In his response – which will not arrive until nine years later1 – Foucault argues that in the Meditations, contrary to Derrida’s reading, dreaming and madness do not lie on the same plane. After recalling Derrida’s argument (‘a more common, more universal experience than that of madness’, ‘the madman is not always wrong about everything’, madness ‘affected only certain areas of sensory perception, and in a contingent and partial way’), Foucault maintains that ‘Descartes does not say that dreaming is “more common and more universal than madness”. Nor does he say that madmen are only mad from time to time and on particular points.’2 In short, the dream is by no means a ‘hyperbolical exasperation of the hypothesis of madness’.3 On the contrary, it constitutes the condition of possibility of thinking as meditation, which is always at the limit of not being able to differentiate, and it is – that is, it thinks, it meditates – only as this limit, at this limit and only at the price of this limit: ‘thinking about dreams, when one applies oneself to it, is such that its effect is that of blurring the perceived limits of sleeping and waking for the meditating subject at the very heart of his meditation’.4 Like the demonic disturbance of Socrates, and like dialogical argument capable of reactivating the forgotten in the anamnesic experience in which alētheia consists,
the dream disturbs the subject who thinks it. Applying one’s mind to dreams is not an indifferent task: perhaps it is indeed in the first place a self-suggested theme; but it quickly turns out to be a risk to which one is exposed. A risk, for the subject, of being modified; a risk of no longer being at all sure of being awake; a risk of stupor, as the Latin text says.5
Risk thus appears here, too, in Foucault, but afterwards, and as coming from the dream. This cannot but be of interest to us.
It is, then, evident that Foucault reads Descartes with Binswanger – for whom the dream is also the fundamental dimension of Dasein, and as such the starting point of every Daseinsanalyse:
dreams may well modify the meditating subject to this extent, but they do not prevent him, in the very heart of this stupor, from continuing to meditate, to meditate validly, to see clearly a certain number of things or principles, in spite of the lack of distinction, however deep, between waking and sleeping.6
The dream as hypothesis in the exercise of doubt is for Descartes a process consisting of a series of moments,
a possible, immediately accessible experience [that] is really and actually produced in meditation, according to the following series: thinking of the dream, remembering the dream, trying to separate the dream from waking, no longer knowing whether one is dreaming or not, acting voluntarily as though one were dreaming. […] By means of this meditative exercise, thinking about dreaming […] modifies the subject by striking him with stupor. […] But in modifying him, [it] does not disqualify him as meditating subject.7
The reader will undoubtedly have understood that it is not a question, here, for me, of taking sides for or against Foucault or Derrida. The Derridian analysis that concludes his reading of Foucault is clearly necessary. And the response given by Foucault, in reaffirming the singularity of the question of the dream in relation to that of madness, is just as necessary.
The history of philosophy is not a series of matches going ‘back’ and ‘forth’ between competing athletes, in which one is able to defeat the other, and where it would be possible for us to choose one over the other: it is a process, for which those recognized as philosophers are necessary moments – but never sufficient. Rather than choosing between adversaries who are only expressions of adversity, it is a matter of striking, more or less belatedly, an iron that is more or less hot (being the pharmakon and its ὕβρις at this or that stage of grammatization).
This process – for this, too, is a process, inscribed in what we call history, as a différance of madness as much as of the dream, that is, as the realization through which the dream fades away, allowing the emergence of a waking state and arousing other dreams that may always turn into nightmares – this process is that of the doubly epokhal redoubling. And this is what, in our absence of epoch, fails to occur, that is, no longer continues on, as if we no longer have the ability or the knowledge to pursue this process.
This is what makes Florian suffer. And it is what makes us all suffer alongside him. For we, like him, are orphans. We can no longer be content to be ‘Foucauldians’, ‘Derridians’ or ‘Deleuzians’. We are living the ordeal of nothingness, of being nothing – which means that we must become the quasi-causal bearers of what remains to come – ‘if there is any’ [s’il y en a], as Derrida often said at the end of his work and of his life.
In the contemporary context – which is no longer that of the ‘sixties’ – in our time, in which the question of ordinary madness is posed, in which it imposes itself and does so in an extraordinary way, and in a way that would undoubtedly have been unimaginable for Foucault and Derrida (for if it were otherwise, they would have been led to think otherwise), in the context of disruption as a stage of the process of disinhibition and ὕβρις that is clearly crossing a threshold, with consequences as unpredictable as, and undoubtedly much more transformational than, those to which the ‘discovery of America’ gave rise – in this context, we must profoundly reconsider the question of ὕβρις and the question of its relationships to the dream and madness from the perspective of the dream of Descartes himself.
It is well known that to ‘make ourselves […] masters and possessors of nature’8 is one way in which we might summarize the dream of Descartes: it is Descartes himself who formulates it thus. This ‘dream’ is a protention that will become collective, precisely in that Descartes will transindividuate the whole of philosophy, that is, the whole of science, taxonomic knowledge, and, progressively, morality, politics and economics. All this, and then art, starting from this foundation of the Cogito that is the ego, will become ‘modern’, that is, characteristic of the Modern Age – all this stemming, furthermore, from grammatization, which does not wait for Descartes but on the contrary precedes him.
The dream, which is thus the redoubling of this grammatization, begins neither with the Method, nor with the Meditations on First Philosophy: it begins in Rules for the Direction of the Mind.9
When we decide to put this dream into question, by considering it as a point of origin of what will then be concretized as the end of the classical age and the advent of the Anthropocene (through a process of transindividuation of remarkable complexity), we proclaim that this dream will have been madness. As for myself, what I will now maintain is that this madness was made possible by the new ὕβρις in which consists writing, reading and rereading, conceived as the analytical conditions of thinking, and in such a way that calculation becomes, as ratio, the mathesis universalis constituting the method of any rational philosophy.
This dream, which with Leibniz will continue beyond Descartes, will be concretized by those who will materialize it by realizing these ideas – but also by de-realizing them, that is, by limiting them, and sometimes, and increasingly, by pharmacologically inverting them – with the analytical machine, the difference machine, tabulation machines, informatics and finally digital technology (as the set of reticulated computing machines) in the service of the data economy. Noam Chomsky is characteristic of this inversion.
I refer to inversion because, after Leibniz and with Kant – who undertakes his philosophy so as to free himself from the dogmatic thought of Christian Wolff, himself a disciple of Leibniz, who immeasurably extends the laws of speculation, this excessiveness being for Kant the ὕβρις of philosophy itself10 – the analytic undergoes renewed reconsideration. This reconsideration of the analytic results in a differentiation of the faculty of knowing such that the understanding and reason become the two inseparable but irreducible dimensions of analysis and synthesis (where both are required for any true knowledge).
This complex process, where the relations between analysis (in Descartes’ sense) and synthesis (in Kant’s sense) continuously evolve in such a way as to realize the dream of Descartes – and, in so doing, to de-realize it by concretizing it through what, today, seems bound constantly to turn into a nightmare – is made possible by those statements by Descartes that establish the Modern Age of philosophy as the transindividuation of a new stage of grammatization induced by the proliferation of grammars, dictionaries, account books and forms of money.
It is Max Weber who will point to the banal phenomenon of merchant account books, showing that the emergence of accounting will penetrate every dimension of life, as accounting ratios come to be inscribed at the heart of the process of rationalization accompanying the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Clarisse Herrenschmidt will then highlight the dissemination of the culture of money, which, through its circulation, comes to be placed into everyone’s hands.
Sylvain Auroux has shown that the practice of these linguistic tools that are grammars and dictionaries conditions what, five years after the History of Madness, Foucault will describe in The Order of Things as the epistēmē of representation, of which the logic of Port-Royal (1662) will for him be the acme – which means that the ‘classical age’ is fully constituted on the basis of this ‘general grammar’, around the same time, then, as the ‘great confinement’ to which Foucault will then no longer refer.11
This logic of representation would not be possible without that which precedes it, namely, the ortho-graphic grammatization required by printed writing with movable type, which leads to the global expansion of what Auroux describes as ‘extended Latin grammar’ – just as generalized tabulation12 required the appearance of pagination.
This stage of grammatization that is extended Latin grammar – informed by and taught via the linguistic technologies that emerge from ortho-graphic writing, and that stem from what, in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida called ‘globalatinization’ [mondialatinisation]13 – conditions the classical epistēmē of which Rules Fifteen and Sixteen for the direction of the mind are major expressions. Through these rules, Descartes paves the way for the analytical functions of the understanding to be organologically delegated to algorithmic automatons, and, in so doing, he frees the way for the unprecedented possibility of ὕβρις typical of the Anthropocene.14
It is this ὕβρις that constitutes the essence of the Modern Age in its relation to madness, and this is what Foucault and Derrida both ignore in concert – namely, the pharmacological and retentional condition of the extraordinary ordinary madness that now afflicts our disrupted world.
This pharmakon, as it is considered in Rules Fifteen and Sixteen, establishes the factors and the factical (artificial, instrumental) conditions of the obvious and the simple that constitute the first object of analysis, which, according to Descartes, resists doubt in the case of madness or dreaming – but not in the hypothesis of the evil genius. Foucault, like Derrida, ignores these organological conditions of the appearance of the simple, with respect to what it contains of ὕβρις and with respect to what it contains of the dream. They both ignore the question of the conditions of possibility by which the dream can pass into actuality, just as they ignore the presence of artifices in dreams that Freud so emphasizes (and yet, paradoxically, Freud himself pays no attention to this), and the transformation of instinct into drive by the mutability of the latter, responding and corresponding to the detachability of the artificial organs that themselves result from these dreams, and so on.
In the Cartesian experience of doubt, which in some way prefigures that of the phenomenological epokhē as a bracketing of the world, what remain indubitable, at the stage of methodical doubt that is the ‘hypothesis of the dream’, are ‘simple and intelligible’ things: even in dreams, two plus three always makes five, and a square will always have four sides.
But the things in question are in fact ‘simple’ and ‘intelligible’ only insofar as they are isolated as such, dis-engaged from the phenomena in which they present themselves as simple and intelligible, that is, precisely, beyond phenomenality alone – and as constituting the latter, precisely as its elementarity, that is, as its irreducible granularity, itself un-decomposable. For the square to present itself as ‘un-decomposable’ – as this geometrical figure that is a square (that is, essentially and in-dividually a square) such that it is composed of its ‘four sides’ – it is necessary that the notions of figure and, ultimately, geometry, be themselves evident and ‘un-decomposable’.
This is undoubtedly what Descartes expresses when he distinguishes geometry and arithmetic from physics and the ‘taxonomic’ sciences. But this distinction presupposes this specific attentional mode – one composed of the specific retentions and protentions that are described by, precisely, Rules Fifteen and Sixteen. These are, however, the givens [données] of noetic artefactuality constituted by alphabetical writing, in relation to which, in addition, the ortho-graphy required by the printing press generalizes normed practices. And these practices will become the analytical basis of what, as universal characteristic, and more generally as algebra, will lead, through applied mathematics and its instrumentalization, and by constituting the universal element of the new industry that is the data economy, to the algorithmic decomposition of the faculty of knowing.
This algorithmic concretization of the Cartesian dream is what – as, on the one hand, instrumental and automated understanding, and, on the other hand, reason lost, because exceeded by this understanding that outstrips and overtakes it – systemically short-circuits reason, which is lost by this very fact. This short-circuiting of reason amounts to a kind of metaphysical and speculative disinhibition that proves literally in-conceivable, and, today, it is what allows calculation to be deployed without limits, and as the fundamental principle of the age of disruption (which is also to say, of transhumanism).
Disruption is an incommensurable stage of disinhibition. Its accomplishment occurs in a capitalism that has become purely, simply and absolutely computational – that is, it is accomplished as absolute ὕβρις: absolutely freed of any and all limits, bringing nihilism to fulfilment as the completion of the Anthropocene. This in-com-mensurable stage of disinhibition, paradoxically founded on a certain conception of measure (μέτρον), and now founded on calculation, results in an immense process of demoralization that is also a massive denoetization, an agent of systemic madness, and more than just systemic (or functional) stupidity.15
‘Simple and intelligible’ things are productions of the passive discretization that is grammatization. Nothing is more difficult to isolate than a simple thing, nothing is less immediate than the ‘simple’: it is through a tertiary attentional form opening the possibility for discreetly discretized traces to be ‘examined at leisure’16 that the simple can be dis-engaged from the composite. The tertiary retentional basis of Cartesian analysis and the mathesis universalis, which predates Descartes, conditions his analytical approach, which is founded on the ‘indubitable’ simple and intelligible elements produced by a ‘passive synthesis’ that is not psycho-logical, but techno-logical.
It is obviously not a matter, here, of casting doubt on the indubitable dimension of these elements, but of showing that we can access their simplicity only on the condition of passing through technological passive syntheses such as those that Husserl described in The Crisis of European Sciences in terms of the occluded and non-intuitive development of algebra. The latter contained such syntheses from the earliest moments of analysis, pre-ceding the techno-logical grammatization that has today developed into the automated function of the analytical understanding cut off from all reason – that is, from all intuitive and speculative (in Whitehead’s sense) synthetic possibilities.
This is something on which we must insist, because it evidently involves not just the possibility but the necessity of a machinic ὕβρις that is nothing but the concretion of the fact that ὕβρις in general stems from this passive violence, if you will. Consequently, the violence referred to by Derrida in terms of the madness of language – which constitutes the possibility of language, a theme that will turn up again in Of Grammatology with respect to writing and Lévi-Strauss – is equally that of an organological supplementarity requiring specific analysis. But such an analysis is what Derrida never undertakes, concerned that to do so would reintroduce the oppositions between nature and technics, animal and human, and so on.
Such a neutralization of the question, however, while being highly detrimental to the reactivation of the concept of the supplement, turns out also to be highly valuable in the context of disruption. Here, the conclusion that Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy draw concerning concepts derived from Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon is equally applicable to Derrida and Foucault: the implementation of these concepts somehow drains them of their content. In other words, it is a matter, here, of making a leap into the ordeal of this new kind of ‘kenosis’.
At the heart of these questions lies that of the relations between the psychic individuation of Descartes and the technical individuation of hypomnesic tertiary retention, of which the Republic of Letters17 is the transindividuated consequence as the collective individuation constitutive of an epoch referred to as the Modern Age. In other words, Derrida’s objection to Foucault with respect to history is one question, but there is also an objection that must be made to Derrida himself – a necessity demanded so as to be faithful, in a way, to his own objection.
We must reconsider the Foucauldian question of structure in terms of the question of the doubly epokhal redoubling, which Derrida made thinkable with the supplement, but which he did not himself think. This amounts to the question of general organology. General organology is itself thinkable only in terms of a pharmacology that, too, goes back to Derrida, but which does not remain tied to the letter of his thinking. That this is the case derives firstly from the fact that this question is Socratic, not Platonic: we must distinguish these two figures, here, precisely on this point, and this is something that Derrida did not do. But it is something that we will develop in what follows.
Disruption, inasmuch as it amounts to the epoch of the absence of epoch and the contemporary form of madness – a madness and disruption rooted in the history and archaeology of the Anthropocene – is what Foucault and Derrida could not have thought, but which they can aid us in thinking.
In his original preface to History of Madness, Foucault ignored the tragic Greek question of madness as ὕβρις, which is all the stranger given that what he claimed to be offering was precisely a tragic approach to madness. It is for this that Derrida reproaches him, and rightly so.
But the Derridian critique of the Foucauldian reading of Descartes does not do justice to the questions initiated by Foucault through an approach whose great originality derived from his exhuming from archives the conditions of subsistence and existence on the basis of which new consistences form. And this was carried out by Foucault as a kind of reconstruction of the material processes involved in the doubly epokhal redoubling – but this would not be truly developed until 1966.
From the History of Madness to the seminars held and published as The Courage of Truth, Foucault was led back to Graeco-Roman antiquity and eventually to the Greece of Socrates, passing through the questions of the epistēmē, disciplinary societies and biopower. When he came to the end of this journey, Foucault accorded major status to the question of writing – in this instance, epistolary writing and Seneca’s discourse on reading texts, such that from such practices, understood as techniques of the self, powers of conversion arise.
It is on the basis of such processes of conversion that circuits of transindividuation are formed, through which the time of a doubly epokhal redoubling comes to be established, where the establishment of such epochs also amounts to the constitution of what Foucault will later call regimes of truth.
The processes of conversion establishing such regimes of truth are at work from the very beginning of philosophy insofar as it is firstly a therapeia, a care that the noetic soul takes of itself, a tekhnē tou biou of which Socratic dialogism is the first practical expression. And Foucault stresses, first in The Government of Self and Others, then in The Courage of Truth, that the initiation of such practice is a parrhēsia, such that, practised within a primordial friendship binding the speakers, it is bound to wound them – it is a trauma:
Parrhēsia […] involves a strong and constitutive bond between the person speaking and what he says, and opens, through the effect of the truth, through the effect of the wounds of truth, the possibility of rupturing the bond between the person speaking and the person to whom he has spoken.18
The truth that arises from out of the ‘effects of the wounds’ of parrhēsia is always painful, and, in practising it, the parrhesiast always courts risk – and in particular the risk that, as in the case of Solon, the city as a whole may consider him mad, a city that he wounds as this very whole.19
This pain comes from the fatum on the basis of which one must speak truthfully and frankly, so as to overcome (always temporarily and only ever intermittently) the fundamental ambiguity of the mortal condition. Is this condition a disease? Is it possible to be cured of such a malady? These questions constitute the framework of Foucault’s final meditations, when he was himself ill and approaching his end,20 and turned to the end of Socrates at the end of Crito – and to the moment when Socrates asks Crito to make a sacrifice to Asclepius on his behalf, as he drinks the hemlock.
During this seminar of 15 February 1984, Foucault attempts to interpret Socrates’ end, and his sacrifice to Asclepius, by starting from the interpretation proposed by Georges Dumézil in Le Moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes.21 I have maintained elsewhere and on several occasions22 that, if Socrates sacrifices to Apollo at the moment when he drinks the poison, it is firstly because Asclepius – as a son of Apollo and a mortal,23 and as himself a hero who becomes an immortal but who is struck down by Zeus for having wanted to give immortality to mortals – is the god of poison, which is also to say of medicine, of therapeutics.
He was given the blood which had flowed in the Gorgon’s veins by Athena, and while the blood from its left side spread a fatal poison, that from the right was beneficial, and Asclepius knew how to use it to restore the dead to life. […] Zeus […] feared that Asclepius might upset the natural order of things and struck him with a thunderbolt.24
Neither Dumézil nor Foucault give any thought whatsoever to the question raised by the fact that Socrates, in the moment of drinking the fatal poison, chose to offer a sacrifice to the god of poison. Following a long tradition that passes through Wilamowitz, the question posed by Dumézil and taken up by Foucault is instead to ask what illness it would be a matter of treating, for which Socrates, by his sacrifice, would be thanking Asclepius. They ask if life itself could be this illness, or whether it is some other illness that would be found within life, but that would not amount to life itself.
What is surprising here is that Foucault gives no consideration to Canguilhem’s perspective, which Canguilhem himself takes up from Nietzsche, according to which noetic life is essentially a life of healing. But this life, this healing – through an irreducibly factical, artificial and therefore fictive and precarious normativity, because it is founded in technicity as the organological and pharmacological condition of this form of life – turns these illnesses into new normativities that are also new regimes of truth. In doing so, however, it is bound to produce new forms of infidelity – and, in this instance, infidelities of an organological and pharmacological milieu that is itself, therefore, always changing.
Foucault does quote a passage from The Gay Science in which, as he recalls without seeming to pay it much attention, Nietzsche himself raises the question of poison25 and gives it fleeting consideration as an interpretation (a possibility he immediately dismisses). Despite this, however, Foucault never explores whether the filiation of Asclepius with Asclepias, milkweed, could have something to do with the pharmakon, even though he had shown that what, for Socrates and Plato, was a pharmakon (meaning by this something rather different from my own view), had become, for Seneca, a therapeutic practice.
Derrida, who contested the two pages of the History of Madness devoted to the Meditations of Descartes and the four lines on the Greeks and madness that appeared in Foucault’s first preface, will himself exhume the question of the pharmakon, but he will never make it the object and the condition of a ‘curativity’ that lies at the basis of reason and does so through the ordeal of ὕβρις that the pharmakon can also engender in the form of madness.
The examination of such questions inevitably leads us back to the status of μηχανῆ (mēkhanē) in the two lines of Pindar quoted by Valéry in Cimetière marin, which are translated by Alain Frontier in a way that highlights the erasure of the question of mēkhanē in Aimé Puech’s translation, which is utterly inscribed in this forgetting of the pharmakon that is a repression and a denial, both a negation [dénegation] and a disavowal [déni].
It is the pharmacological condition that governs the transductive relation that constitutes gods and mortals endowed with that divine fire which in the hands of mortals becomes the pharmakon, that is, always ambiguous, which is not the case for such tekhnai in Olympus. Unlike mortals,
the gods […] attain their goal immediately, […] they are already in possession of that towards which men tend and strive. It is enough for Artemis to want to reach his target for it to be reached at once: there is no need to aim. There’s no need even for a bow. The bow is there only for decoration. The prerogatives of the gods thus represent this ideal, virtual point (situated at infinity, so to speak) towards which a mortal (in the best case) can orient his action, by utilizing all the possibilities offered by the tools that lie at his disposal according to his field of excellence. To claim to have reached this point, situated at infinity, would be an absurd and vain dream (a ‘sacrilege’, says Pindar). […] This impossibility […] does not prevent mortals from acting, nor from having intelligence, ingenuity or the personal talent to develop themselves and grow.26
In this transductive relation between mortality and immortality, constituted by the theft of fire, lies the possibility of ὕβρις, at once as crime, madness and noetic fate.
This is what will have been denied since the beginning of the ‘metaphysics’ of the philosophers – Foucault and Derrida included: therein lies the source of their many misunderstandings (which are repeated by little Foucauldians and little Derridians in the quasi-noetic menagerie of scholarly and literary monkeys and parrots).
In the conclusion of ‘Dream and Existence’, which Foucault will introduce to the French public through a translation by himself and Jacqueline Verdeaux, Binswanger writes that, faced with the ‘selfsame’ [même] that ‘hits’ [arrive] the dreamer in the dream ‘he knows not how’, an
individual turns from mere self-identity to becoming a self or ‘the’ individual, and the dreamer awakens in that unfathomable moment when he decides not only to seek to know ‘what hit him’, but seeks also to strike into and take hold of the dynamics in these events, ‘himself’ – the moment, that is, when he resolves to bring continuity or consequence into a life that rises and falls, falls and rises.27
The individual becomes starting from his dream. And he does so as a movement in which the individual becomes, by taking hold, by intervening – in awakening – one who sometimes rises, sometimes falls: living intermittently between the high and the low, like those birds that are for Binswanger essential examples of dreams, and that should also be related to the eagle or the vulture devouring the liver of Prometheus – that is, the organ of black bile.
In this relation to the dream that is also a relation to the gods, to that which is most high, and which is a transduction of sleeping and waking, the dreamer makes something:
That which he makes, however, is not life – this the individual cannot make – but history. Dreaming, man […] ‘is’ ‘life-function’; waking, he creates ‘life-history’.28
[W]e do not know where life and the dream begin.29
These considerations describe the horizon of the scene set by Miyazaki on the basis of Cimetière marin, The Magic Mountain (two texts that he read also through Tatsuo Hori’s The Wind Rises) and the life of Jiro Hirokoshi. It is clear that they haunt Foucault, too, at the moment when he reads Descartes’ Meditations and situates the dream not on the side of madness, but as coming from existence itself: ‘Between the sleeping mind and the waking mind, the dreaming mind enjoys an experience which borrows from nowhere its light and its genius. […] But the theme of original dimensions to dream experience […] can easily be discerned as well in Cartesian and post-Cartesian texts.’30 In other words, if, according to Foucault in 1962, Descartes has stopped listening to the madness that still reigns in the Renaissance, he nevertheless maintains a relationship with the dream that is the very issue taken up by Binswanger in ‘Dream and Existence’. And, among the post-Cartesians who still participate in this oneirology, there is also Spinoza:
in terms of dreams, premonitions, and warnings, he distinguished two sorts of imaginings: those that depend solely on the body […] and those which give sensory body to ideas of the understanding […]. The first form of imagination is encountered in delirium, and makes up the physiological fabric of the dream. But the second makes of the imagination a specific form of knowledge.31
Noetic existence, that is, existence capable of meditating, and not limiting itself to subsisting, is drawn by the attraction of those consistences of which the gods as read by Alain Frontier are markers for these noetic patients [malades] who are mortals worthy of the name: as thought by Canguilhem, noesis is in fact organological illness [maladie]. Canguilhem: who inspired Foucault, but where this is something that the latter seems constantly to forget (to the point that on occasion one wonders if he has actually read him).
The dream can be divine only because, day and night, it transduces the nocturnal and the diurnal. This transduction, which ties mortals to immortals, that is, existences to consistences, to eternities, is constituted in and by meditation.
The issue, however, is that the dream, insofar as it can be realized – and insofar as thinking is what thinks the conditions of the realization of the dream that it is, in which it consists – being pharmacological through and through, always brings with it ὕβρις and hence madness, and, in so doing, brings nightmarish inversions that are not just always possible, but always imminent.
This is why knowledge is perpetually required to contain the ὕβρις that it itself contains more or less poorly or well, and where knowledge amounts above all to a therapeutics – and firstly of techniques of the self.
This is why, if Foucault’s gesture is not soluble into Derrida’s objection (the dream is in continuity with madness, meditation always in any case harbours the imminent madness of the evil genius), this objection by Derrida must nevertheless be meditated upon, but so as to do justice to Binswanger’s question of the dream as the ability to make history beyond any ‘life-function’. It seems that Derrida ignores the new questions this brings with it – organological and pharmacological questions that we must resituate in the still uncharted territory of noetic exosomatization.
Just as it is highly instructive to read the text written by Derrida in 1953 while still a normalien, on The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, so too it is striking to read the ‘Introduction’ that Foucault published in 1954 for the translation of Binswanger’s ‘Dream and Existence’. In both cases, the visions and the discourses are almost the opposite of what will later come to constitute these authors named Foucault and Derrida as we know them.
In the ‘Introduction’ to ‘Dream and Existence’, we see how the young Foucault’s project is to construct a new anthropology, located within a kind of square whose corners are Freud, Binswanger, Heidegger and Husserl, and where the central question of the dream paves the way for Foucault’s position with respect to the Meditations in History of Madness.
Foucault’s works must be taken up in a totally new way, starting from a critique of the entropology evoked by Lévi-Strauss at the end of Tristes Tropiques32 – a work written after The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the Introduction to the Works of Marcel Mauss and the texts gathered together in Structural Anthropology 1, and where it seems that the young Foucault allows himself to be diverted by this set of publications, as he becomes attracted by their structuralist vision. These works of Lévi-Strauss and of a triumphant anthropology built on the Saussurian method will mark the course of intellectual debate for the next fifteen years, dominated not just by Lévi-Strauss and his reference to Saussure, but by Althusser, Lacan and Barthes.
In 1954, the young Michel Foucault wanted to create a new anthropology founded on a therapeutics of the psyche, on a psychiatry and a psychology – where this anthropology and this psychology would constitute a therapeutics and a clinical practice, through a more or less ‘existentialist’ deviation from Freud with respect to the status of the dream, itself a primordial resource of meditation. At the other end of this immense journey, some thirty years later, Foucault will pose the questions of parrhēsia, the hermeneutics of the self and techniques of the self as conditions of meditation, to which he seems to trace back all primordial questions.
All this, for we who find ourselves plunged into the depths of disruption, which is also the ordeal of denoetization that nihilism ultimately constitutes, opens the path, which has not been traced but which is indicated (like a dream within a nightmare – as, in a way, in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, as seen by Jonathan Crary33), to a neganthropology – beyond the anthropology and humanism that in 1966 Foucault will attempt to overcome.
The positive anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and structuralism was constructed by systematically ignoring Leroi-Gourhan, who is mentioned by Derrida as well as by Deleuze and Guattari in the elaboration of their respective enterprises – hence referred to as poststructuralist. A rigorous approach to exosomatization in the absence of epoch that is the disruption – as the Anthropocene reaching its extreme stage by generalizing the entropology in which this anthropocentrism, in fact, consists as entropocentrism – requires us to embark on the path of neganthropology. The question, for this neganthropology, is ὕβρις – where this whole question must be conceived in a tragic way, because it stems from a problem of fact.
This does not mean that we should return to a tragic way of thinking in the same manner as the Greeks. It means that, today, it is a matter of reopening – urgently – the hermeneutic question, as a hermeneutics of the madness of the human that ‘does not exist yet’, as Jean Jaurès wrote on 18 April 1904 in the editorial for the first issue of L’Humanité. This is what we must set in opposition to the totalizing and pre-totalitarian ideology of the transhumanists and neo-barbarians.
In ‘My Sunday “Humanities”’, Derrida comments on this statement by Jaurès, which takes humanity as being first and foremost what, not existing, has the faculty and is the faculty of dreaming itself as that which ‘does not exist at all yet or [which] barely exists’,34 and, in so doing, of thinking itself as that which inscribes into becoming [devenir] the bifurcations of its future [avenir]. As the rest of the editorial makes clear, what Jaurès believes in is the realization of this dream. He believes this dream will eventually be realized, but he ignores the fact that this realization is always also a de-realization: this is what forever separates us from him and from his epoch, whatever denials persist in this regard. This is the significance of the first paragraph of the editorial:
The very title of this newspaper, in its breadth, marks out exactly what our party proposes. It is, indeed, the realization of humanity for which all socialists work. Humanity does not exist at all yet or it barely exists. Within each nation, it is compromised and fragmented by class antagonism, by the inevitable struggle of the capitalist oligarchy and the proletariat. Only socialism, by absorbing all classes into the common ownership of the means of work, can resolve this antagonism and make of each nation, finally reconciled with itself, a parcel of humanity.35
Derrida, unlike Jaurès, sees in this non-existence, which gives humanity its consistence, the processual différance of a promise remaining always to come, constituting what I try here (and in Automatic Society) to think, by reading Derrida beyond Derrida [hors de lui], as a neganthropic potential.
This is, indeed, a matter of reading Derrida outside the framework of ‘deconstruction’ as he defined it: for Derrida, différance would amount to negentropy in all its forms, that is, life in all its forms, without the need to specify what constitutes noetic différance. What is at stake in the words of Jaurès, on the other hand, is noetic différance, that is, exosomatized différance, distinguishing itself from mere bio-logical life, constituting knowledge that, necessarily exteriorized, is also exposed to the degradation of proletarianization (as the Grundrisse describes it).
We no longer believe (in this we I include Florian, but also, believing I may do so on their behalf, the members of Ars Industrialis) that socialism will resolve the tragic pharmacological situation, and in truth nobody truly believes in this anymore. We do believe, however, in the possibility of a renewal of noetic life that would make it more care-ful, more attentive and more worthy. And we assert that this is possible simply because it is absolutely necessary, and therefore rational. That a renewal of noetic life is possible does not mean that it is probable: the possible is often so improbable that it presents itself before anything else as the impossible.
This impossible can and must be realized, and as the dream of the improbable: to fail to achieve it would be to condemn non-inhumanity to disappear, either into an oligarchy who would dominate a nano-bio-technological anthill, in the sense envisaged by Leroi-Gourhan,36 or, more probably, into an irreversible increase in the rate of entropy such that life itself will find itself threatened – at least in its more highly evolved forms.
Having posited that such are the terms of our problem, we must turn to the question of the dream in politics and the question of the politics of dreaming – where dreams would be the resource of any neganthropogenesis, that is, any exosomatic organogenesis such that it would preserve its future by maintaining its noetic capacity. The expression ‘politics of dreaming’ would no doubt sound pleasing to many fools who do not hesitate to refer to ‘creativity’ – for example, to the ‘creative economy’.37
The deterioration of the place of dreaming in politics – which falls within that ‘realism’ denounced by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason38 (see my commentary in Automatic Society, Volume 139) – consists in claiming that promises (or dreams) are binding only on those who believe in them:40 this pejorative deterioration amounts to a form of denial. What it denies is precisely the fact that dreams are the origin and the future of exosomatization as noetization, even if they can always turn into nightmares. And it is this fact that necessitates – as the therapeutics of this pharmacology that is the organology resulting from an organogenesis of which politics is the organization – the call for a politics that would not be dissolvable into the law of the market. For the latter can only extrapolate calculabilities and computations, whereas politics must know how to manage bifurcations that are incalculable because they are improbable. It is from this perspective that we must reread and reconnect The German Ideology and the Grundrisse.
The betrayal of dreams insofar as they are the resource of all noesis and all neganthropogenesis is what, in the last three decades, particularly in France, has engendered an immense demoralization. Beneath the disruptive horizon, this demoralization seems to prevent any opportunity for an eventual peaceful bifurcation – as if what should be inscribed in becoming, and inscribed as the future of Neganthropos, can no longer be conceived except on the condition of passing through the experience of extreme violence.