiatry’. He thinks in particular of Mehdi Nemmouche, who was arrested on 30 May 2014 in Marseille, suspected of having killed four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels six days earlier.32
This is followed by a list of similar cases claimed as ‘jihad’:
The list of ‘borderline’ individuals does not end there. On 20 December 2014, in Joué-lès-Tours (Indre-et-Loire), a 20-year-old man stabbed three policemen while shouting ‘Allahu akbar!’, before being killed. Daesh has claimed responsibility for the assault, but it is unclear whether they are doing so opportunistically. The next day, in Dijon (Côte-d’Or), a 40-year-old driver slammed his car into a crowd (wounding ten). He claims to have been acting in the name of jihad. In fact, however, since 2001 he has been admitted to a psychiatric unit 157 times.33
It was a few days later that Sébastien Sarron, the ‘Nantes chauffard’,34 deliberately drove his car into the crowd at a Christmas market, but without claiming affiliation to ‘jihad’. Hence L’Express does not include him in its list – nor does it include Andreas Lubitz. And yet, like Mohamed Atta and his accomplices in 2001, Sarron and Lubitz utilized road or aerial vehicles as weapons of war. But, in the cases of Sarron and Lubitz, with what ‘war’ were they involved? What is it they were battling against? Or, what battle is it that inhabited and possessed them?
It is not, of course, the battle between Good and Evil, as Bush Junior claimed – this would be too simple. It is the battle of Thanatos and Eros unbound: unbound because they have been deprived of the bonds created by identification, idealization and sublimation, through which they form an economy, that is, a dynamic system within which tendencies compose through binding themselves to one another. When they become unbound, however, these tendencies, Thanatos and Eros, which are contained in and by this economy35 as the two faces of ἐλπίς, are the expression of the two consequences of ὕβρις. These tendencies, unbound and decomposed, inevitably generate the violent madness of murder, rape, or individual or collective suicide, and sometimes they do so as the hallucination of a ‘sacrifice’ – projecting and thereby concretizing a plane of negative consistences via negative forms of idealization, identification and sublimation of every kind.36
What we must now understand – ‘now’ meaning ‘here’ in the contemporary disruptive period, and as the hastening of the Anthropocene towards its end – is that, unless we manage a full accounting of the challenges we are describing, acts of madness will continue to multiply in an ever more spectacular way. It is therefore imperative that we open a new perspective.
We will see in the following chapters how all this extends what Peter Sloterdijk has described, in In the World Interior of Capital, as a five-fold secular process of disinhibition lying at the root of capitalism and globalization.37
Disruption essentially consists in outstripping and overtaking social organizations, and, through that, in short-circuiting collective individuation and transindividuation. Disruption, then, is based on the destruction of every psychosocial structure that enables the construction of such an economy – an economy that is simultaneously and indissolubly psychic and social, which means that changing the social also changes the psychic. Disruption, of which the actual barbarians – whether ‘new’ or not – are symptoms as well as actors, is bound to generalize and radicalize disinhibition, by dissociating Eros and Thanatos. This is already what was at stake in what Adorno and Horkheimer saw coming as early as 1944 with the culture industry.
Reticulated society has accelerated the disruptive processes that were already harboured in the new form of barbarism induced by the reversal of the Aufklärung (which, from her own perspective, Hannah Arendt describes as the crisis of culture and the crisis of education38), and it has done so by taking this reversal to the stage of radical rationalization, thereby provoking extreme disenchantment in the Weberian sense. In the case of the new barbarians, heirs of the buccaneers and pirates whose history is examined by Sloterdijk, this radicalization stems from the purely computational exploitation of the traces of individuals and groups who have been radically disindividuated and radically harmed.
All this combines with the despair and hopelessness engendered by the collapse of a thousand promises: in France, those of François Hollande; in the Near East and the Middle East, those of the ‘Arab Spring’; among the ‘digital natives’, those of a new era, of which the NSA, algorithmic governmentality and The Family are the profound and hidden reality. This reality has been laid bare by the revelations of Edward Snowden, by the conflicts around ‘uberization’, as well as by the analysis of Evgeny Morozov – and it has been laid bare as ‘digital disenchantment’, or what we have in the past referred to as ‘net blues’.
If, as we have seen, the radical and deliberately disruptive digital rationalization propagated by the French new barbarians and their libertarian allies systemically and automatically deprives individuals and groups of their protentions, the latter are nevertheless always bound to resurface. But when they do so, they will have totally left their transindividuated pathways. This is why they are increasingly often expressed not in arguments, but through every manner of ‘acting out’ [passages à l’acte] – including as the burst of automatic weapon fire, heard throughout the whole world.
The ‘cultural’ spheres that form as regions and eras of transindividuation via processes of collective individuation are concretely expressed as that which must be cultivated: as that of which care needs to be taken. As such, they are indeed cultures. Such cultures cultivate their neganthropy by containing ὕβρις, which means both retaining it [retenant, holding it back] and ‘protaining’ it [protenant, holding it forth].
A culture always, and each time in its singular way, that is, neganthropically:
A culture takes care of that which, so as to be constantly cultivated, is made an object of constant attention – such as the fire in the hearth watched over by Hestia. Without such worship, the evils contained in the jar of Pandora as so many versions of ὕβρις would escape en masse.
Among these evils – which, when they are contained, are goods (marking the organological condition insofar as it is also pharmacological, and constituting its δύναμις, that is, its potential, its dynamic) – there is ἐλπίς, the archi-protentional39 spectre of hopes and fears that underlies all forms of madness, from despair to ‘vain hopes’,40 that is, hopes held in ignorance of danger.
As expectation, ἐλπίς makes possible (and translates into) attention – understood as solicitude, cultivating organological and pharmacological forms of knowledge specific to each culture. Culture therefore forms the singular life-knowledge [savoir-vivre] specific to a given region and epoch insofar as they are devoted to some or other artificialities arising from ὕβρις. It is always a matter of knowing how to live as such and such: as an Italian, as an Egyptian, as Japanese,41 according to the epoch and the place where one was born and that one knows. One cannot live without such life-knowledge, which is learned without knowing it, but which lets us know the world [monde] and everything that contrasts it with the worldless and the befouled [immonde].
To a greater or lesser extent, a culture participates with other cultures, by cultivating those transcultural fields through which human knowledge is formed – beyond particular forms of life-knowledge, which belong to ‘particularisms’ and local idiomaticities. Knowledge that is in this sense transcultural includes the work-knowledge and artisanship of guilds (beyond localities, and this is already the case for art) and the conceptual, formal or spiritual knowledge that forms academies, colleges, schools, brotherhoods, churches and all forms of ecclesia (the ἐκκλησία is the assembled community) as political and/or religious communities – from the polis to the synagogue and the Ummah, and passing through all forms of power and all institutions through which the diversity of social systems is synthesized in being localized and yet also deterritorialized.
As the power and knowledge of unification, as culture of diversification, as individuation, an epoch constitutes the ‘spirit’ as Zeitgeist. In Western Europe, for a very long time, this spirit was, first and foremost, a wholly other possibility accorded by religion, which took as obvious fact the necessary fiction of dogmatic revelation, up to and including Kant.
Before religion, at the dawn of Europe, there was piety – that of the Greeks of Greek tragedy, about whom I doubt it could be said that they practised a religion properly speaking. But they were mystics, that is, initiates into the mysteries at Eleusis, through which they celebrated Demeter and Persephone at the return of spring, or, in other words, through which they celebrated the negentropic explosion of life.
All this concerns the Mediterranean West, for which Egypt and the Great Empires were the condition of possibility, including through the establishment of monotheism in the Kingdom of David. Cults of the dead and the divine dynasties of the pharaohs and empires formed other revenances, that is, other ways of being of spirits who bring into question the unity of the spirit (here we should reread what Freud had to say about Egypt, Amun, Moses and the birth of monotheism42).
Before all this, supernature [surnature], which seems to have taken shape in the Upper Palaeolithic, and probably beforehand, is the horizon of the revenances that the instruments of the shaman have the power to summon – and it seems to have been maintained from the cultures of the ‘dream time’ and ‘dreaming’ to the societies of Siberia and North America.
As discussed in Chapter 2, with the new form of barbarism foreseen by Adorno and Horkheimer in Hollywood and early television – all this forming, along with radio and the mass media in general, the industry of cultural goods, the culture industry – it is both psychic individuals and collective individuals who find themselves disindividuated by the coordinated and systematic wounding of their primordial psychic and collective narcissisms, between which psychic and collective retentions and protentions circulate, form and bind together.
This is why we see, today, psychiatric cases (who in the past were called madmen or fools) who, in a delirious (hallucinatory) way, articulate their psychic poverty [misère] with the prevailing affective, symbolic, political and spiritual poverty – and do so against a background of economic poverty that becomes unbearable. The primordial narcissism of the I suffers, above all, from the wounds inflicted on the primordial narcissism of the we. The madness that can be its result tends inevitably to be carried to the level of a delirium of the we, which the ‘professionals of the struggle against radical Islam’ present, as in the case of Yassin Salhi, as a combination of ‘psychological fragility’ and ‘identity crisis’.
It is foolish to say ‘I’m Malcolm X’, just as it is crazy to say ‘I’m Napoleon’. These amount to one or another strain of madness, more or less necessary, just as there are necessary fictions. At the same time, however, lies also exist – that is, fictions – and these may be very harmful and highly reprehensible.
There are different kinds of madness, which, as we shall now see, are sometimes necessary, and which are possible only because noesis can pass into actuality as the ἐντελέχεια (entelekheia, fulfilment) of the δύναμις (potential) from which it stems, and can do so only by taking it to the limit, and, in so doing, by passing its borders, which are those of the dream realizing itself – at the risk, each time, of turning into a nightmare. These various forms of madness – inevitable, if not always required, because they stem from this primordial noetic necessity that is also the issue in Aristotle’s essay on melancholy,43 where the pharmakon is also wine – must be treated and thought about care-fully [panser].
This is what I am attempting to undertake here, a little madly, in trying not to forget how I have taken care [pansé] of myself (as myself-an-other), by tackling head-on, and as an uncompromising conversion, the Delphic injunction, starting from a thinking of my own era:
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν – know thyself.