The knowledge of death1 is the archi-protention that constitutes Dasein: death is what Dasein expects throughout everything it does – but most of the time without being aware of it. This primordial protention conditions and configures all other protentions, that is, the entire relationship to the future. It inscribes them on the path of the vanishing point that it constitutes as this irreducibly thanatological perspective, but this knowledge is also and constantly concealed by processes of denial of all kinds, where all of this falls under what Heidegger calls Besorgen (busyness, pre-occupation).
The whole existence of Dasein is a way of both knowing this thanatological perspective and refusing to know it, that is, of disavowing it [denier]. All of Dasein’s knowledge is in this sense a différance. It is the existential analytic of Being and Time that inscribes this knowledge of the end – being towards death, Sein zum Tode – at the origin of the noetic soul, and as the default of origin, that is, as denial [dénégation].2 By returning to the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, I have endeavoured to show why and how this default of origin that is mortality is constituted as prostheticity, that is, exosomatization.
The fruit of this exosomatization is tertiary retention in all its forms, that is, technics in general inasmuch as it conserves and materializes an individual’s time in the form of traces – a spatialization of time, which is a différance and which allows the constitution of what Heidegger described as the past of Dasein, a past that Dasein has never lived but which it inherits as its ‘already there’, which also amounts to what Simondon called the preindividual funds [fonds préindividuel] of psychic and collective individuation.
It is in terms of the archi-protention of the end that Dasein interprets the tertiary retentions accumulated as the already there – even though most of the time Dasein does not interpret this already there: it remains content merely to reproduce it through its ‘busyness’, its pre-occupation, its Be-sorgen, and to do so as the practical denial of this end. Nevertheless, intermittently, and in going over tertiary retentions that, instead of repeating, it interprets, on the basis of which it inscribes a difference, Dasein projects its protention of all protentions, its end, and its end insofar as it is indeterminate – insofar as it is incalculable and where, reaching it, no one can take Dasein’s place.
This path towards its end is therefore what generates a bifurcation – that is, what inscribes a negentropic difference beyond pre-occupation, Be-sorgen, and does so as the singularity of a care, Sorge. Such a care is a knowledge, which means that it itself becomes transmissible, interpretable and fruitful through new negentropic différances that we must here also and more specifically describe as neganthropic.
Nowhere does Heidegger integrate the negentropic conception of life. Nor does he explore the metaphysical consequences of the new consideration of the cosmos to which the theory of entropy gives rise – even though the end of Dasein, its death, is the return of its body ‘to dust’, that is, to a mineral realm itself overwhelmingly subject to entropic becoming.
On the other hand, and above all, Heidegger does not investigate the protention of what happens beyond the end of Dasein in terms of what it means for the way that Dasein relates to this end: he does not question the care for what comes after the end, which, for example, makes us wonder about the future becoming of the universe, the solar system and the biosphere beyond our own end.
Until quite recently, beyond this archi-protention that is Sein zum Tode, there was, rooted in every noetic soul – that is, in every form of exosomatic, organological and pharmacological life – a more archaic and, as it were, ‘more primordial’ archi-protention than the thanatology of being for the end. This protention was being for life, and it posited that beyond my death, beyond the ‘instant of my death’, life would continue, that there would be descendants who succeed me, that a legacy would continue on that would make fruitful what I would myself have made fruitful and thus brought to life – so that I would, then, not have lived for nothing and not have died in vain.
In our time, at the end of nihilism, of which the capitalism of the death drive is the fulfilment in and through disruption as the radicalization of the Anthropocene, this absolutely positive archi-protention that is the affirmation of life itself – and the one that variously but jointly animated Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud (for whom the life drive expresses and constitutes the first and last meaning of Eros, which incessantly composes with Thanatos in exosomatization) and, indeed, many others – this absolutely positive archi-protention has turned into an archi-protention that, if not purely negative, is at least tragically interrogative: ‘Will life continue after I’m gone? For how long?’
Such a reversal is what occurs when Neganthropos discovers that, as Anthropos, and through its anthropic activity, it massively and irreversibly increases the entropy that, in the biosphere, it had been concerned with minimizing [économiser], that is, reducing, deferring [différér], and doing so through noetic différance, that is, as knowledge – of how to live, do and conceptualize. It discovers that it has destroyed its knowledge [savoir], that its life has thus lost all flavour [sans saveur], and that, by this very fact, the future of life in all its forms has been jeopardized.
It is this discovery – which is the result of both the so-called ‘death of God’, that is, the domination of calculation, and the discovery of entropy made possible by the steam engine – which has precipitously increased the rate of entropy in the biosphere, leading Lévi-Strauss to refer, at the end of Tristes Tropiques, to ‘entropology’.3 And this is what we think, along with Florian, and in fact all of us, whether we want to or whether we don’t: we have compromised the future of life and we are threatening our descendants.
But at the very moment when we think this, when we say to ourselves that this positive archi-protention that we all share of a life after ours has become the negative protention of the end of every form of life after our death, we all, all of us except Florian, we all at the same time continue to deny this thought, which thus becomes our unthought. But if we thus deny and ‘unthink’ this thought, it is because such an archi-protention is literally unbearable [insupportable]. And as long as it is unbearable, as long as it remains unsupported, it cannot support our existences by constituting the ὑποκείμενον πρώτον (hypokeimenon prōton).
Such an archi-protention, however, is what results, on the one hand, from the second law of thermodynamics, and, on the other hand, from the fact that the Anthropocene has amounted to an astounding concentration and acceleration of the local effects of this second law within the biosphere. The anticipation of these consequences necessarily leads to a negative collective protention. Unless it becomes the object of new cares, that is, new knowledge, both theoretical and practical, such negative collective protention can only drive us mad.
Without such knowledge, this negative protention – whether we deny it, as most of us do most of the time, or whether we declare it, as Florian exemplifies, but where this is also expressed through forms of behaviour that stem from negative sublimation, which is itself the outcome of this negativity – is bound to produce a kind of cosmic panic at the scale of the biosphere, a biosphere that is suffering the consequences of the entropic becoming of the universe in the Anthropocene era, that is, the era of negligent carelessness [incurie], the era of the absence of care. On the horizon of this negligence, and without a highly improbable jumpstart [sursaut], many scientists predict that the collapse of the Anthropocene may only be decades away.
It is striking to note here that, with the exception of Bergson, the consequences stemming from the law of entropy – as revealed by thermodynamics, itself emerging from the development of the machine, which produced a sudden increase in the local entropy rate in the biosphere – failed to be drawn by so-called ‘continental’ philosophy, and more particularly ‘French’ philosophy. In addition to the silence of phenomenology on these questions, Derrida says nothing about it, and nor does Foucault, while Lyotard may occasionally do so but only in passing. In some respects, Deleuze and Guattari do refer to these questions, but via dissipative structures and chaos theory.
The forgetting of these questions clearly stems from the denial highlighted by the existential analytic as constitutive of what I myself analyse in terms of the intermittent condition of noesis – something that afflicts this existential analytic itself. We will see that this forgetting stems more profoundly from a forgetting of the pharmakon and the consequences of the pharmacological situation of exosomatization in which noetic life consists, and that this strikes Derrida himself, at the very moment when he tries to think forgetting as such by deconstructing the deconstruction that Heidegger called the ‘forgetting of being’.
We have seen4 that the madness to which today’s extreme demoralization leads is expressed by denial of all kinds, cloaked in statements either pessimistic or optimistic. We see now that all this stems from a more profound denial, on which neither philosophy nor psychoanalysis has ever really reflected.
The positive collective protentions from which epochs are formed are conditioned by the archi-protention of a life yet to come for descendants: this is the unconditional affirmation of a life after my death, not as immortality, but as the preservation of negentropic possibility. In exosomatization, it is knowledge that constitutes such a possibility, but where this knowledge is pharmacological, that is, where it can turn into its opposite. And in the Anthropocene, the highly entropic automatisms this knowledge generates lead to its disintegration.
This disintegration is the vanishing point of the moral philosophy that we are trying here to conceive as a way of responding to questions raised by Keynes and so many others (including Georges Friedmann and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen), and as articulations between the market economy and the libidinal economy. The moral dimension of economics and the economic dimension of morality lie on the horizon of works as diverse as those of Adam Smith and Karl Polanyi – provided that we are willing to reinterpret them from the perspective of the only noetic dream possible today: the Neganthropocene whose possibility arises from out of the nightmare of the Anthropocene and disruption.
It is a question of revisiting the questions of morality and exchange by reconsidering the market and libidinal economies from the perspective of a life drive that, economically bound, becomes the key dynamic element, not just of a bio-economy, which would be an economy of negentropy, but of a neganthropology, that is, an economy of exosomatization – as Georgescu-Roegen allows us to think it.
Faced with the fears expressed by Keynes, Freud, Dostaler, Maris and so many others before5 and after6 them, faced with the terrible ‘negative collective protention’ expressed by Florian, the overwhelming tendency is towards denial: it seems practically impossible to live in awareness of the immense dangers that humanity is now courting – we find ourselves paralysed. We try to think of something else, to hold onto that portion of energy we need just to live our everyday life.
Just as after Fukushima a syndrome erasing the memory of the catastrophe appeared in Japan, increasing the likelihood of its repetition, or of something even worse,7 so too deniers of all kinds proliferate through the effect of this psychic defence mechanism that is self-deception and a kind of lying to oneself, which the immense pressures of ideological bombardment attempt to consolidate and reinforce, by which it is turned into diverse forms of cowardice.
In the absence of epoch, in the absence of positive collective protention, everyone more or less effectively cultivates this kind of lying to oneself. This gives rise to a particularly pathetic symptom of demoralization: denying demoralization itself. This was already dramatized by Alain Resnais in On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), where all the characters are depressed and all of them deny being so, such as Camille: ‘Depressed, me? Pfff…anything but!’ All but one, Camille’s interlocutor Simon, who is in love with her because she is depressive like him, that is, for the same reasons as him, and who tries to make her recognize these reasons, if not know them.
This denial of depression from within depression is both psychological and socio-economic, and believes it can justify itself from the side of economic and political power by declaring that it has the goal of ‘supporting the morale of markets’ and ‘investors’. This denial, however, is the very thing that continues to feed depression, and to feed it more than ever – and to do so on the scale of whole countries, about which we act as if ‘everything is going fine, Madame la Marquise’,8 which nobody believes, but which many want to hear, while nevertheless finding these lies shameful and scandalous.
This is so because both psychic individuals and collective individuals are split: one part wants to hear the opposite of what the other part knows and tries to say and to make heard. This is what since Freud has been called Spaltung (splitting), which opens up the possibility of lying to oneself, that is, of the denial by one part of the self of what another part of the self knows.
Such splitting is also the starting point of any moral philosophy, since it establishes the bipolarity that cuts across both psychic and collective individuation, binding them to one another. Because it may lead to denials that threaten the unity of the psyche, this splitting can also drive us crazy: it was by starting from splitting that Freud tried to think psychosis.
As the deniers that we all tend to become in order to defend our psyche, and so as not to completely exhaust our ‘morale’, what we do consists in also and firstly denying the absolute need to think afresh – this necessity to which Dostaler and Maris invite us at the end of their work.9 For thinking is painful: when it involves an authentic noesis, which happens only intermittently, it inevitably leads to questioning the foundations of one’s own life.
By refusing to think afresh (anew, otherwise) in the Anthropocene, and through the denial that this contains and that justifies this refusal and leaves us lost in disruption, we are courting disaster. To think in such conditions, and to think such a contemporary condition, inasmuch as it sets up a vast denoetization, is therefore and above all to think [penser] and to think care-fully [panser] these conditions themselves: it is to try to think, and think care-fully, the necessity of this process of denial.
Denial – which organizes noetic life in general as it confronts the fact of the relation to the end, and which is borne by a more profound denial of the exosomatic and pharmacological situation as it poses a specific problem of ‘entropology’, and such that it requires a neganthropology – is what professional deniers systemically and systematically exploit. And they do so, at least in the short term, inasmuch as they are caught up in their own denials about their own long term, believing that it is wholly within their interests to stir up obstacles to thinking and caring newly and otherwise.
To think and to care today, in the exceptional circumstances that have been imposed precisely in this regard, is to try to combat at all costs the deeper disavowal on which these denials are built, and which is in truth constitutive of ὕβρις itself (and as the denial of ὕβρις itself). And this is the way to combat the consequences of disavowal – which are the denials themselves, inasmuch as they are all tied to cowardice. As such, this is a question of the moral philosophy of the ‘moral being’, who possesses a noetic soul insofar as this refers to the soul of a non-inhuman being.
To think by caring [penser en pansant], in other words, is to have the courage to think, to counter this cowardice that prevents thinking – and that does so within thinking itself, which means that it is firstly to think (and to think care-fully) cowardice as such, inasmuch as it is something from which there is no escape. It is to conduct, by all means possible, this fight that is firstly with oneself – and by all means that can re-establish desire, hope, trust, courage and therefore reason (for hope) in the face of what seems above all to make all of these impossible.
This impossibility that must be overcome, this impossibility in which the only possible possibility is the impossible, is the bifurcation that must give rise to the Neganthropocene from out of the Anthropocene, and it is a question that is simultaneously and inextricably political, economic and epistemic. It is epistemic to the highest degree, that is, to the point where a new era is initiated, bearing other epochs, themselves emerging from new conditions of epokhality established by this era, and hence discovering new consistences, Inshallah.
This is what is most urgent, the real ‘state of emergency’, and it is what is denied at the highest levels, in particular as the denials and lies of the state – which everyone feels but without having a clear idea of how to describe this feeling – and which amounts to the height of carelessness.
The process of disinhibition began from the very first moments of modernity, and amounted to an incredible dream, but the effects of this dream would begin to accumulate and be systematically realized from the onset of the Anthropocene, only to be radicalized by disruption. At the end of this process of disinhibition, the dream seems to have turned into a nightmare, and so the defence mechanism of generalized denial tries to blind itself to the obvious, from high to low, both in ‘France from below’ [France d’en bas] and at the ‘highest levels’. Those on these ‘highest levels’ believe they will be able to seduce ‘France from below’, but the latter, on the contrary, and for this very reason, despise them even more. And so this generalized denial continues, despite the parrhēsia of a few.
Through denial, we, the demoralized that we all more or less remain, nevertheless try to keep sleeping – and to do what accompanies it: to keep dreaming – but we find ourselves sleeping and dreaming less and less. Meanwhile, other deniers, the professionals, maintain this bad sleep haunted by dreams that are less and less noetic: the professionals of denial deny themselves the noeticity of dreams in order to keep economic or political power, and, as the power over the power of dreaming, to pervert it, and, ultimately, to annihilate it by disintegrating it – and, along with it, any horizon of promise worthy of hope.
It is within this state of negligent carelessness that Florian and his generation find they have become incapable of dreaming: deprived of a place in the future, deprived of a right and an ability to create a place for themselves, deprived of the knowledge that we no longer know how to transmit to them because we no longer know how to live, deprived of the possibility of being the future that they alone can incarnate, they can no longer undo these denials upon denials that may be involuntary for some but are nevertheless programmed by others – making perfectly visible to them the negligence involved in what some claim to be untreatable [impansable].
Engendering a generalized cowardice from which no one completely escapes – it functions both as an epidemic and as an omerta – this generalized denial raises, as never before, the question of courage: of the courage of truth, of which parrhēsia is thus, according to Foucault, the first resource, and of the courage of truth that is not just being-towards-death as the archi-protention of the existential analytic, but the absolute danger that Anthropos has become in the cosmos, whose becoming is the slope on which courage becomes the force affirming a future that pushes back up this slope – against becoming, right up against it [tout contre lui].
It was Nicolas Sarkozy who installed government by systemic stupidity, and he did so at the level of the presidency of the French Republic – a governance consisting essentially in encouraging regressive processes, of which his successor’s governance by lying was a frightening escalation. Lying is obviously a regression – towards minority, that is, into infantilization. We have already seen how much this has to do with the promise and with the dream. It is this obviously regressive character of lying that lies on the horizon of Kant’s famous essay on the ‘right to lie’.10
Lying introduces into the noetic soul – which must always produce its unity – not just a split, but a divorce with itself.11 When heads of state indulge in such cowardice, they inevitably generate a collective madness that usually begins by turning against the heads of state themselves. Given the position these figures occupy within transindividuation, such cases are particularly harmful. This harmful power then appears to be the expression of power itself, which thereby finds itself inherently discredited.
Analysing and describing individual and collective regressive processes is always a delicate matter: when people who are regressing are told about their regressive tendencies, they generally regress even more – and they become aggressive. Moreover, this is a process from which no one escapes, precisely because it lies at the root of denial itself, which is also the ordinary mode of functioning of transindividuation.
Anyone who tries to analyse regression and its denials may be tempted to believe that doing so shelters them from its effects, that it sets them apart from the crowd. If this is what they believe, it is because they do not see that, in the no-win scenario in which exosomatization ultimately consists, and the ὕβρις that it provokes and that provokes it in return, regression is constitutive of noetic life: it inhabits it, and hence it is never simply a matter of denouncing it. It is a matter of thinking and caring about it [panser], and firstly of thinking care-fully of and by oneself.
Because it constitutes the noetic life of which it is in this way a ‘condition of impossibility’, regression always ends up denoetizing noesis itself, if only by turning it into the ‘well-known’ through which knowledge [savoir] and savours [saveurs] become clichés and hackneyed expressions. Hence it is that noesis is intermittent, and that education, attention-formation, culture and civilization all amount to systems and apparatuses [dispositifs] whose aim is to struggle against this regression. The latter, however, always returns, and accompanies the ‘revenance’ of the spirit like its shadow, to the point that education, attention-formation, culture and civilization can be made to serve regression at the very moment when they believe they are fighting against it: such is the ‘mortality of civilizations’ upon which Valéry meditates in 1919 in ‘The Crisis of the Mind’.12
It was the denial of regression itself and of the complicity that it so often induces among those it affects – as an anti-noetic, highly mimetic epidemic – that drove Marie-Noëlle Lienemann and Paul Quilès to take France Télévisions to court over a programme called Le Jeu de la mort. This show recreated the Milgram experiment13 with the goal of highlighting the degree to which television demoralizes viewers, not just by showing them degrading images but by leading them to identify with the televisual apparatus itself (thereby pursuing Milgram’s hypothesis a step further), and, through it, with the viewers selected as part of the ‘games’ of reality television – where they lose their dignity.14
In March 2010, Quilès defended their lamentable action, which he and Lienemann felt was necessary, by claiming that with this programme public broadcasting had gone a step too far, that it had crossed boundaries: ‘There are limits to what should be shown – even in the name of worthy intentions – on this powerful medium that is television.’15 On the basis of such a placatory discourse, which consisted in concealing the fact that television is constantly crossing boundaries (especially when it is not part of the public service) without Quilès or Lienemann or anyone else being bothered by it, these two ‘elephants of the PS’16 brought to an end, through the threat of a trial, and therefore by intimidation, the public debate that France Télévisions had been courageous enough to want to open up.
In so doing, they intimidated or intended to intimidate all those who would like to combat the degrading state of affairs that offends youth who have themselves become incapable of dreaming, and incapable of being attracted by the solicitations of false ‘idealizations’. Quilès and Lienemann did not allow them to occupy the position that the programme was attempting to set up so as to provoke a shock in public opinion through a kind of televisual parrhēsia. They failed to recognize the courage of these filmmakers who were creating this dream of a public television service that would be thought-provoking and that, in so doing, would be care-ful [panserait]: they took advantage of what were no doubt the programme’s weaknesses in order to muddy the waters, or, as we say in French, pour noyer le poisson, ‘to drown the fish’.17
Bullying and intimidation is what, by means of fear – and through the cowardice it provokes – accompanies and reinforces the denial that afflicts the state or the party.18 We have witnessed the way in which pressure and intimidation continue to be used against all those who would dare to follow the examples of whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Denis Robert,19 and the way in which Jérôme Kerviel was turned into a scapegoat, which in this case means a ‘fall guy’,20 after having been chewed up and spat out by his superiors. We have also seen how laws have been implemented to reinforce this power of intimidation against the parrhesiasts of our time.
In fact, over the course of history, parrhēsia is reconfigured as the stage of a regime of veridiction according to the configurations of denial to which it is exposed – and which are conditioned by the state of exosomatization, the organological arrangements produced by this state and the positive and negative pharmacological effects that unfold as a result. An organology of parrhēsia in the epoch of networks, platforms and algorithms is clearly required, and a parrhesiastic right should be allowed to emerge.
Today, all this must be situated within the cosmic locality that is the biosphere, where the ‘struggle’ against entropy occurs in an Anthropocene in disruption that is itself highly ‘entropogenic’ and where denial strikes the industrial democracies, and particularly France, with unprecedented vigour. Consequently, the regressive tendencies that democracy fights against, and that constitute it as the problem of noesis itself, seem to be set free thanks to the effects of panic, the symptoms of which are all those forms of madness that we have referred to as ordinary, extraordinary and reflective.
When, on the evening of the first round of the 2012 presidential election, Eva Joly was overtaken by Marine Le Pen, leading the former to declare that the result achieved by the National Front represented an ‘indelible stain on democratic values’, her reaction stemmed from a fundamental denial with respect to the real: it stemmed from not wanting to know what was going on in the world in which she lived, or the immense suffering provoked by this denial. Since she did not know how to respond, she turned those who voted for the National Front into scapegoats for democracy, responsible for its own negligent carelessness.
This practice of scapegoating, in which she claims to be the one denouncing the scapegoating of the opponent who beat her, is one case among many of the general regression afflicting a French democracy that is running out of steam.21 This case raises the question of democracy as such, of the regressive temptations in the name of which it is always attacked by its opponents, as well as the question of the status of courage and truth in the democratic exercise in general, and in our absence of epoch in particular.
In The Courage of Truth, Foucault recalls that Plato effects a reversal in the sense of parrhēsia as true discourse ‘in the form of philosophy as the foundation of the politeia, [which] can only eliminate and banish democracy’.22 ‘Democracy cannot appeal to true discourse.’23 In the Greek age, democracy – of which Solon, along with Cleisthenes, was one of the founders, Solon whom the Athenians treated as mad when he denounced Pisistratus24 – falters on the question of what Foucault calls ethical differentiation. The latter is the foundation of parrhēsia insofar as it constitutes the courage of truth, which is at bottom always wounding, because it calls into question the metastabilized processes of transindividuation that it, precisely, destabilizes:
And if the democratic institutions are unable [according to Plato, then Aristotle] to make room for truth-telling and get parrhēsia to function as it should, it is because these democratic institutions lack something. And […] this something is what could be called ‘ethical differentiation’.25
The ethical differentiation that distinguishes the one who has the courage to speak the truth – at the risk of wounding and of being wounded in return – is what dares to oppose accepted discourse and other forms of rigidified speech [langues de bois]. ‘Aude, dare, dare to know,26 and hence dare to oppose the denial of those who do not want to know, beginning with you yourself’: such is the moral maxim that everyone should take on wherever it is a question (let’s not mince words here) of ‘saving the world’, that is, of overcoming a danger quite without precedent. And to do so, we must act while caring [en pansant]. And to do so, we must ‘try to live’,27 that is, to think.
According to Plato, as according to Aristotle, in democracy, dominated as it is by an essential demagoguery, the expression of courage tends always to lose out. It is this that will lead to the regression of parrhēsia itself. And it is an ethical weakness of democracy, insofar as it is tied to the impossibility of democracy giving voice to ἦθος each time that truth speaks in the city:
if philosophical discourse is not just a moral discourse, it is because it does not confine itself to wanting to form an ēthos, to being the pedagogy of a morality, the vehicle of a code. It never poses the question of ēthos without at the same time inquiring about the truth and the form of access to the truth which will be able to form this ēthos, and [about] the political structures within which this ēthos will be able to assert its singularity and difference. Philosophical discourse […] exists precisely in […] the necessity […] of this interplay: never posing the question of alētheia without at the same time taking up again, with regard to this truth, the question of politeia and the question of ēthos. The same goes for politeia, and for ēthos.28
But what does ἦθος mean? In Protagoras, ἦθος designates the place of beings endowed with artifices, beings who are mortal, exosomatized, and who must constantly interpret this condition, that is, their place, their locality29 within the cosmos, a locality that constantly shifts without ever leaving what, as αἰδώς and δίκη, marks out this place between the gods and the beasts.
If there can be – in the interpretation of this place, of this abode, of this ἦθος – a question of the courage of truth, it is because there is the possibility of a cowardice faced with the truth: a truth is always wounding, because it always consists in pointing out and fighting against some kind of cowardice, a cowardice that is always also provoked by the pharmakon when it becomes toxic, and which always leads to what Nietzsche and Deleuze call stupidity [bêtise].30
As for democracy – given that it is solely through the noetization of the demos, in law and in fact, and as far as it is possible, that the neganthropic future of Neganthropos can be preserved, that is, remain open, and as the Open31 – it is intrinsically exposed to the threat of regressing into cowardice (that is, into stupidity). To deny this fact is already to betray it: given that democracy opens access to the pharmakon to everyone, it is inevitably exposed to the risk of aggravating this pharmakon’s toxic potential. Such is the price of the correlative increase of its curative potential, that is, its noetic potential – its neganthropic potential.
Socrates and Plato denounce the toxicity of the pharmakon that is literal tertiary retention when, in the hands of the Sophists, it becomes a means by which the ambitious may acquire power. And they’re right to do so. It is in order to respond to this that Protagoras makes Prometheus, Epimetheus and Hermes the touchstones of these questions, who together suggest (each of these going hand in hand – just as ἀλήθεια, πολιτεία and ἦθος cannot work without working together) that it is the default of origin, and the ὕβρις or delinquere in which it consists, that is the challenge of democracy as of any form of πολιτεία. In this way, Protagoras defends democracy. And he’s right to do so.
For Protagoras, only democracy draws out all the consequences of the exosomatic situation that is the noetic condition – a situation whose toxicity must be fought against noetically, and a situation that inevitably leads to regression and to the denial of this regression. The toxicity of the pharmakon and the problem it poses to democracy more than to any other regime are what the deniers refuse to see, just as they refuse to see its role and its ambiguity, and their responsibility in this regard. In so doing, they ultimately reproduce all the philosophical clichés stemming from Platonism, fighting against Protagoras the democrat at the very moment they believe they are fighting for democracy – and they themselves thereby encourage regressive temptations and denials.
This is, for example, what Jacques Rancière does in Hatred of Democracy. In this work, Rancière rightly contests the arguments of Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki when, in The Crisis of Democracy,32 they argue that (in Rancière’s words): ‘good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life. […] What provokes the crisis of democratic government is nothing other than the intensity of democratic life.’33 In fact, this type of argument consists in striking down the minority in any real democracy, a minority who must therefore submit to ‘expert’ tutors in governance. This is what has ruined European democracy, for example, where Greece’s humiliating submission to such experts, who are in truth representatives of financial interests, was obviously used as a way of intimidating those democrats who opposed the conditions set by Greek and European creditors, creditors who were then bailed out by the 2008 ‘mutualization of losses’.
Combatting this anti-democratic argument leads Rancière to argue more generally that the denunciation of the regression borne by democracy as that which always threatens it is itself an expression of the ‘hatred of democracy’, and that, for example, Gustave Le Bon’s analyses of ‘crowd psychology’ are those of an inveterate reactionary and notorious enemy of the Paris Commune.34 In this way, it is also Freud who, having put Le Bon’s analyses at the heart of his own theory of the ego, comes to be classed among the ‘reactionaries’.35
That a hatred of democracy exists, and that it is at this moment particularly virulent, and even highly threatening, is not in doubt. But that democracy should be defended by denying its shortcomings is more than doubtful: it is unacceptable, in addition to being completely counterproductive – and firstly because these shortcomings are also and firstly those of noesis, and even of truth, as much as of ἦθος, insofar as noesis and truth ‘are’ only intermittently, and finally of the psyche itself, insofar as it is split and polarized by that indefinite dyad analysed by Simondon in L’Individuation psychique et collective.36
To refuse to consider these organological and pharmacological conditions of democracy, insofar as the latter grants legal rights to every psychic apparatus whomsoever he or she may be (provided, however, that they have passed through the skholeion37), is to preclude understanding how it is possible to produce, in an industrial fashion, regressive behaviours that affect, not only the ‘people’ conceived as the the whole of the poor (as Aristotle proposes to define the dēmos), as those who possess nothing,38 but non-inhuman beings in general, inasmuch as they regularly sink into shame and injustice, to the point of generating a ‘new form of barbarism’.
Like any regime of πολιτεία, democracy is exposed to what is originally the result of exosomatization and its shortcomings. Being founded on noetic sharing [partage noétique] (of which the ‘distribution of the sensible’ [partage du sensible] is one dimension39) as a condition of democracy itself, the trial and ordeal of these shortcomings is bound to be more radical. To deny this is to refuse to think.
Cynthia Fleury, whose enduring work also investigates courage, shows that, in the current, reputedly democratic world, it is the rule of law that is threatened by disindividuation, which obviously amounts to a regression.40 This means that it is the condition of democracy as well as of the republic, and ultimately of politics, which seems to dissolve with the dissolution of democracy itself insofar as it is no longer able to undergo the test of its intermittent, and therefore regressive, condition – which, consequently, it denies in a quite pathetic and pathological way. Conjoined to so many others already mentioned here, this denial casts upon it a dangerous discredit that combines with the denial and lies of the state we have already discussed.
This is now the case as never before, because disruption outstrips and overtakes law by imposing upon it a thousand states of fact through the creation of structural and chronic legal vacuums that concretize the Nietzschean desert. And after the culture industries come to be engaged in the production of industrial populism41 – which Lienemann and Quilès deny, joined in this in a certain way by Rancière – the ‘data economy’ comes to short-circuit individual protentions, replacing them with automatic protentions.
Democracy as defended by Protagoras is an experience of and experiment with the pharmakon – which, in the wake of tragic thought, puts this question at the heart of the life of the polis. And this means that there is a pharmacology of democracy, and a positive pharmacology of democracy as a therapeia for the politeia that is required by exosomatization when it becomes that of the letter, where this literal exosomatization is what enables the establishing of public law. To refuse to see these questions is to be lazy – intellectually as well as politically. It is to not think [penser] – so as to not care [panser].
Intellectual laziness – which has become colossal, seizing hold of every public debate and enlisting its own professional con artists [embobineurs], sometimes called ‘intellectuals’ – took a particularly visible, verbose and tacky form during the crisis triggered by what, in the wake of the law on ‘marriage equality’ [mariage pour tous], has become the ethical quagmire surrounding surrogacy [gestation pour autrui].
Insoluble and intractable in such conditions of unpreparedness, the immense questions opened up by this childbirth technology, which emerged from organological tinkering rather than from a scientific dream, have become the subject of countless denials with regard to the possibility of changing the reproductive conditions of non-inhuman beings, changes that signal yet more colossal possibilities of radically transforming the conditions of life on earth, an overview of which seems nowhere to be attempted, apart from in transhumanist discourse and at the ‘singularity university’.
Here more than ever, Mark Hunyadi has cause to denounce the atomization of ‘ethical themes’ that allows them to be adopted by what is ultimately a market, without any significant debate ever being held about an overall ethical perspective concerning what is being played out in what amounts to a new stage of exosomatization – where the process of selection (in which, like any organogenesis, it consists) is totally subject to market criteria.
Here as in everything that stems from the rapid advances in the technologies of life, from procreative technologies to synthetic biology, it is clearly a suffocating disruption that catches transindividuation off guard, so that any noetizing work with respect to this new possibility of adoption inevitably comes up short. With extreme brutality, this new possibility introduces into neganthropology the question of its différance in relation to negentropy, where the latter relates to life in general. Where endosomatic life evolves through a so-called natural selection process, exosomatic life must produce artificial selection criteria: those referred to as knowledge (of how to live, do, conceptualize and spiritualize), so that they guarantee a neganthropic differentiation.
From the suffocation of thinking produced by surrogacy [gestation pour autrui], it follows that biotechnological disruption, of which it is one of the most visible instances, seems to prohibit any critical work other than denunciation, rather than a thought that ruminates care-fully [pensée qui panse]. Opposed to this pseudo-critique is an adherence and legitimation (by ‘intellectuals’) that is just as flat, weak and ill-considered, and shockingly subject to the ‘tyranny of lifestyles’, which seems to have made ‘like/don’t like’ their mode of thoughtlessness.
As for the meaning of biotechnological disruption, in a context where exosomatization (stemming as it does from post-Darwinian artificial selection) is becoming a major business of tomorrow, the market has been able to impose its criteria upon exosomatic evolution, defining the non-inhuman not just in the field of conception or the specification of artificial organs, but also and especially in relation to the reproduction of life in general, in agriculture as in the culture of living tissues, not to mention the endosomatization of neurotechnological devices – of which ‘medicine 3.0’ is an early phase. As for the meaning of this new age of exosomatization, this has simply received no attention whatsoever.
The meaning of the biotechnological stage of exosomatization, of which surrogacy is but one of the consequences (dramatizing, via an irresponsible statement by the French government on this subject, the debate on ‘marriage equality’), is also something that is denied – precisely through the ‘tyranny of lifestyles’ that accompanies the legitimating discourse of the professional deniers of all kinds.
It is by occupying the theoretical vacuum generated by the suffocating aspects of biotechnological disruption, as well as the legal vacuum that is its inevitable correlate (for law itself needs criteria of veridiction that it lacks precisely because of the absence of sufficient theoretical elaborations), that transhumanism articulates a discourse that gives the appearance of being coherent, and of being the only viable position.
Scientifically inconsistent and economically disastrous, since it is based on a denial of entropy,42 this discourse is highly dangerous: just like the ‘jihadist offer’,43 it amounts to the offer proposed by ‘the Valley’ (as the disruptors refer to Silicon Valley), which tries to attract noetic souls in search of those pseudo-noeses so favoured by the neo-barbarians.
This state of affairs derives from all those countless denials that define our absence of epoch, which hence finds itself demoralized in almost every sphere, shocked by the brutality of the transformations presently underway, overwhelmed by the effects of disinhibition and paralysed in facing the wall towards which all this seems to be rushing headlong, without any prospect seeming to emerge that might resemble a ‘dawning awareness’ [prise de conscience] – which would in any case only resemble it, because it would also need to be a ‘dawning unconsciousness’ [prise d’inconscient].
These denials, however, are on the whole and as a whole founded on a more profound disavowal – it being understood that, for Freud, denial is itself what structures the psyche insofar as it is sexuated. Here, denial [dénégation] (Verneinung) is not the same as disavowal [déni] (Verleugnung). Denial as Verneinung is an expression of what is denied, which, being denied [nié], is also apprehended through this negation itself, albeit in the mode of a repression:
Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed.44
Verleugnung is of another order: it is the disavowal of castration, which itself presupposes the splitting of the ego, die Spaltung.
I maintain, however, that this disavowal is yet more deeply grafted onto what Engels and Marx show in The German Ideology, namely, that the organism is constituted organologically, but that it does not see this exosomatic condition that conditions both its soma and its psyche (and which, today, in the biotechnological disruption, modifies its germen).45
Engels and Marx show that the idealist vision by which these organs seem to arise from out of the mind [esprit], and as its inventions, in fact stems from an optical illusion that assumes that this mind would itself be immaterial, that it precedes its exosomatic materialization, and that it would be founded on and by ideas that would constitute the ‘conditions of possibility’ of exosomatization.46 The denunciation of this illusion might seem to be in opposition to the theory we have maintained here with respect to the noetic dream. But this is not the case: the dream becomes noetic only because it is exosomatized.47
The noetic dream is anything but immaterial: it is a psychomotor process that radically changes the trajectory of the sensorimotor loop studied by Jakob von Uexküll,48 differing from and deferring [diffère] the looping of this loop, and where noesis is a technesis. Such is noetic différance. The noetic dream is possible only for an exosomatized body, and thus conditions – as the hallucination of this body, a body that is intrinsically fetishistic and whose instincts have become drives – sexual difference insofar as what it establishes amounts, precisely, to a libidinal economy. This is what Greek mythology describes through the figure of the ‘first woman’, Pandora, wife of Epimetheus.
The consequences of the current evolution of exosomatization, however, are that sexuation itself is:
The sexual difference that for Freud was the foundation of disavowal and (as a result) denial thus seems to be faced with the attenuation of its functional imperative, while bringing exosomatization in general into the foreground, both as the condition of noetic sexuation in general, and as the possibility of diminishing the function of sexual difference in the reproduction of life in general.
Exosomatic organogenesis harbours new entropic and negentropic possibilities for non-inhuman life, new possibilities other than those stemming from the organogenesis of endosomatic life. Furthermore, exosomatic organogenesis is de-correlated, from its earliest moments, from the bio-logical frameworks of endosomatic organogenesis: no longer being genetically conditioned, exosomatization frees itself from that of which sexual difference remains the condition with respect to endosomatic organogenesis, and as the ontogenesis of non-inhuman individuals. As for the human species, its endosomatic evolution seems to have stabilized during the Neanderthal period.
From all this, we can now conclude that the relegation of sexual difference – as condition of the reproduction of life in general and of parental coupling as the condition of the reproduction and hence the endosomatic organogenesis of the human individual – clearly transforms that situation which Freud believed he could describe while neglecting exosomatic organogenesis, which, as we have seen, he nevertheless did care about in Civilization and Its Discontents, where he referred to it in terms of ‘perfecting [man’s] own organs’,49 but without understanding it as such.
Because the selection criteria that control exosomatic organogenesis are social, and not biological, they raise questions of αἰδώς and δίκη. It is the libidinal economy – insofar as it is the condition of noesis as the process of idealization, projecting consistences that do not exist but that make realizable (and unrealizable) noetic dreams possible – that constitutes the criteriologies characteristic of the ages, eras and epochs of exosomatization. As an economy of the drives, it produces collective protentions with respect to the future of what amounts, not just to a human species, but to a non-inhuman kind. These elaborations are made possible by the sublimation processes that are presupposed by spiritual perspectives on the future of noetic life in cosmic becoming.
Purely and simply computational capitalism installs a libidinal diseconomy, amounting to an unbinding of the drives. This unbinding, moreover, liquidates the noetic criteriology, replacing it with market criteria. Therein lies the key fact of denoetization. And herein, too, lies the origin of the malaise that the jihadist offer tries to seduce – and to drive mad – in competition with the transhumanist proposal that tries to package up the disarray resulting from this malaise into promises that foreshadow an oligarchical exosomatization ruling over the global fate of human cattle and claiming to ‘go beyond’ entropy – something that is made explicit by those who present themselves as ‘Extropians’50 – just as the ‘jihadist offer’ has the goal of installing the domination of a caliphate on earth.
Here, Freud’s own text on the possession of fire – that is, on Prometheus51 – should be analysed to show how he expresses, in an extremely elaborated and rationalized (in the sense of clinical psychoanalysis) manner, the Freudian disavowal [déni] that consists in ignoring the organological condition of any libidinal economy, which is also the condition of noetic sexual difference in libidinal economy: only exosomatically constituted (by the jewels of Pandora and by fetishism in general) sexual difference is capable of giving rise to the drives, which are no longer instincts precisely because they can be ‘detached’ and ‘diverted’ by the différance in which this economy consists.
The splitting that makes this disavowal possible is, moreover, precisely what stems from the gap opened up by Prometheus and that he brings to ‘mortals’ as their condition: the same ὕβρις that Roberto Esposito names delinquere. Denial, disavowal and splitting are the conditions of regression in general, which is in itself the pharmacological condition: denial, disavowal and regression are aspects of the same split condition, constantly forgotten by an illusion against which we must constantly struggle – failing which all ‘remedies’ become ‘poisons’.
The organological and pharmacological condition in which exosomatization consists, for better or worse, is what we experience every time we lie to ourselves – which we do far more often than we imagine, especially in a democracy that has degraded into ‘market society’: we can lie only after the experience of artifice, which is the lot of noetic life. By denying this condition, we in the West and in the monotheistic world tend to transform these tendencies into entities referred to as Good and Evil. We then seek scapegoats that must be sacrificed on the altar of the Good, and we do evil in the name of the good – hence Daesh, which is a formidable machine for the production of all kinds of scapegoats.
This Freudian disavowal, which clearly feeds into the ethical quagmire surrounding surrogacy, creates a theoretical vacuum with respect to the current stage of exosomatization. By abandoning this critical subject to transhumanist discourse, which has picked it up and taken it to a much broader level – which is the only way of taking hold of it (in terms of the amplitude of exosomatization) – this disavowal by psychoanalysis renders it inoperative, nonworking, which is singularly problematic for a theory that is also, and in an essential way, a therapeutic practice.
This is why psychoanalysis now has great difficulty in preserving its noetic and clinical power in the face of behaviouralism, of which transhumanism is a significant radicalization. This state of fact, however, is by no means an inevitability.
All of us, or almost all, are now more or less caught up in objects that constantly solicit us, to such an extent that we no longer pay attention to ourselves, nor to what, within us, requires reflection: we no longer have the time to do so, nor the time to dream. Without respite, we are piloted, if not remotely controlled. As a result, it becomes very difficult to identify our own practices of denial, that is, it becomes very difficult to think. For to think is also and above all, in some way, to overcome a form of denial into which we have settled.
Denial, which is a way of lying to oneself, is systemically provoked by the fact that ‘market societies’, in becoming massively addictogenic, erect impediments to thinking by installing a structural infantilization of consumers, whose expensive toys (such as cars and all manner of appliances and devices) lose any transitional virtue – any consistence. As a consequence, they unleash a massively regressive tendency that fails to provide access to ‘child’s play’ [enfance de l’art]. All of us thus descend into an ‘adulescent’ society, that is, a society that is grossly afflicted by immaturity.
It is in this structural state of denial that dreams and promises tend to become synonymous with lies – and, in the first place, with that lying to oneself that is denial in general. As a result, self-esteem decreases, just as aggression massively and proportionately increases – from ‘France from below’ [France d’en bas] to the pinnacle of government. As I have tried to show in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, it is thus the stages of life, stages that are constituted over the course of the formation of the child’s psychic apparatus on the way to becoming adult, that are disintegrated. Such is the absence of epoch.
Children confuse the world with their own representations of the world, and this is why, in the world of childhood, children seem to be constantly living through waking dreams that are not yet clearly distinguished from nocturnal dreams. That which makes childhood a kind of permanent rather than intermittent transitional dream becomes, in the infantilized adult, the regression of someone who is permanently lying to themselves, engaged in all those denials through which the abyssal gap that is the absence of epoch widens into a gulf.
When the exosomatization resulting from noetic dreams produces a wave of new types of artificial organs, thereby upsetting the technical system, which is then transformed as a whole – this being what Bertrand Gille describes as a change of technical system – this amounts to the occurrence of the first stage of the doubly epokhal redoubling. The ‘understanding that there-being has of its being’ is then thrown into question by becoming, which destroys the previously constituted circuits of transindividuation, causing all forms of knowledge (of how to live, do and conceptualize) to enter into crisis. This is what, until now, would lead to the critical stage in which knowledge is transformed, thereby engendering a new epoch.
Today, this is what is no longer true. Disruption is the radicalized ordeal of the second epokhal stage of the redoubling, now devoid of any prospect: in the expectation of a new era, negatively foreshadowed in and as the default of epoch and as the prelude to a transition to a panic mode, adults, in denial and totally disoriented, regress to an infantile age while depriving adolescence of its noetic dreams. Yet it is only through the realization of such noetic dreams that, in fact, one can become adult, but these dreams are what the disillusioned older generation no longer knows how to transmit, in this way becoming themselves powerless.
To pass from childhood to adulthood by going through adolescence is to transform transitional spaces into spaces of idealization granting access to the disciplines to which these are related: it is to learn to make the difference between childish fantasy and the lying that is specific to the infantile adult. The transition through which this difference is made (a difference that is a différance) is the experience of oneself becoming an adult, where adults themselves learn to dream otherwise than children dream, precisely by preserving these adult transitional spaces that are, for Winnicott, works of the mind and spirit.
These works ‘work’ only by exceeding the opposition of the real and the fictional: their reality is not that of an existence but of a consistence (an ideality) that, for this reason, can inscribe into the entropy of becoming [devenir] the bifurcation of a future [avenir]. Such is the power of knowledge, of which the managers of public powerlessness no longer have any inkling.
In a decadent age, of which massive denial is obviously symptomatic, denialists [dénégateurs] proliferate, practising their denial upon the most serious and urgent questions. In the context of the Entropocene, which is also the ordeal of the irreversibility of time that passes and is lost, we find that the more serious and the more urgent things get, and the more everything turns into a machine that multiplies the reasons for panic, and the closer all this does indeed approach the stage of panic, the more it also becomes the subject of countless strategies of denial, more or less coarse or elaborate, from ‘France from below’ to the ‘pinnacle of government’, all of which can do nothing but aggravate the panic to come.
Among the great deniers are, in North America, the Tea Party, whose emblematic historical leader is Sarah Palin, who, to glorify the ‘American way of life’, stated that she loves ‘that smell of [fossil fuel] emissions’. In the absence of a discourse on the state of the world truly capable of providing an understanding of the possibility of a way out – and this is something for which we are all responsible, including Bernie Sanders – and despite the warnings of Pope Francis, Donald Trump may well end up leading the American federal government into a most frightening state of geopolitical denial.52 Inshallah.
All these discourses exploit the anguish secreted by the reality of this decadence that we all, however, more or less deny:
We saw at the beginning of this chapter that our psyche, which is a weave of retentions and protentions, is structured by the archi-protention of the end, itself presupposing the archi-protention of life after this end. In the disruptive context in which no positive collective protention allows us to project ourselves beyond our own end, which seems to condemn all noetic life to having suffered and lived only in vain, we may – in order to appease the negative collective protention that results from this situation and that hollows out the abyss of the absence of epoch within us, as our despair – stuff ourselves with anxiolytics or antidepressants (personally I recommend Laroxyl) so as not to go crazy.
These expedients, these medicines – these pharmaka – have the serious disadvantage, however, that they erase the gravity and the urgency of a situation for which we are responsible. Most of the time, these expedients keep us in a state of irresponsibility, locked in that child’s buggy that Kant mentions as a way of describing the situation of adults who have been kept in a state of immaturity,53 which an entire industry dedicated to automobility seems to have turned into an immense functional market: by integrating the mobility function that serves the total mobilization of producers and consumers with the infantilization function via the craving for ever faster and more expensive toys.
Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step beyond the child’s buggy54 in which [their guardians, tuteurs] have imprisoned them, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided.55
Because the situation seems unthinkable and incurable [impansable], because our psychic apparatus is in structural denial, and because our guardians (who have become private powers, and not just those puppets, themselves infantilized, who believe themselves to be governing us) take advantage of this situation, we, or some of us, or a part of us, may eventually (without our being able to see or analyse it) join up, in an underhanded way, with the great ultra-reactionary discourses of denial, if not find ourselves in complete agreement with them.
This generally happens unconsciously, but also, sometimes, dogmatically – from those on the ‘radical left’ who deny the ecological challenge, such as Alain Badiou, for whom ecology amounts to the ‘new opium of the people’,56 to the so-called ‘republican’ parties, and via Jacques Rancière’s denial of the shortcomings of democracy. All of them agree on the fact that they do not want to know that the scale of decay is now that of the biosphere, to the point that it will, quite soon, be irreversible. ‘Today we are closer to the catastrophe than to the alarm, and this is why it is high time we composed a health of misfortune. Even though it may have the arrogant appearance of a miracle.’57
Far more profoundly than those petty accommodations with the organized denial of the worst, there is, in the philosophical discourse of the twentieth century, particularly in France, a kind of protection of what has constituted the very basis of ‘metaphysics’ since Plato, analogous to Freud’s disavowal [déni] of ὕβρις as it was thought by the tragic Greeks outside of the morality of guilt, and as the pharmacological condition of mortals – oi thanatoi, those who, though they are not gods, yet wield divine fire.
In Birth of the Clinic (1963), published after History of Madness (1961), Foucault passes over synthetic chemistry, that is, industrial medicine:58 he passes over the role of the pharmakon in the history of modern medicine – which is rather striking, and quite difficult to understand. This impasse is clearly the symptom of a metaphysical blindness still at work in Foucauldianism.
It could be shown that a similar residue in Derrida constitutes a blind spot, when he resists thinking the supplement in terms of its historicity, in terms of its being nothing other than this very historicity. The historicity of the supplement is the law of the default of origin, and it constitutes noetic différance as such [en tant que telle], or ‘as such’ [comme telle] – this is what Derrida disavows [dénie] under the pretext that, so as to avoid falling into the metaphysical opposition between man and animal, he is in dialogue with Heidegger’s ‘as such’, and, through that, with his reference to Geist, spirit.59
The denial of historicity insofar as it constitutes a bifurcation in life qua différance amounts to a madness that believes it is possible to project a ‘quasi-transcendental’ character onto the pharmakon – which would thus be conceivable in terms of a pure logic of the supplement, of which one could in addition do the history, but where this never ends up being done. Yet undertaking the history of the supplement, including as natural history, can consist only in drawing out the separate regimes of différance – in thinking with the regimes of individuation – which Derrida himself dispenses with, thereby obstructing in advance, by obliterating it, any possibility of thinking a bifurcation to come.
To obliterate:
prefix ob (object) and suffix from litterae (letter) […], [means] literally […] ‘to erase the letters’. The verb [oblitérer], has been likened to oblitus, ‘forgotten’ and ‘forgetful’, past participle of oblivisci (to forget), especially in the sense of ‘to make forget, to erase the memory’.60
In regimes of différance, there are kingdoms, ages, eras (both geological and theological61) and epochs. Unless these are drawn out – and, in particular, unless negentropic différance is differentiated from that neganthropology of which exosomatization is the pharmacological advent – the possibility of a bifurcation yet to come cannot be anticipated otherwise than in the mode of a submission to fate: Geschick.
Even though (or because) he makes a claim for a transcendental empiricism, one finds in Deleuze the same step back and the same repetition of a metaphysical gesture, for example when, in his commentary on Foucault, he elaborates his discourse on the ‘diagram’. This ‘metaphysical ὕβρις’ can also be found in the way that Simondon neutralizes the medium [support] in his consideration of information. Hence with Simondon, too, it is necessary to take a step beyond.
In the epoch of digital disruption and synthetic biology, it is no longer conceivable that we could get caught up in these flights of noetic denial that, at bottom, make a compromise with metaphysics inasmuch as the latter disavows the innumerable organological and pharmacological stakes – that is, the economic and political stakes – of exosomatization, which are first reflected upon by Herder, Engels and Marx contra German idealism. For this materialist heritage to bear fruit, however, we must reconsider it starting from the questions arising from phenomenology, which displace the heritage of idealism. And we must do so on the basis of the Nietzschean question of nihilism, of which the Anthropocene is the fulfilment.
Because we cannot escape the denial that is inscribed within existential horizons as the primordial forgetting of that knowledge of being-towards-the-end giving direction to all protention, this forgetting, which becomes, in the thought of the second Heidegger, the ‘forgetting of being’ as Geschick, amounts to an automatic obliteration supported by tertiary retentions, which, at the same time, themselves both effect and occlude being-towards-the-end – and do so precisely as exosomatization.
It is exosomatization that opens being to the world of ek-sistence and its noetic différance, for this being that is ‘questioning’ only because it is constantly put back into question by the realization of its dreams – a putting back into question that is the ‘time of being’ and of the dreams of those who are thereby thrown into question by what Heidegger calls ‘ontological difference’.
It is Heidegger who shows that denial is a structural constraint of noesis qua mode of being of Dasein as a ‘being who questions’, where being is time, but where this encloses the latter in what Being and Time describes as the ‘ontic’ plane (qua knowledge of what exists), closing it off from the ‘ontological’ plane (qua knowledge of what consists).
Constituted by its retentions and protentions, where the temporal ekstasis of the future and of futurity controls its temporizations and temporalizations (its différances), Dasein accedes to this ‘ontological’ plane only intermittently, through what Being and Time calls its resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), and when it turns to what, for being, remains to come.
What Heidegger claims to deconstruct under the name of ‘calculative thinking’62 is not reducible to the results of this Abbau63 whose conclusion is that ‘science does not think’.64 It is only by passing through calculation and determination (as exosomatized understanding) that the experience of the ‘indeterminate’ in which ‘resoluteness’ consists is possible. This is what I tried to establish in Technics and Time, 1.65 The fact remains that determination, which, as calculation, controls ‘preoccupation’ (Besorgen, busyness), is indeed a form of the denial of being-towards-the-end (Sein zum Ende, which is also Sein zum Tod).
And here, we cannot but be struck by the following sentence – taken from one of the most detestable of all the texts in the corpus of this thinker: ‘the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking’.66 It is clear that this is the point at which we have now arrived. ‘Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking, total thoughtlessness.’67 To combat this state of fact, however, we must understand that what, in this very text (Discourse on Thinking), Heidegger calls ‘meditative thinking’ is constituted by the pharmakon, which is what Heidegger will deny from beginning to end, and this is particularly clear in this discourse – although, and I will return to this in La Société automatique 2, the lecture on ‘The Turn’, along with other lectures devoted to Gestell and Ereignis, do somewhat complicate this situation.
Twentieth-century philosophy was dominated by Heidegger. This major thinker also happened to be one of the most reactionary thinkers imaginable. Not only that: it is clear that he was anti-Semitic. His affiliation with Nazism and his anti-Semitism are particularly obvious in Discourse on Thinking, where, opposing ‘calculative thinking’ to ‘meditative thinking’, he asserts that only rooted thinking can meditate – whereas uprooting, of which the Jews are clearly the figure in the Christian West, appears as the Evil in the extremely trivial sense that philosophy inherits from monotheism.
Nevertheless, we cannot think the twentieth century without passing through Heidegger, and we cannot read Heidegger without going back over Husserl’s path. Both of them set into opposition that which tertiary retention composes – and, in so doing, they fail to give tertiary retention the consideration it is due. At the end of their lives, however, both of them seem to bifurcate. ‘The Origin of Geometry’ makes tertiary retention a condition of possibility of apodictic thinking, while Identity and Difference, ‘The Turn’ and ‘Time and Being’ make Gestell into being itself: ‘But being itself essences as the essence of technology. The essence of technology is Gestell.’68
Today, the hatred of uprooting – and of migrants, immigrants, wanderers – is returning to the forefront, after three decades of unbridled globalization founded on the death drive, which capitalism sets free by unbinding the drives, and as the unleashing of the process of disinhibition. This state of affairs is just part of a generalized demoralization that is also a universal practice of denial in the face of what nevertheless presents itself as an unavoidable terminus – a ‘shift’, to use the term of the article in Nature we have mentioned on several occasions.
We must read Heidegger, and this imperative amounts to a paradox. We must read him because he is the first philosopher who put denial at the heart of noesis as well as of epokhality – while showing that one cannot be thought without the other. And we must read him because he himself, by taking to the extreme the metaphysical ὕβρις that begins in Plato with the rejection of the tragic thinking of the pharmakon, practises philosophical denial like none before. It is because he radicalizes this paradox that Heidegger is the victim of a form of madness that translates into an adherence to Nazism and an anti-Semitic obsession.
Today, denial consists in refusing to consider the denoetization that Heidegger does indeed discuss in Discourse on Thinking, and that has become a massive and striking reality. By deconstructing Heidegger’s Abbau, Derrida made it clear that it is not possible to oppose calculation and meditation. But he did not himself think the new arrangements between retentions and protentions by which calculation and meditation – that is, understanding and reason – can and must operate the bifurcation that is effected as a new era that is not the destining of being, its Geschick, but the inscription of the future that makes (the) différance in becoming.
In the age of disruption, which gives rise to chaotic and febrile situations typical of the generalized denial that characterizes the Besorgen of the absence of epoch, where retentional and protentional horizons disintegrate, nothing is further from non-inhuman beings than those consistences in relation to which the ‘ontological difference’, as Heidegger conceives it, is an attempt to name the extra-ordinariness arising from the ordinary and towards which ‘meditative thought’ is turned.
Given this, we must say that generally speaking, when we are confronted with an unforeseen situation, we may find ourselves without the ability to analyse, to critique and ultimately to introduce a bifurcation into a state of fact – a state of law being what produces a bifurcation starting from a state of fact, which thereby becomes lawfully and performatively regulated. We refuse to see the situation in which we are, more or less, involved, and this refusal, which we call disavowal [déni], is much more profound than a negation.
Disavowal does not rise to consciousness, whereas negation and denial manifest that which is denied. The contemporary philosophy that today follows in the wake of twentieth-century French philosophy, which does not escape this fate, must overcome Heidegger by redefining the analysis of the ‘forgetting of being’ as the unfurling of the epochs that lead to the absence of epoch in the disavowal of the organological and pharmacological problems and questions arising from exosomatization.
We deny in order to maintain a process of transindividuation that we believe to be right, which belongs to the same epoch as other similar processes, with which it forms an epoch and which themselves believe they are right, and which we also fight against, even though we also share with them the presuppositions of the epoch. All this constitutes ‘the understanding that there-being has of its being’. As far as the philosophy of the twentieth century is concerned, this can last only so long as the absence of epoch remains hidden beneath the feet of this ‘understanding’.
It is this of which so-called ‘French theory’ is the specific experience: it tries to think the absence of epoch, but recoils before the change of era – and it does so because, ultimately, it never truly thinks the pharmakon. Through this denial, what we want to preserve at all costs is a very deeply buried ‘average understanding’, one deeply entrenched in the epoch.
For and through this average understanding, we are at bottom willing to give credit to our worst adversaries over what is essential – which then comes to seem secondary or accessory. On the contrary, however, this is what must be analysed as that which enables us not to want to know what is happening, especially when a shock in exosomatization occurs of such magnitude that it amounts to a bifurcation in the natural history of exosomatization itself: this is the meaning of the transhumanist symptom.
The primordial dimension of disavowal is archi-protention as being-towards-death in the test and ordeal through which every epoch constitutes itself as the capacity to overcome the despair that is inevit-ably provoked by what presents itself as, precisely, inevitable. After the thermodynamic age, however, and well before the atomic age, it is the archi-protention of life beyond my own death that, by turning itself into an archi-protention of the end of life itself, which is also to say of death itself, creates a panic that philosophy has yet to begin to think.
It is as this ability to maintain hope beyond the insurmountable fact of death that there-being shares an ‘ordinary, vague’ understanding of its being with its generation. Through this is formed the horizon of those positive collective protentions that consist throughout that epoch, and which in so doing constitute it – a horizon that for Florian is missing. And it is as courage in the face of the end of life itself that philosophy can and must begin to think again, and firstly to think calculation beyond calculation – as this power to bifurcate that is the ‘function of reason’.69