After 21 April 2002, and over the course of the various national and European elections during which the rate of abstention continued to increase just as did the successes of the far right, it was said that the discourse of campaigning politicians failed to evoke any dream, especially on the left – as if the left should know how to dream better, and be able to dream better, than the right. This kind of statement can only provoke sneers from those who, after Henri Queuille and Edgar Faure, keep repeating that when politicians make promises to their constituents, they are commitments only if they believe in them.
To sneer is not to laugh – it is even the very opposite: a sneering wisecrack of this kind no longer makes anyone laugh, except fools. Because what this wisecrack describes has become the norm, generating an immense feeling of revulsion at the deception and producing a profound exasperation that exacerbates antagonisms and phantasms. The political reality to which this kind of joke refers plunges the population into dangerous disarray: instead of making people laugh, it enrages them.
What was previously a ‘wisecrack’ [mot d’esprit], however, does raise important questions: what is the status of the promise in politics, what does it incite insofar as it is a kind of waking dream, and what are the conditions of its eventual realization?
A noetic dream is a dream that can be realized – as exosomatization, the condition of which is thus the dream. This occurs firstly as the first stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling, and through the production of a new pharmakon. In Western civilization, politics and the dreams from which it stems essentially organize the process of collective individuation via circuits of transindividuation through which a social group fully and positively realizes this exosomatization – and does so by creating a new social reality, as a new social body, a new way of coming together [faire corps] by collectively individuating exosomatization: by epokhalizing it.
Such collective individuation is a therapeutics that organizes the arrangement between pharmaka – and that can clearly also limit, condition or even prohibit pharmaka, as is the case with many drugs. This therapeutics comes out of an organological situation in which psychosomatic organs, technical organs and social organizations constitute an epoch as a stage of an accomplished exosomatization – and where the arrangements between these are the objects of general organology.
The exosomatization of pharmaka itself evolves (as the first stage of a new epokhal redoubling, bearing a new epoch) under the close or distant effects of an infidelity of the milieu. It always tries to resolve the new and pathological tension (pathological in Canguilhem’s sense) induced in the technical milieu as it becomes unfaithful [infidèle], that is, as it disadjusts itself or its initial exogenous conditions (for example, in terms of natural resources) through a new organological realization that is always itself pharmacological – that is, pathogenic. This is what Civilization and Its Discontents describes.1
The social realization of a new stage, or some new consequence, of exosomatization is political insofar as it conforms to positive rules of law, where law [droit] is itself prescribed (as a ‘therapeutics’ characteristic of an epoch – of which mores are the implicit rules) by legislators legitimately appointed according to rules that are called laws [lois], constituting a regime, and establishing or continuing an epokhality concretized by new rules and meta-rules of common life.
The noetic dream, therefore, is realized in layers: the first stage of the epokhal redoubling stems from a work-knowledge [savoir-faire] that overturns the existing organological horizon, while the second stage of the epokhal redoubling stems from conceptual knowledge [savoir concevoir] (knowledge of critical noesis), which is itself the source of new forms of life-knowledge [savoir-vivre] (mores – which themselves vary more or less according to the variations in the knowledge of how to do and conceive: according to the tensions that are always maintained within these different spheres, and that constitute their dynamic potentials).
Hence it is that the dream is the condition of politics. But it can constitute a political promise only on the condition of being noetic, where noesis finds its source in this faculty of dreaming that is always also a technesis.2 Let us call such a promise a political noesis. It is then possible to interpret Henri Queuille’s disillusioned wisecrack in a slightly different way from that which was imposed on France on the basis of the so-called ‘radical-socialist’ tradition.
If the commitment to promises is on the side of those who believe in them, the latter, who try to constitute a new law, who promise themselves new laws or rights, must not simply delegate to their representatives the legislative and executive functions of the realization of promises, but actively contribute to the conceptualization and the concretization of the noetic dreams from which they derive: to their effective noetization, and as the formation of circuits of transindividuation. Such effectiveness of the concept and the promise from which it stems is what Hegel called Wirklichkeit as the fulfilment of ‘actually effective’ history.
This last consideration, which thereby advocates a contributory politics, presupposes that ‘capabilization’ [capacitation],3 which lies at the heart of the contributory economy such as it is conceived by Ars Industrialis, also becomes the condition of transindividuation as the realization of a political noesis – establishing a new epoch of political debate, giving rise to the emergence of new psychosocial individuations of citizenship and defining new democratic and republican rules and laws.
The evolution of today’s ‘dissocieties’4 (which are disintegrated and ‘disrupted’ hyper-industrial societies) towards such a social reinvention, which obviously seems absolutely improbable and unexpected, is nevertheless the condition on which any bifurcation beyond the Anthropocene depends, as a redefinition and reinvention of knowledge in all its forms, and as a way out of the process of self-destruction to which the current disruption is leading. And this gives meaning as never before to Fragment 18 of Heraclitus: ‘One who does not hope for the unhoped-for will not find it: it is undiscoverable so long as it is inaccessible.’5 The realization of noesis insofar as it stems from noetic dreaming is what all institutions have the responsibility of producing (by instituting it) and maintaining (by reproducing themselves). But in the age of disruption, the reproduction of institutions must give way to their neganthropic evolution. Among political institutions, establishments for research, teaching and training are the sine qua non for the reproduction, transmission and trans-formation of circuits of transindividuation.
In the context of disruption – where, short-circuiting the whole process of adjustment between the technical system and the social systems (which is the concrete and effective reality of transindividuation as social cohesion [faire corps social]), institutions are as such and in advance invalidated (since they always arrive too late, enabling the growth of the desert of legal vacuums to which these short-circuits give rise) – research, teaching and training establishments must be reinvented from top to bottom.
This requires that knowledge itself be redefined from top to bottom on the basis of an organological and pharmacological perspective, according to new models of the goals, organization and functioning of these establishments of capabilization.6 I will return to this subject in La Société automatique 2 from the perspective of ‘digital studies’. The latter consists above all in reconsidering the social nature and role of forms of knowledge as forms of life containing (in both senses of the word ‘contain’) the ὕβρις that exosomatic organogenesis constitutes in a structural way.
The faculty of dreaming lies at the origin of noesis because the latter is thoroughly and originally neganthropological. Noesis, as the source of all forms of knowledge (work-knowledge [savoir-faire], that is, knowing how to exosomatize so as to subsist; life knowledge [savoir-vivre], that is, knowing how to live noetically in exosomatization so as to ek-sist; and conceptual- and spiritualizing-knowledge [savoir concevoir et spiritualiser], knowing how to transindividuate in coming together [faisant corps] in exosomatization in the direction of consistences), is what opens opportunities for bifurcations that are inscribed in the real, but that are accessible only as and through the epokhal derealization of this real. This derealizable real is complex, because it is constitutively out of phase [déphasé] – being at once social, vital and physical. Always in default, this phase-shifting [déphasage] is ὕβρις as such (delinquere).7
The real is processual. Real processes are overwhelmingly entropic when they are purely physical, and negentropic when they stem from processes of vital individuation or psychosocial individuation. The ability of living things to produce différance from entropy is what diversifies itself in all living species arising from evolution, whose noetic form, as the creation of a social body [faire corps social], is not just negentropic, but neganthropological, because it is not just organic, but organological: exo-somatic.
What the current disruption renders impossible is the noetic faculty of dreaming precisely insofar as it is neganthropological – which it replaces with a constant incitement to fantasize in vain, for nothing: nihil. In this way, it amounts to a fulfilment of nihilism that we can call dis-integrating, as a submission to drive-based and mimetic protentional models that short-circuit the faculty of dreaming, while giving rise to immense and extremely dangerous frustrations.
These frustrations are themselves systemically exploited and intensified – which installs both the denoetization that stems from systemic stupidity and madness (as the ‘propensity to madness’ and ‘functional stupidity’ inherent to the process of disinhibition) and the economic insolvency that leads rapidly to planetary ruin – so long as no bifurcation has occurred that would amount to a ‘turning point’ in this disruptive period that is at present pushing the Entropocene to its extremes.
As Canguilhem shows with respect to biology and as Whitehead shows with respect to reason in general, forms of knowledge are functions (in Canguilhem’s case, these functions are organological, but this is not so for Whitehead) of the psychosocial forms through which noetic life takes shape [fait corps].
What Valéry and Binswanger (as read by Foucault) tell us, in very different registers, as does Pindar interpreted by Miyazaki, is that the epokhē of the real in which noesis consists, as the power to provoke a neganthropic bifurcation, presupposes the realizable dream. In other words, it presupposes the capacity for waking dreaming in meditation, that meditation whose oneiric tenor Foucault explored in Descartes. Hence it presupposes the capacity to conceive – that is, to engender – the theoretical and practical conditions of the noetic realization of this epokhē.
From the side of collective existence in all its forms, the faculty of dreaming together – for example, the geometric point, the dream of which is collectively maintained by learning geometry, and where this point, like all consistences, does not exist, no more than does justice, which is a promise in that, while it may be inaccessible, it nevertheless guides all non-inhuman behaviour – this faculty of dreaming so as to cohere [faire corps] is the condition and the resource of noesis that requires tertiary retention (where what follows from this is that we must revisit the status of imagination in Kant, but in a different way than that attempted by Žižek), which is thus both the result of exosomatization and its condition.
The consistence of justice, and, beyond that, of all motives – which, ever since the beginning of exosomatization, have more or less metastabilized themselves through all the forms of noetic life – is not the inscription of an eternal necessity constituting being beyond the world-as-becoming. It is what, in the entropic process that is the cosmos, constitutes conditions of (im)possibilities (pharmacological conditions) of localizations of negentropic différances, of which we ourselves, as non-inhuman beings, are the neganthropological form.
As such, these forms are protentions. This is why Being and Time is concerned, not with a new formulation of the question of being, or with a new conception of being as the ‘questioning of being’, but with the specification of the question of time qua futural capacity. The latter, however, is conditioned by the noetic faculty of dreaming: it is upon this possibility of the possibility that Binswanger meditates [songe], which he does on the basis of the dreams [songe] of his patients – including Aby Warburg.8
In general terms, consistences are motives of oneiric projections onto screens (operating through an atranscendental archi-cinema), and, as such, they are the sine qua non conditions of processes of neganthropological différance – where empathy for the living and repugnance at destroying it or making it suffer are principles of this economy that is différance.
After Freud, the dream is also that which constitutes the scene of the unconscious. This means, on the one hand, that reason must be conceived as the motive of the desire that is noesis, which in any case philosophy takes as its starting point (from Diotima to Aristotle), and, on the other hand, that the noetic dream is above all the fruit of a libidinal economy that must be cultivated and maintained, being perpetually exposed to the possibility of its diseconomy, whether local or general, a possibility that amounts to that of ὕβρις – but where, nevertheless, the latter is itself always the potential bearer of a fruitful bifurcation.
It is starting from this primordial noetic oneirism and its archi-cinema9 that we must pose the question of the status of the promise in social relations in general, and in political and institutional relations in particular, as well as in the economy today, both in terms of the market in general and the financial market in particular.
Starting from the question of the will inasmuch as this question was completely reconfigured by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche made the promise a specific trait of the noetic soul, and Derrida made it his constant concern at the end of his own life and work. Dreaming and promising are, here, modalities and conditions of protention and also of retention (of the retained [retenue]), and of their realization (of holding out [tenue]) as expectation and attention. This is why, in On the Genealogy of Morality, the animal who promises (the Neganthropos) is also the one who cultivates mnemotechnics.
The fulfilment of promises and the realization of dreams, as well as the différance of promises (as the consistence of what, not existing, is therefore all the more necessary – as ‘regulatory idea’), stem from knowledge in all its forms. The industrial economy made conceptual knowledge its principal production function, and did so by short-circuiting life-knowledge, work-knowledge and theoretical knowledge – via machinism in the nineteenth century, via marketing and the mass media in the twentieth century, and via algorithmic governmentality in the twenty-first century. This meant, however, that the political function, in its failure to take the measure of this situation, found itself dispossessed of any critical capacity founded on the noetic faculty of dreaming.
The faculty of dreaming is then turned into a process of denoetization – and, in France, a history that extends from Mitterrand to Sarkozy and Strauss-Kahn bears witness to the summoning of marketing in the service of politicians against politics, that is, against citizens. So far as I understand the situation, those who claimed that we must make it possible for voters to dream in order to struggle against voter abstention raised the question of political dreams after the nightmare orchestrated by Jacques Séguéla.10 But in the very way this question was raised, and in such circumstances, it was already drained of meaning. Were this not the case, they would not even have needed to ask it: they would themselves have dreamed it. But they do not dream.
In France, this was especially true after François Mitterrand, who in this way became the very model for both François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. Mitterrand, however, still cared enough to ensure that his manipulations of the faculty of dreaming served his own historical dreams: he still dreamed of strutting the historical stage – which is, indeed, a succession of dreams.
The effect of the professionalization of politicians has been that they couldn’t care less about history, in which they no longer believe any more than does Florian. Politics has thus turned into just one more job market among others, where politicians are subject to the evolution of the economy of promises, as is the case in all other markets, and, where, in the wake of the process of disinhibition (miserably exemplified by the fall of Strauss-Kahn), the improbable and neganthropic promise turns into the calculated risk of the nihilist in search of opportunities.
In other words, calculated promises are not genuine promises (this is the meaning of Derrida’s work on this score). And this is why they are virtually condemned to become lies – such is the downfall [déchéance] of Hollande calling for the downfall of those who thereby become scapegoats (here I am obviously referring not to terrorists themselves, but to those who are designated as being so in potential).
Promises that arise from noetic dreams cannot be fulfilled or realized by mere calculations, however complex and well-equipped [outillés] they may be, but only by literally improbable bifurcations.11 Pseudo-promises, promises that do not arise from noetic dreams, decompose almost immediately into lies, just as, in Charles Perrault’s ‘The Fairies’, the words of the evil daughter turn into vipers and toads that fall from her mouth.
If dreaming is the condition of exosomatization,12 and if, as noetic hallucination, it allows not only the generation of new technical organs, but also, as the transindividuation of the epokhal redoubling, the generation of works, knowledge and the organizations that these require (institutional systems, economic and monetary apparatuses and instruments, collective enterprises of all kinds, and so on), if all this is true, then the question of politics is, indeed, one of fostering dreams in those to whom it is addressed through significant historical figures, who become so only to the extent that they succeed in realizing such dreams.
It is in this way that Martin Luther King leaves his mark in the global memory of the twentieth century. As a sublime figure of non-inhuman being, he embodies the dreamer whose dreams, in being realized, become global. The noetic dreamer realizes his dreams firstly by playing: play is a kind of waking dream.13 The noetic dream constitutes an epoch through a generation, and as its awakening:
Awakening is a gradual process that imposes itself both in the life of the individual and in that of the generation. Sleep is the first phase of this process. For a generation, the experience of youth has many things in common with that of the dream. Its historical figure is an oneiric figure. Each epoch has such a side, turned towards dreams, which is its childish side.14
The play and games through which the child individuates itself and constructs its psychic apparatus become, in the course of adult development, work as the power to make other adults dream (the power to open up) in these transitional spaces that, in some way, forms of knowledge always constitute.15 If this were not the case, then the arbitrary rules in which life-knowledge (mores) consists would have no ascendancy over those who share it, those who, in so doing, trans-form it by trans-forming themselves.
The destruction of the faculty of dreaming is necessarily also that of this ascendancy, and it thus leads to the generalization of incivility – from the managing director of the International Monetary Fund to the ‘savages’ that Jean-Pierre Chevènement believes he can and must refer to with this term, via the shameless lies of President Hollande – while Florian, who is not uncivil, practises this wounding truth that arises from every παρρησία, which, afterwards, and as the bifurcation that it foreshadows, transforms into flowers and diamonds.
As soon as she had arrived at the spring, she saw a lady, magnificently dressed, approaching from the wood, who came up and asked for a drink. She was the fairy who had appeared to her sister, but she had made herself look and dress like a princess, so as to see how far this daughter’s rudeness would go. ‘Do you think I’ve come here just to give you a drink?’ said this proud, rude girl. ‘I’m supposed to have brought a silver jug on purpose, am I, for Madam to drink from? As far as I’m concerned you can drink straight out of the stream, if you want.’
‘That is not very polite’, said the fairy, without getting angry. ‘Very well, then; since you are so disobliging, the gift that I give you is this: at every word you say, a toad or a viper will come out of your mouth.’
As soon as her mother saw her, she cried out: ‘Well, daughter?’
‘Well, mother?’ replied the rude girl, and spat out two vipers and two toads.
‘Oh Heavens!’ exclaimed the mother, ‘what’s happened? This is all because of her sister; I’ll see she pays for it.’ And she rushed off at once to give her a beating. The poor child ran away and escaped into the forest nearby.
The King’s son, who was on his way back from hunting, met her there, and seeing how beautiful she was, he asked her what she was doing all alone, and what had made her cry. ‘Alas, sir! it was my mother, who chased me out of the house.’ The King’s son, seeing five or six pearls and as many diamonds coming from her, asked her to explain how this could be. She told him the whole story. The King’s son fell in love with her, and, considering that the gift she had was worth more than any dowry that another girl could have, he took her back to his father’s palace, where he married her.
As for her sister, she made herself so hateful that her own mother chased her out of the house, and the wretched girl, after a long time going from place to place without finding anyone to take her in, went off to die at the edge of a wood.16
Today’s disruption destroys the faculty of dreaming that, when it dreams its own conditions of realization, whether in a nocturnal way, as in the case of Valéry’s mathematical dream, or in a diurnal way, as the Cartesian meditation presents itself, opens up the possibility of effecting [opérer] bifurcations through which anthropic Anthropos becomes neganthropic, thus preparing the way for its own future by making it irreducible to becoming, to which, as an agent of entropy, it nevertheless also contributes in a pharmacological manner.
Ever since the French Revolution, the parties of left and right have fought over this faculty of dreaming inasmuch as it revealed itself to indeed be the faculty of ‘changing the world’, and, along with it, of changing nature, so as to become its ‘masters and possessors’. This in turn was realized as the modern dream, and, with the industrial revolution, as the entry into the Anthropocene qua intensification of the process of disinhibition that began with the Renaissance.
Like many of my peers (those of my generation), I affiliated myself with so-called left-wing thought because I saw in it a promising collectivity, one that was alive and struggling for the realization of the noetic dream that emerged from the Enlightenment. To defend a politics of the left was firstly to defend a theoretical perspective, that is, a right – a legitimate right [un droit en droit] intrinsically in advance of the real, itself intrinsically correctable and perfectible, but which, in fact, and, as we said at the time, ‘dialectically’, itself precedes the law.
This seemingly circular causality is in reality the hermeneutic phase-shifting contained by the threefold transduction induced by exosomatization, and as its ὕβρις: such is the dynamic of the three strands of individuation (psychic, collective and technical17) that organology tries to conceive in terms of a threefold transductive relation.
With the concept of transduction, it is no longer a matter of conceiving the terms of a ‘dialectic’, but, on the basis of the phase-shifting [déphasage] of this circular causality as it contains ὕβρις, of interpreting it as a pharmacological spirit from which it is always necessary to extract the quasi-causality of a rule and a law (which is a difference in the différance of a repetition the conditions of which are altered by tertiary retention in each new epoch).
A ‘left-wing’ thought is what considers in facts that which exceeds them as the laws that they conceal, that they require, and which fall within a function of reason that sets them up as the condition of possibility, après coup, of such facts. It is necessary to redress facts with rules of law, so that, indeed, in law and not just in fact, they can last and intensify the durability of forms of life that emerge therefrom – in the sense of ‘forms of life’ referred to by Canguilhem. Of course, there is ‘right-wing’ thought that thinks this way – and it often goes much further than ‘left-wing’ thought.18
To admit this does not mean that right and left will thereby be dissolved into one another. It is, again, a matter of doing justice to the quasi-causal logic of the pharmakon. In this pharmacology, what continues to distinguish right and left today is the status of calculation, and this is what keeps me firmly anchored to the side of the latter – which, by its very name (left, sinistral), says something about what, in the accident, is not reducible to the probable, and requires the improbable of which the dream is the reserve (the μέτρον).
Nevertheless, calculation here is not what must be rejected or treated pejoratively: it is what, through critique, must be limited by reason. It is precisely the rejection of calculation (like the rejection of the determination of the ‘indeterminate’ that is being-for-death, which I have here called archi-protention) that, in Being and Time, keeps Heidegger locked within the metaphysics he is trying to deconstruct – as well as within, not just the ‘right-wing’ of his age, but the National Socialist far right.
Conversely, Marxist thought, which sees in the historical effectiveness of the relations of production the ‘infrastructural’ causal model of ‘superstructural’ relations, believes that it can reduce the latter to such calculations.
Under the influence of marketing, which is essentially the technology by which control is taken of the faculty of dreaming (something that Foucault failed to address in his analyses of neoliberalism), it is noesis as the faculty of dreaming that is individually and collectively short-circuited and proletarianized by the specialists of the dream industry, where the latter also produces the cinema discussed by Godard in 1998.
Politicians have failed to critique or to think the limits of law emerging from the faculty of dreaming in the epoch of this dream industry. As representatives of political parties that have themselves become temporary employment agencies, they have learned to ignore the historico-political function of the dream. Hence is installed the absence of epoch and its epidemic of the drives, whereby the social body decomposes and starts to fester.
In so doing, politicians have destroyed their parties. A political party is an organism of partial transindividuation, that is, it represents a part of society that distinguishes itself from another part, itself represented by some other party. The ‘marketization’ of politics that began in France in the 1980s with Mitterrand and Séguéla, manufacturing the ‘Mitterrand generation’ like industrialists of the dream, is what inaugurated the movement ‘à la française’ that systemically destroyed the faculty of dreaming.19 Hence it was that minds were functionally locked into dreams that can never be realized.20
In 1994 or 1995, I suggested to Sylviane Agacinski that we discuss the political situation at the time, and the prospects for which I felt it was possible to hope. I had known her at the Collège international de philosophie in the 1980s. She had since become the companion of Lionel Jospin. She was a lively, beautiful, friendly and warm person, and she was someone of whom I was extremely fond.
We did not at all, however, share the same political analysis: her ideas on the subject were typical, in my view, of the great critical weakness of French social democracy. But she was intelligent and sincere, and we had over a long period of time built up a relationship of trust. Convinced that Lionel Jospin would play an important role in the coming years, I wanted to enter with her, and with him through her, into a dialogue on the future consequences of the development of what was then still referred to as ‘information technology’.
I had met Jospin with Sylviane during a post-thesis party [pot de thèse], and I was struck by his cordiality. Furthermore, like everyone else, I listened to his discourse attentively, especially with respect to his desire to take stock of Mitterrandism and to exercise a ‘right to make an inventory’. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, with whom I spoke a great deal during that period – they were translating Technics and Time, 1 into English – had urged me to take the initiative at this meeting.
They and I suspected that the left would come back to power, and we believed in the absolute necessity of Jospin and his entourage understanding and integrating that of which the three of us were convinced: the great economic, social and political questions of the years and decades to come would be overwhelmed (disrupted) by the completely new conditions in which technology was going to develop with the digitalization of the technical system – of which the World Wide Web had been the initiating factor in April 1993.
I met Sylviane in a bar opposite the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where she taught. After catching up on her news, I began by explaining to her – by trying to explain – what it was I wanted to talk about with Jospin. But she quickly interrupted me, saying in an impatient tone: ‘Listen, if you want to talk about these things, all you have to do is join the Socialist Party. Nowadays, the party has a quite brilliant member, Pierre Moscovici, and he’s the guy you really need to speak to.’
As politely as possible, I brought the conversation to an end. I knew Moscovici well. Ten years earlier, when I was at the firm TEN, to which I had been recruited by Claude Neuschwander,21 he had been there for a time himself, as an ENA trainee.22 He was the living caricature of the pretentious and cynical careerist, totally devoid of ideas about the possibility of changing the French or European situation, and with absolutely no interest in reflections of this type – which were for him useful only as election campaign trickery.
I left Sylviane disappointed and concerned. Eighteen years later, Moscovici was a minister under Hollande. Today, he is a European Commissioner. Since that time, I ask myself what lessons Jospin and Sylviane, who became his wife, have drawn from these miserable developments, from the escapades and indiscretions of their Dominique and the lies of little François.
In April 2005, George Collins, Marc Crépon, Catherine Perret, Caroline Stiegler and myself founded Ars Industrialis, an international association for an industrial politics of technologies of the spirit. The manifesto23 of this organization referred to the political economy of ‘spirit value’ developed by Paul Valéry in Regards sur le monde actuel.24 In The Re-Enchantment of the World, published in French in 2006, we again took up and developed these ideas.
From the beginning, we at Ars Industrialis argued that consumerist capitalism and its culture industries had systematically exploited, exhausted and ultimately destroyed the libidinal economy, while installing a financialization guided by the drives that liquidates investment and replaces it with speculation. We argued that this was bound to lead to a generalized diseconomy – and a general violence.
In 2010, after our expectations were confirmed by the 2008 crash, we published a new manifesto. It emphasized the psychic, social and economic divide resulting from 2008 – which was for us not merely a financial crisis, but a demonstration of the insolvent state of consumer-ism, implying the need to shift to what we began calling a contributory economy.
Over the course of those years, we focused not just on analysing and denouncing the limits of carelessness and neglect to which the conservative revolution and the generalization of systemic stupidity had given rise, but on proposing a pharmacological politics capable of reversing the effects of those technologies that had accompanied all these evolutions, by giving them the economic and geopolitical means to become ‘quasi-causes’, which in this case means to be capable of trans-forming facts into new laws and knowledge.
We affirmed, and we continue to affirm, that these economic and geopolitical means are clearly within reach for the European continent, and that the latter will survive as an actor involved in the global future only provided that it implements an alternative industrial politics, one capable of preserving its interests and those of the entire planet, instead of following the prescription of American ideologues as the European Commission currently does in suicidal fashion.
On 14 May 2011, I presided over a meeting of the Ars Industrialis board of directors. At the time, France was in pre-election campaign mode, and the two frontrunners were Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Before getting to the formal agenda, I opened a discussion on the economic and political situation, and, in relation to the latest news, I expressed my discomfort at seeing Strauss-Kahn riding around in a Porsche belonging to ‘Ramzi Khiroun, one of DSK’s communications gurus and closest followers’.25 My problem was not that it was a luxury car, but that it was a grotesque symbol of the most vulgar parvenus of ‘communication’, and in that way quite in keeping with Nicolas Sarkozy’s Rolex – and with Séguéla’s industrial destruction of dreams.
My comments produced a strong reaction from one of us, who objected that these issues were of no interest. Another invited me to temper my point of view, pointing out that this was really a private matter. The next morning, news broke of what would come to be called the Sofitel affair, which was also a private matter but quickly became public, because it was soon to become a legal matter.
Strauss-Kahn withdrew his candidacy. A primary was held through which it was determined that Hollande would be the candidate. In February 2012, we published a dossier on the Télérama magazine website, arguing that ‘the true issue of 2012 is 2017’.26 The theses developed there were taken up in 2013 in Pharmacologie du Front national, which Manuel Valls did not read.27 A week before Hollande’s election, 38 per cent of those polled stated that they were in agreement with the ideas of Marine Le Pen. With the publication of her book, this figure rose above 40 per cent.
In the summer of 2014, five months before the Charlie Hebdo massacre and in a social and political context that was becoming overwhelming and deleterious, I found myself retracing the steps that, long before my incarceration, had once led me to a psychiatric clinic in Loir-et-Cher: seriously depressed, I made the decision to consult the psychiatrist who had treated me in 1971, when, at the age of nineteen, I had a ‘psychotic episode’ – after which a psychoanalyst had sent me to this particular clinic for an apomorphine treatment for alcohol detoxification.
At the beginning of August, three weeks before the beginning of the fourth summer academy at Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, entitled ‘For a new critique of anthropology: dream, cinema, brain’, finding myself increasingly obsessed by death, that is, by what I projected as being my death, and by the latter as my deliverance, waking up every night haunted by this suicidal urge, I called, somewhat at random, this clinic where I had received treatment. I asked for urgent help, seeming, so I thought, to be suffering from some kind of early dementia, and succeeded in getting hold of a psychiatrist on duty who agreed to see me immediately.
I got into my car and drove the 200 kilometres that separated Épineuil from the La Chesnaie clinic, which I had not seen again after what had turned into sleep treatment and then into a course of psychotropic drugs. Early one morning in late autumn 1971, I had walked out of La Chesnaie and hitchhiked my way out of there, after a conversation with a patient made me realize that, if I didn’t leave, then, as had happened to him, I would still be there ten years later.
The doctor who saw me at La Chesnaie during the summer of 2014 went back to my file, listened to me, recommended I see the psychiatrist who had treated me in 1971, and prescribed an antidepressant called Laroxyl.28 Two months later, I made an appointment with my former doctor, who in 1971 had been quite young. He was now retired, but he would still give the occasional consultation.
He prescribed a fresh bottle of Laroxyl. I told him that, of course, I would take this antidepressant, which I clearly needed and which had allowed me to get some sleep, and that I had indeed come for that, too. But I added that I was worried that this pharmakon might prevent me from writing, that is, from working – that is, from treating myself. And I began to tell him how I had tried to treat myself in prison through this ‘technique of the self’ that we call writing, but also through reading – two practices of another pharmakon.
I began writing in prison, and I did so almost without being aware of it – feeling my way into the invention of a therapy that, fortunately, I could continue to practise after I was ‘levée d’écrou’ [taken off the prison register, that is, released], as they say in prison administration. What I am here calling ‘writing’ is not at all what, having arrived in prison, I believed in doing or wanted to do at the end of two or three weeks of incarceration, which consisted in a pathetic attempt to ‘do literature’.
During my adolescent years, in addition to playing the saxophone, writing poems and novels had been one of my unrealized dreams – or what we call fantasies. After arriving at Saint-Michel, I spent the first months trying in vain, and on countless pages now lost, to tell a story that never took any form other than the same fruitless effort to write.
This did, however, have the advantage of leading me to see that, ultimately, I had nothing whatsoever to say, nothing to tell or write to anyone else – not even to myself. Hence I began to learn the difficulty, the futility [vanité] and the necessity of writing, three moments that must be encountered in order to begin to write, by forgetting, in this confrontation with the difficult, the vain and the necessary, what we had started writing and would like to write.
My relationship to literature and to reading was thrown into complete disarray by this failure, which had nevertheless allowed me, while awaiting something better, to not feel totally stuck in the incredible void that opened up as the yawning gulf of my imprisonment. This eventually led me to read – to read with an intensity greater than I had ever imagined myself capable of, to the point that I would almost entirely become the texts that I was reading, eventually discovering that, despite so many readings I had believed I had previously undertaken, perhaps I had never before begun to read in actuality.29
Every evening, after my ‘bowl’, which happened around six o’clock, I read novels. Having come to understand the fact that I would not be a writer, parallel to the novels I read in the evening, in the morning I began to study, with an immense and increasing appetite, the works of poetry I have already mentioned,30 after closely rereading Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.
I wanted to know everything about linguistics. And finally, after having passed the special entrance exam for those who had not finished secondary school, I enrolled in this discipline at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, through the distance education programme – my teacher’s name was Nespoulous. By then, I had already abandoned my project to make linguistics, semiotics, poetics, narratology, textics,31 intertextuality or ancient or modern letters the main subjects of my studies: I had decided to study philosophy. That would be the path through which my adolescent dreams would be realized.
For I had understood, or believed I understood, that the question of language, in the golden silence in which I lived, had finally become my principal interest. I had begun to think that, rather than the signified/signifier pair, it was necessary to conceive and especially to practise what was then called the signifier [signifiant] (after Saussure, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and Barthes) as the tension between the insignificant and the non-insignificant. This later led me to translate ἀ-λήθεια (a-lētheia) by signi-ficance [signi-fiance], a significance making signs as non-insignificance, as coming out of [sortant] the insignificant, and as the extra-ordinary step out of [sort] the ordinary.
I had understood, or believed I understood, that all this, as a question of language, began with philosophy, which was, moreover, as this theory and this practice of significance after the insignificant, a primordial and constant issue for me, who, no longer speaking, found myself incessantly practising the soliloquy.
And from this fact, the phenomenological experience of the world in the absence of the world was also, first and foremost, that of language in the absence of speech. It seemed that all that remained for me, in the absence of the world, was the memory of the world and the mnesic, visual, sonorous, olfactory, tactile and verbal traces through which I kept it within me.
The question of language became that of these ghosts of which language in the absence of speech is the most common experience, and yet the most extra-ordinary, the most oneiric, the most noetic and the maddest. This is how I read Mallarmé, and how it would be necessary to interrogate Hölderlin, Nerval and all those madmen who would make philosophy think so much about the death of God – beginning with the solitary Nietzsche, obviously.32
The question of language – as the ordeal of insignificance and its continuation throughout the long history of the West as the accomplishment of nihilism, that is, as the destruction of all significance and the expansion of insignificance to the point of encompassing everything, up until the absence of epoch into which we were entering at the moment I was entering prison – was imposed in Greece, in Socrates, and in the trial of sophistry, itself stemming from a falling prey to literal grammatization that, nevertheless, lay at the origin of the new relation to language that appeared with the polis under the authority of what the Ionians had already named λόγος.33
Investigated as such, considered by philosophy as such, thematized by Plato in Cratylus, the question of language is decisively constituted beyond language and as the question of consistence in λόγος in Aristotle’s Analytics, on the way to becoming onto-theology, before it becomes the business of the grammarians (there is also an Indian grammar, which I was not aware of at that time), then of linguistics as ‘science of language’.
In the course of my experiments with reading, writing and meditating with language, with or without traces as the elementary condition of noesis, I discovered that the material and organological trace, spatializing the mnesic and cerebral temporal trace, is the condition of logical noesis, ‘for meditating without leaving any traces becomes evanescent’.34 Through these readings, temporalizing the space and the volume of letters read, and through the writings that I began to draw from these readings, as one draws a line in industrial design, which spatialized the time of my readings as retentions themselves literal, engaging me, without my perceiving it clearly, in a dialogue with myself – practising, in the manner of Bill Evans revisiting Thelonious Monk,35 a kind of re-recording of what thus becomes myself-an-other [moi-l’autre] – I parted ways with Saussure, the only theorist whom I had read prior to my stay at Saint-Michel, and threw myself into what Granel said was to be my philosophy of language (I was at the time studying Wittgenstein with Élisabeth Rigal and Granel, and he told me constantly to read Humboldt).
Michael [Michel] fights the diabolical dragon in the name of the crucified symbol. This is what onto-theology would soon become – the dramatization of this combat in which the forces of good and evil are opposed to one another. This is what I would reinterpret as the play of those tendencies referred to by Saussure as the diachronic and the synchronic, but which he does not approach as tendencies: he treats them as dimensions of a dichotomous methodology that will then become the structuralist method. In becoming a principle of method, the dynamic of what I here call transindividuation will be erased.
The signified/signifier pair, based on Saussurian thought, which had at first seemed so enlightening, gave way, after reading Derrida, to the question of the compositional relation between diachrony (or diabols) and synchrony (or symbols), constituting for psychic and collective individuals the dynamic of two transductively-linked tendencies: signi-ficance (sign-making) and in-significance (différance as indifference and the vanity of self-reference).
It soon became clear that these tendencies also lie behind Dionysos and Apollo, just as they organize the Freudian pairs, pleasure and reality and Eros and Thanatos, as well as Bergsonian dynamics. Studying the physics of order and disorder with Roger Cavaillès, it was not long before I conceived these tendencies in primordial relation to entropy and negentropy. And, upon reading On the Soul, the play of tendencies composing with and against one another finally became the question of noetic intermittence, that is, of what I have since called the allegory of the flying fish36 – of which the experience of language is one of the possible versions, and which made this pair of tendencies a question of rhythm.
Coming before linguistic questions, therefore, are the questions of noesis (of the noetic soul), of being, of its ‘logic’, that is, its categories, of rules of predication and of onto-theology, the latter being presented in Aristotle initially as the question of the ‘manifold ways that being expresses itself’ in the course of a noesis that is itself intermittent – all of this being reappropriated by Thomism and thereby rendered illegible: this is what Heidegger made it possible for me to understand.
I then began to devour the work of Pierre Aubenque,37 while following a course given by Annick Jaulin on Aristotle’s Analytics, Metaphysics and On the Soul – with the help of Hegel’s History of Philosophy.
I have already explained how the question of language began to take shape in the silence of this phenomenological laboratory that was my cell, and in the absence of all communicative practice, where, without respite, I experimented with the extremes of soliloquy while in the morning I read, after a poem by Mallarmé, Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and, in the evening, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
All this took on immense noetic proportions without my really being aware of it. The uninterrupted character of my tacit experience of language was like an alternately nocturnal and diurnal dream, which, projected through annotations, summaries and notebooks that I began to fill, traced its ‘guiding thread’ while following it out – trying to realize it, that is, to spatialize it, however locally. My cell was filled with traces: the books brought to me by Granel and that I received by mail, plus the notes and cards I produced and that accumulated on the floor of the cell.
This cell, within which I barely existed, allowed me to discover that to exist is not simply to subsist: it is to project oneself, through intermittences, towards consistences, inasmuch as any existence accedes to them by experiencing them [éprouvant] while being tested by them [éprouvée]. Ordinarily, the initial experience of consistences is through relations that may be filial, affectionate, familial or friendly, but that, after that, they are also experienced through all kinds of events, and as these very events.
Events form nodes in a process of transindividuation within which affects are produced (or what I call traumatypes and stereotypes).38 Affects of all kinds, on the occasion of which consistences are encountered, but also on the occasion of which and in the wake of which they are forgotten, repressed, denied – these affects fall within what Aristotle called φιλία (philia). But φιλία is not just, as is said all too often, friendship: as I learned from Jean Lauxerois in his translation of Book 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics,39 in Greek, friendship is φιλότης (philotēs), not φιλία.
I was deprived of such relations – but, through the annotations, commentaries and syntheses of my readings, I recounted the great texts that made me dream and that in this way amounted to another type of φιλία, and more precisely the φιλότης discussed by Peter Sloterdijk in ‘Rules for the Human Park’.40 This relation occurred inside an apparently sealed box, and this was possible, indeed, only because, exteriorizing what I was reading, I made it ek-sist, and hence made myself ek-sist, and as an other. This relation did possess, however, the power to go through walls, or to remove them – so much so that my cell became enormous, if not unlimited. Such was the madness that protected me from madness.
The noetic beings that we try to be all accede, precisely insofar as we are noetic, to such consistences, and always do so, more or less, in one way or another, through the innumerable occasions for it offered by knowledge – knowledge of living, doing and conceiving – so long as we do not prevent it, which is barbarism. The generalized proletarianization that is characteristic of the end of the Anthropocene when it becomes the age of disruption and the Entropocene, however, consists precisely in disintegrating and annihilating knowledge. Barbarism then becomes inevitable – and, along with it, so too do cowardice and submission of all kinds, including that of literary degeneration [déchéance], so well embodied by Saint Michel Houellebecq.
Cultures, and those who cultivate and frequent such consistences, follow various paths along which spirits arise, magical forces of the supernatural, the gods of antiquity, the God of the ‘people of the Book’, or of Buddhism, along with many other forms of spirituality. In ancient Greece, from the seventh century bce, the relation to the consistences engendered by λόγος is tragic – and it is Prometheus who establishes the lot of mortals.
The Latin words intellectus and spiritus translate the Greek νοῦς (nous), from which the term ‘noetic’ derives, which thus refers to both of these (at once intellectual and spiritual). This νοῦς, esprit, comprises these two dimensions, which with Kant become understanding and reason, as fundamental tendencies and conditions of the ‘faculty of knowing’, and it does so up until the Enlightenment, realizing itself as revolution – ‘French’ then ‘industrial’ – deifies Reason at the very moment when the latter becomes, with the birth of machinic capitalism, a ‘production function’, installing the tertiary retentions of what Guattari tried to describe as the asignificance of the ‘machinic unconscious’.41
Hence reason becomes ratio, conceived ever more exclusively as computation, and through that as this disinhibition that is then referred to as Progress, and which, today, at the end of the Anthropocene, in the age of disruption that turns it into an Entropocene, seems to exhaust all consistences (that is, all reasons for living, acting and hoping) in the growth of a desert where legal vacuums accumulate and prophets of doom proliferate.
From out of this nightmare comes the drought and the thirst from which emerges a new form of ὕβρις – terrible, suicidal, homicidal – which the political decay [déchéance] of the dreams of the left, turning into the nightmare of the deprivation of citizenship [déchéance de nationalité], can only aggravate to even greater extremes, leading to ever greater extremes on the side of ‘jihadists’, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of those, increasingly numerous, who take any opportunity to put their persecution of scapegoats into practice.
Disruption is also and above all what is today concretized in the life of everyone via the ‘data economy’, through which the five billion terrestrial inhabitants who have a mobile telephony subscription42 more or less unconsciously produce the traces and metadata through which they annotate themselves, enabling automated glosses to take over and short-circuit their protentional potentials – and, along with that, any interpretation, any individuation, any hermeneutics and any consistence, that is, any value.
When ancient Greece, which is pious, gives birth to philosophy by passing through the law-givers and founders of cities – poets, geometers and ‘physiologists’ discoursing on what remains and becomes what we today call nature, which they called φύσις (phusis) – consistences come to be considered as such, for themselves, and no longer in terms of spirits or gods.
This does not mean that this consideration, which is also called θεωρία (theoria), overthrows idols: the gods of Greece are precisely not idols. As we have seen with Alain Frontier, they are markers: those who mark the limits in and through tragic culture, cultivating the knowledge of its proper limits, and as the culture belonging to what Ruth Benedict and Eric Dodds will call ‘shame cultures’, cultures of what the Greeks called αἰδώς (aidōs)43 – which with monotheism will become ‘guilt cultures’.44
I began, in that cell, to trace back over the traces of the path that, starting from the hypokeimenon prōton (ὑποκείμενον πρώτον) and going through the primordial element first conceived by the Pre-Socratics as fire, air, water or earth, leads from ancient atomism to contemporary physics, passing through the Rules for the Direction of the Mind and the characteristica universalis before reaching those formalisms that are now increasingly algorithmic, and that automate the treatment of those ‘tags’ of every kind that are today’s ‘traces’. I methodically explored the landscapes of the life of the mind and spirit, into which I penetrated with the help of the academic institution and by taking notes, just as Malcolm X did thirty years earlier, and even D., almost forty years later.45
I annotated the books I read and I transferred these notes onto loose sheets that I ordered into folders, from which I made cards, which I synthesized. In other words, I reformulated them in the form of arguments that enabled me to take stock of what I had actually read, effectively read, to the extent that I was able to spatialize these arguments. I transformed everything that I read into writings that served me both as a way of preparing for my exams – since I had become what one calls a student – and as a way of annotating myself, in my turn, in order to seek out the other lying there, in front of me, or, rather, around me, literally roaming around, like a spirit, as a promise to come, as a protention of a possible future.
What I am here calling ‘the other lying there’ did not consist just in my notes taken from my readings. It was also the whole library itself (which my cell became), from which I discovered that, even before having read it, it had already framed and woven who I was, as my ‘already there’, as that ‘past that has always already preceded me’,46 the bifurcations produced by all these works having been incorporated and socialized, that is, transindividuated as realizations of those noetic dreams that became the Greek polis, the civitas of the Roman Empire, the Christianity of Saint Michael, modernity – until the epoch of the absence of epoch, as the nihilism that was the disembodiment and decomposition of all that this had been.
In the end, what I understood is that what I had effectively read was what I would write and would know how to write on the basis of what I had read (texts that also stemmed, already, from reading notes, from hypomnēmata, as I would later discover with Fouault47), and that I experienced firstly in a kind of dream. Hence, without being aware of it, without worrying about it, I began to write, in order to realize, in the space of dreams that I created during my readings, the dreams that those who wrote these books had countlessly realized, and which, for centuries, had responded amicably to each other, in the noetic crypt from which it is possible to escape only intermittently.
Words, of their own accord, are exalted in many facets, recognized as the rarest and most worthy for the mind, the centre of vibratory suspense; which perceives them independently from the ordinary sequence, projected, as on the walls of a cavern, as long as their mobility or principle lasts, being that part of discourse which is not spoken: all of them, before their extinction, being quick to take part in a reciprocity of fires, either at a distance or presented obliquely as a contingency.48
What I discovered, walking through the lettered traces of the world and from the language already there before me, is that, in these highly specific circumstances of being deprived of the presence of others, and in echoing what had been kept in my memory, existence could come to intensify itself to the extreme, and that it could do so in the direction of consistences.
Of course, this happened only at the limits of madness: as limits, and as the absence of all bouquets, these consistences of the (de)fault [défaut] that in ‘My Books Closed’ Mallarmé called a lack (a ‘learned lack’49) became alterities in the absence of any other, non-existent motives of the default of origin, that is, of primordial ὕβρις, forming stars in this perpetual night, constantly ‘transfigured’.
Hence I elaborated a method for living, existing and consisting in an infra-existence that still tended to appear, between these ‘four walls’,50 like a supra-existence. In addition to reading and synthesizing techniques that I began to punctuate with physical exercises on the floor of my cell, I adopted a daily programme to which I strictly adhered.
It was based on close rereading and rewriting – on a systematic practice of repetition.
After reading a text for the first time in a cursory way between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. – which I did after reading a poem at sunrise – I reread, at 9:00 a.m., the text I had read the previous day, while going back over the notes I had taken the day before, where I would generally notice interpretative gaps that were, in truth, often the beginning of what I now call experiences of ‘surprehension’.51 The next day, at around 2:00 p.m., I would prepare a synthesis – after a cup of Ricoré chicory coffee and a Gauloises cigarette.
Through these experiments with reading, writing, rereading and rewriting, I came to redefine the question of signi-ficance (of non-insignificance) as participating in what, in Meno, Socrates called άνάμνησις (anamnēsis). Proust, too, accompanied me along this path – in the evenings, just as Mallarmé did in the mornings. άνάμνησις is the fruit of a disturbance [trouble], which Socrates called άπορία (aporia), through which, as affect, the set of circuits of transindividuation emerging from an epistemic collective individuation (for example, geometry) re-presents itself in its very presence – in its Anwesen, as Heidegger will say.
The Anwesen of άνάμνησις, and, more generally, of any signi-ficance, of any moment through which what signifies [fait signe] arises from the insignificant, constitutes the salience (I borrow this term from René Thom52) provoked by a catastrophe in transindividuation inasmuch as it reaches and affects the one in whom the sign is made. A catastrophe, in Thom’s theory of catastrophes, is a phase in a morphogenetic process.
Hence arise semantic storms – that is, conflicts of interpretation – through which the process of the collective individuation of a μελέτη (meletē, commonly translated by meditation, exercise or discipline) is reinvigorated through the one who undergoes the experience of άνάμνησις, hermeneutically reactivating circuits that are already constituted, circuits that had hitherto been thought to be well-known, well ‘understood’, and which, in this reactivation, and on the occasion of this hermeneutic conflict, once again become constituting, and reconstituting, sur-prising, and no longer simply understood: reopening a future.
This, however, is what has now mostly become an unfamiliar experience, one that is missing [fait défaut], failing to incite the work of opening towards that which is necessary.
My circuits are screwed up,
There’s some kind of build up there,
The current can no longer pass through.53
I assigned myself a μελέτη that, as a ‘technique of the self’, defined for each day the hours at which, over the course of weeks and months, I invariably obliged myself to read, annotate, comment and finally write, and then to read again, which always sent me too quickly back to bed for a short night’s sleep. I got used to getting up early – with the return of the electric light in the early morning. The prison practice was indeed to turn the lights out pretty early and turn them back on at 5:00 a.m. – but all that must since have changed, unfortunately for the inmates, after television sets were placed in cells.
Apart from a few letters in which I ventured to interpret what I had read, and that I sent to Granel and some of the distance education professors, the little texts that I was producing had no readers other than myself. I wrote them only to reread them, to reduce them, to turn them into commentaries, then commentaries on commentaries, increasingly compacted, which were ultimately organized in large folders that no one would ever read – but which still drive everything I write thirty-five years later, and which are sitting right now, covered with dust, above my desk.
During this epokhē of my life, I still did not know that all these amounted to tertiary retentions that I was generating on the basis of the secondary retentions from which my memory was woven: I had not yet read Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.54 And, in reading ‘The Origin of Geometry’ for the first time, and Derrida’s introduction to it,55 I did not yet understand all the issues that linked this text to what would become the latter’s central problematic in Speech and Phenomena.56
It was not until about 1987, when I began to write the thesis that would form the origin of Technics and Time, that I discovered the key difference that Husserl posits between primary retention and secondary retention – whose stakes I have expounded upon many times, and will do once again here.
After Kant, Husserl posits that perception is temporal, and that, given that what is perceived is what is present, the temporality of perception requires that the sensible data that I retain in what I perceive (during what he calls impressions) be distinguished from the memories I have of previous perceptions: the latter are from the past, whereas what is perceived, and therefore present, and retained as such by perception, is not, unlike that which is past, the fact of a more or less imaginary reconstitution on the basis of memory traces.
Primary retention amounts to the material of perception, and therefore of the present inasmuch as it presents itself, which is to say that the present is a dynamic process of presentation. Secondary retention is that of memory, that is, of the past, of what is absent and represented by a dynamic process of imagination.
In my own analyses – which are very different from Derrida’s – I have tried to show that primary retention is always contaminated by secondary retention, because it is a selection, the criteria for which are, precisely, secondary retentions, but where these criteria are susceptible to being controlled through what I call tertiary retention. That primary retention is a selection is made clear by the fact that, if I reread a text a second time, I do not ‘primarily’ retain exactly the same thing: what I retain depends on what I am capable of retaining, and this capacity is constituted by secondary retentions, that is, by my past.
As for tertiary retention, this is what makes it possible to control the play of primary and secondary retentions, and to control this play in terms of selection, either to critique this play by spatializing it – precisely in the form of tertiary retentions (this is what I did while I was taking notes) – or in order to certify a particular path of reasoning, such as, for example, in the case of the protogeometer evoked in ‘The Origin of Geometry’, or, thirdly, to manipulate the processes by which secondary retentions lead to the selection of primary retentions. This is the accusation that Socrates makes against the Sophists (in a completely different language, of course), and it is how I argued, in ‘To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us’, that Le Lay has turned television into an industrial activity generating a ‘new form of barbarism’ – which is what I was teaching my students at the Université de Compiègne on 11 September 2001.
In this cell of Building A at Saint-Michel – from out of which, at the beginning of 1981, I had to shift my books, notebooks and cards, moving them to a cell in Building F of the Muret detention centre – the following process was underway:
Although when I was an inmate I did not yet have the Husserlian concepts of retention and protention at my disposal, I was already trying to describe reading as an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read. In so doing, I took inspiration from the following analysis by Proust:
In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader. Besides, the book may be too learned, too obscure for a simple reader, and may therefore present to him a clouded glass through which he cannot read.57
I did not know then how to theorize the production of the protentions that resulted from this discipline so that motives of reading and writing are projected that in the end generate the book currently being read, generated by someone who does not just try to understand [comprendre] what it means [signifie], its significance [significations], but to ‘surprehend’ what it is that creates signs [fait signes], which is its meaning [sens], this reader trying, therefore, to surprehend this meaning in himself or herself, which Socrates called ‘thinking for oneself’ and which ‘you, reader’,58 as Calvino writes, can find only as he-the-other or she-the-other.
The creation of the meaning [faire sens] of what is significant in the sense of being not insignificant is what – in the politeia, then in the Republic of Letters, and eventually in the French Republic dreamed of by Condorcet and concretized with Jules Ferry as the Third Republic – as protentional projection, can create an epoch for a community of readers. And this is what is no longer accessible to Florian.
What follows after this is the rise of cinema, which Jean-Michel Frodon called ‘national projection’ (I am not sure that he really understood the full implications of what he was saying59), which then turns into control by electromagnetic broadcast, as Adorno and Horkheimer saw. And this is what, without an epokhal redoubling worthy of the name, that is, without a thought worthy of the name and of the epoch, bears within it the new form of barbarism, where, today, we have a clearer understanding of what this entails.
When, in the early autumn of 2014, the doctor prescribed for me a new bottle of Laroxyl, I told him of my concern that the effects of this pharmakon may diminish my writing activity. I explained to him that my writing was a way of treating myself, and that if there was an aspect of this care that probably maintained my psychic suffering, nevertheless I cultivated the latter in such a way that it could be transformed into a noetic culture capable of sublimating it – which must be regularly practised, just like physical culture, and practised as a rule, in the broadest sense of this word, which therefore also implies a meletē.
I needed this suffering in order to transform it into ‘hypomnesic tertiary retentions’, which, in the form of what we refer to as books, participate in the writing of new circuits of transindividuation, through which I ek-sist by creating signs [faisant signes] pointing towards, as potential collective protentions, that which consists, and consists on the basis of those countless pharmacological shocks retained in the accumulation of tertiary retentions.
It is, therefore, through these tertiary retentions, producing our own primary, secondary and tertiary retentions and protentions, that we individuate ourselves psychically and collectively. And we do so because concealed within them are pharmacological shocks, which are retained, just as in the jar of Pandora. These shocks may be more or less ancient, and, because they remain active, they may return to affect us – so that we ourselves, being disturbed [troublés], become troubling. In being affected, we become ‘affecting’, and this affection is precisely that in which the profound dynamic of transindividuation consists.
Since the end of September 2014, I have had regular discussions about these questions with this doctor, who has played his part by continually reminding me of what is clinically known about depression, delirium and madness, while listening attentively to what, in the contemporary context of negative protention, of disruption and of the Anthropocene, I have stubbornly insisted on reminding him with respect to thinking and what fundamentally ties it to ὕβρις, to μωρία (moria), to μανία (mania) and to everything we refer to as madness, and equally to the pharmakon that treats, cares and heals, but which also destroys, and which, as an agent of the delinquere that constitutes the lot of the exosomatized beings that we are, is at stake in all moral suffering as in every joy.
The essence of these ‘therapeutic conversations’, as the doctor referred to them, dealt with (from my perspective as the patient) what there is that is common, ordinary, banal and sometimes extraordinary in madness, inasmuch as it is precisely not what psychiatry calls, for example, depression [mélancolie]. Hence this bore a resemblance to what the psychotherapist would refer to as ‘literary melancholy’, but hence also, when I discussed the great bifurcation to come, when I spoke of a shift, and of its cost as generating so many negative protentions and consequently leading to violence of all kinds, the psychotherapist would respond by describing it as my ‘pessimism about the future, typical of depression’ – which, if I understand correctly, would then no longer be in any way literary.
I replied by saying that the issue is the containment of ὕβρις, which makes us suffer insofar as we are or try to be – whether we know it or not. We all cultivate a way of containing this ἐλπίς to which ὕβρις always also amounts, and which, when it becomes a negative ἐλπίς engendered by knowledge of the negativity of the pharmakon, requires a therapeutic culture of the positivity of this pharmakon, a therapeia that takes care, and that, treating and healing while inscribing circuits of transindividuation, generates positive collective secondary protentions.
Today, however, melancholy and more generally all forms of ὕβρις are shaped by the retentional and protentional specificities of the pharmaka of the absence of epoch, and this absence of epoch produces disruption inasmuch as these automated retentions and protentions are treated by algorithms operating more quickly than any form of care. Because of all this, madness, which becomes ordinary and general, is today a question that is inextricably medical, economic, juridical, political and industrial, that is, technological.
To confront this crucial fact, a fact that is more than just epokhal because it paves the way either for a new era or for the end (this is the issue of ‘the turn’), Freudian theory and its Lacanian extensions are no longer sufficient. This is what, to treat myself, to take care of myself, I argued during these therapeutic conversations, and this is what I will come back to at the end – in order to conclude by opening up a dialogue, unfortunately posthumous, with Bernard Maris.