“NON-PHILOSOPHY” or “first science” seeks to be “scientific” in its method and its essence, but immediately touches on philosophy in its object. It strives to extend the criteria of scientific thought, which is rethought beforehand in its autonomy, to the theory and practice of philosophy. But it is not in any way a mode of “philosophy as rigorous science” or the negation of philosophy. It is a positive, autonomous discipline, which aims to inscribe itself in the lineage of sciences while rectifying their epistemological concept. It proceeds through operations of the type “experimentation” and “deduction.” But, on one hand, it remains transcendental and nonpositivist (hence its other possible designations: “transcendental science” or “first science”) and, on the other, it applies its operations to philosophical statements, thus to “natural” and not logically formalized language.
Let’s
place this entire project under the rubric of a
scientific reform of the understanding. A reform of the scientific understanding would have a philosophical inspiration. This is not the case here where theoretical thought, the “understanding,” ceases to be copied (as in the theories of knowledge and philosophies in general) from more or less sublimated, interiorized, or displaced
faculties. The knowledge at issue is the one engendered by the scientific process, whose structures and aprioric operations have nothing in common with the faculties. Theory of science rather than theory of knowledge: such is the content of “first science,” or again: theory of scientific-knowledge-as-thought rather than philosophical-thought-of-knowledge.
A few major theses or, rather, a few axioms, sum up non-philosophy. Their exposition will clarify the descriptions of the previous chapter and introduce new supplementary clarifications from the perspective of a “first science” and of its use of philosophy.
THE ESSENCE OF THE REAL RESIDES NEITHER IN BEING NOR IN THE OTHER, BUT IN THE ONE
This—real—axiom has to give us the means to rethink the One theoretically from itself as cause or “qua One” and outside every convertibility with Being or the Other. It has to give us the means to subvert—at least in this science itself—the founding presuppositions of metaphysics and of its deconstructions, i.e., philosophy’s entire authority over the real. This thought of the One, insofar as the One is absolutely “outside-Being” or identical to the real itself, forms a “transcendental science” because it discovers in the One its cause and not only, like philosophy, a theme or one of its objects.
A
thought of the One is devoted to the real alone, and the real should not be confused with the Whole or Being. But we will not say that it is abstract or too exiguous. This would amount to confusing the One qua One, defined by a radical and thus nonpositional and nondecisional immanence (of) self, with an ontological One, pervaded by transcendence, impotent outside its convertibility with Being, a One “without-Being” in the sense in which it said of
Dasein that it can be “without-World” (
Weltlos). Science is certainly not a super-, a meta- or an inframetaphysics. In science the One is not torn away from its element, and everything else negated, excluded, as it is in Parmenides’ One-All. Not only does it let Being and being subsist “outside” it; but, as cause (of) science, the One is vision-in-One, seen-in-One of the World, of Being and of being to which it unconditionally gives phenomenalized being. It is also outside every metaphysical parousia. And for that reason it includes the World, Being and being in the immanence of the theoretical space, a space rooted in the One itself and received or given, manifested in the mode peculiar to the One. Nothing of what is not in the One, nothing of Transcendence is negated or destroyed by this phenomenalization, if not the philosophical Autoposition. It ceases only to be a point of view on itself, a support of a philosophical thought that always manifests by claiming to transform. It is important to distinguish (a) a thought founded on the criterion of radical immanence, which only negates the illusion, but offers Being its own “phenomenological” generosity or its power of manifestation, and (b) a thought founded on the permanent autosurpassing of transcendence, which leads to abstractions and self-attenuation.
NON-PHILOSOPHY’S OBJECT IS PRIMARILY PHILOSOPHY, THEN, THROUGH PHILOSOPHY, ALL THE OTHER POSSIBLE STATEMENTS; IT IS THROUGH THIS OBJECT THAT NON-PHILOSOPHY DISTINGUISHES ITSELF FROM OTHER SCIENCES
Non-philosophy is not “on the margin” of philosophy. Rather, it is philosophy that ceases to be the site of non-philosophy or its foundation and is reduced to the state of materials or of “objective givens,” “phenomena” that can be treated by the operations of this science. Thus philosophy also cannot be the object of science in the philosophical sense of the term object; it is so in the precisely scientific sense of this word. This sense will become explicit through the forthcoming description of the structures of scientific theory’s or knowledge’s fractality.
In general, a science is designated—this is a tradition—by its “objects,” the region of its phenomena. This is equally the case for the science
of the One. This formula does not mean that it is science of the One to the exclusion of philosophy (cf. the possible hesitation: “science of the One” or “science of philosophy”?); rather, it is a science that makes use of these phenomena that are
the philosophical statements about the One. Since sciences’ cause is equally “qua One” (the One as absolutely given), “science of the One” does not always designate this One-cause, but also the philosophical or phenomenon-One. So there is no contradiction between the two formulas: science of the One or of philosophy, because the One at issue in these formulas is either its material, that which is provided by philosophical statements, or its cause, but without any amphibology between them. From the first perspective, the science of the One is distinguished from other sciences precisely because it is a science of philosophy, insofar as philosophy aims at the One-of-which-it-speaks. From the second perspective, the guiding formula can simply signify the real state of affairs of the One-cause, if it is understood as follows:
the being-One (of) the One, the being-Identity (of) Identity. Philosophy can at most lead only to the
being of the One or the
being of Identity and bars the One by Being, which represses it.
By its essence or its cause, we will call this discipline transcendental or first science; by its material (philosophy) and its product (non-philosophy in the strict sense of the term), we will instead and generally call it non-philosophy. This term and its “non-Euclidean” analogy make it sufficiently clear that it is not a matter of negating philosophy or “leaving” it—impossible operations—but of recognizing that its alleged validity and its claims over the real have always been suspended by science. Furthermore, such a science would have no sense, at least as a theory, if it did not let itself be determined—within some precise limits—by philosophy as well as by its material. It entertains with this material a scientific rather than philosophical relation or a relation of objectivation; a purely transcendental, rather than empirical or mixed relation (“empirico-transcendental,” which is philosophy itself).
Thus the guiding formula (the One qua One, Identity qua Identity, and so forth) no longer has the ontological sense of tautology, of “as such” [comme tel]. The One intervenes twice, but in a mode that we will henceforth call “dualized” or “unilateralized.” The One as cause (of) science, as absolute Given, conditions the transformation of philosophical statements and their insertion into a truly theoretical space. In this way, the unity, the convertibility of philosophy (thus the convertibility of Being) and of the One itself is broken a priori.
NON-PHILOSOPHY IS PRACTICED IN THE MANNER OF A THEORY
“Between” its
cause and its object, between its essence and its material, or rather from one to the other, it produces
theoretical and no longer
philosophical thought: the relation of its cause and its object excludes the conditions of philosophy. Against the spontaneous confusion of philosophy with culture, against its inevitable “cultural” and “ideological” drift, non-philosophy aims to safeguard the rights of theory and to struggle against the more initial and foundational confusion of science with philosophy. It thus struggles against the “philosophies of science” and epistemologies. Here theory no longer has a philosophical essence because philosophy was never a theory, a knowledge that is grounded in reality and in rigor. First science enjoys a universality “superior” to the one resulting from the distinction and combination of “generality” and “totality” (the two sides of onto-theo-logy). And it introduces a mutation or a generalization of the non-Euclidean
type into the practice of thought in general. It is to philosophy what non-Euclidean geometries are to Euclidean ones within the “genus” of geometry. Moreover, it is to philosophy what a science is to a nonscience.
These first axioms are not enough to make non-philosophy concretely intelligible. They have to be completed with others (always transcendental and not logical) that determine the field and style of non-philosophical practice.
PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT REACH OR KNOW THE REAL
What the critiques (Kant) or deconstructions (Heidegger) of metaphysics demonstrated about the extent of the transcendental illusion or of its errancy is still limited. And these authors did not draw all the consequences of their description of the structure of the philosophical decision. Globally, it is philosophy as
decision (including the one that pursues the—strictly partial—deconstruction of the decision) that must be deemed the victim of an
appearance, i.e., of a “forgetting” of the real, more profound, more extensive than the simple forgetting of “Being-as-forgetting.”
After the analyses of the philosophical gesture, of onto-theo-logy, of presence and of decision carried out by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, it seems hardly possible to try once again, like these authors, to make sense of things and recognize to philosophy an ultimate right, the right of its claim to codetermine the real. It is possible only to extend the transcendental illusion of the
dialectic of (dogmatic and skeptical) metaphysics to every
decision- or thought-by-
dyad (mixture, blending, doublet, hierarchy), as is philosophy in its most secret operations. It is in effect a
transcendental dialectic in the sense that we can generalize of the term
dialectic: not only in its rationalist-empiricist form or in its onto-theo-logical form (the
difference of horizontal Being and Totality, of ontology and theology), but in its more general form as
decision, dyad, or unity-of-opposites, with the operations that animate them (reversal and displacement). Contemporaries have shown the depth of these schemas, deeper than their dogmatic version, so long as they are divested of their restrained rational form. And the true “return to Kant,” if it is not a simple return to the doctrinal and obsolete Kantianism, means that science alone—as thought of the real itself—can demonstrate this universal transcendental illusion.
Thus philosophy does not reach the real in its identity but reaches Being, i.e., a blending, a combination of reality and of appearances or simulacra. Being’s semiunreal constitution, its content of appearance or of imagination (ens imaginarium) proves that it is not limited to the nothing-but-real, but that it seeks to be itself through this latter and the functional use it makes of it. It extracts from it a surplus value of unreality, possibility, image, and transcendence from which it draws its prestige and, in this way, asserts that it is necessary to the real. We must limit philosophy in order to make way for science—on the condition, perhaps, that from now on it be up to science to make a place for philosophy…
THE REAL DOES NOT RESIDE IN BEING, BUT IN THE ONE-WITHOUT-BEING, AND YET IT IS THINKABLE: IT IS “DETERMINATION-IN-THE-LAST-INSTANCE”
The real in the irrefutable sense of Given-in-immanence anterior to every operation (even the operation of donation) is the One, but “qua One” or as “last instance.”
Being testifies only to philosophical hubris, whereas the One is the nothing-but-Given that precedes every donation. So much so that the veritable order of transcendental reasons goes from the One to philosophy and not from philosophy to the One. This order upsets all the traditional—globally idealist—relations between the real and its thought. The thought of the real must be able to think itself and to expound itself at once: 1/ as a thought that stands in strict dependence on the real-One, that does not coconstitute it as it coconstitutes Being, but receives the real-One as the given absolutely anterior to it; 2/ as nevertheless capable—despite its posteriority—of thinking the One, of constituting the
adequate representation (of) the real, and thus by definition it never objectivates the real in its relation to it. What concept should we introduce here? The true relation of the real-One and of thought, if it is
no longer in any way a (total or partial) objectivation of the real-One by thought, can only be formulated as
determination-in-last-instance of thought by the real-One. This is no doubt the most profound sense of the originally Marxist formula.
Parmenides’ guiding formula: “The Same is Being and Thinking,” which structures every philosophy and even partially or half of its deconstructions, is eradicated by the One itself. As soon as it is a matter of the One that is thought without-Being or outside-Being—a possible thought, as we have just seen, if the traditional and philosophical relation of objectivation and reciprocity is replaced with the determinant-in-the-last-instance cause—“real and thought” are no longer “the same.” Nor are they simply “identical”: real and thought are identical in-the-last-instance alone. The One is the last—or first, but absolutely first—instance as well as the transcendental instance that “holds” within itself (but without being affected by it) the thought that will represent it, that will even be its adequate albeit belated representation. More than belated: de jure “posterior” or lagging in relation to the One. More profoundly: uni-lateralized by it.
Non-philosophy has no other real beginning, if not no other foundation, than the rectification, in a scientific and axiomatic sense, of our ontological representations of the One (its convertibility with Being or with the Other and its consequences). This rectification represents it now as preceding Being (and thought) in the ordo essendi as well as in the ordo cognoscendi. More profoundly, it begins with assuming this order as the only real one, thus with the One as the Given itself, the sole given that is given independently of every donation.
A THEORY OF THE ONE—OF IDENTITY QUA IDENTITY—IS NECESSARY, AND IT IS ALREADY GIVEN BY SCIENCE, PROVIDED WE KNOW HOW TO THINK THIS SCIENCE
A different global schema of science than the one offered by philosophy and epistemologies is possible and necessary. A science’s non-philosophical economy is the following: qua theory, it is related in-the-last-instance alone, or in the above-indicated mode, to the real-One, to the nondecisional Identity (of) self as well as to its cause; and it is related, on the other hand, to its “objective givens” or the “phenomena” of its domain in a mode that is not that of philosophical objectivation, but the one we call the mode of “materials.” This mode is specified within the functions of index, material, and symbolic support. Every decisional and positional (= objectivating) schema, its modes and its temperaments (intentionality, ekstasis, project, horizontal opening, etc.) must be eradicated from the relation of theory to the real or to the cause as well as its relation to “phenomena.” Not only are they no longer conflated and no longer communicate as in philosophy, but the real-One is what unilateralizes—displaces without return or reciprocity—the “phenomena” or
data and thus what frees up a specific place for theory or thought, free finally of every confusion with the “empirical” givens. Determination-in-the-last-instance “and” materials form a system, and both derive from the cause. This new architecture is probably the real economy of science at work, the way science can think itself outside philosophy’s codes, injunctions, and norms. As the real-One is “without-Being,” science is “without-philosophy”; the “without” does not indicate here radical absence or negation, but a change in use and the abandonment of their function, which is constitutive of the real itself.
To understand the type of displacement to which we are subjecting the philosophical images of science, we can recall that at first these images invariantly set in play a duality (concept and experience, operation and object, knowledge and data, logic and fact), then a superior unity (dialectic of concept and experience, reflexive or operative unity, objective transcendental, research programs, etc.). It is this overall schema that is overturned, disorganized, more-than-displaced by “science itself” or qua science that thinks itself. Instead of projecting a superior unity of synthesis, which gives scientific labor a circular and thus philosophical appearance, science works unilaterally,
without synthesis or circle. It prohibits every “hermeneutic” or stylistically philosophical reappropriation, which reaps the fruits of scientific labor. As to this labor, it is enough to substitute Identity for Unity and Determination-in-the-last-instance for synthesis and reciprocal action (dialectical or otherwise) so as to autonomize theory and experience in relation to each other and render theory truly falsifiable in its restrained particularity, to no longer confuse the movement of knowledge and philosophical “becoming,” which turns endlessly in the doublets. No term is any longer in a “face to face” with the other or forms a fold with it; all terms are distributed on the axis of asymmetry or of unilateralization. And yet, in each of these stages (Identity-cause, theory, experience and its symbolic use), it is indeed Identity that reigns: either alone (real-cause) or as last-instance of theory, of theoretical immanence and of the manifold of determinations, or, finally, as “symbolic” identity that can be the identity of experience and its givens, reduced to the state of “symbolic support” (we do not describe here the details of scientific labor). So much so that, ceasing to be in a doublet or in a face to face and thus to be sterile, the concept and experience, theory and the theorico-experimental givens are now only
related to one another from the last-instance alone (something that frees them in their own positivity) and not in the indeterminate generality that is philosophers’ “superior Unity” (dialectical, reflexive, transcendental, operative, etc.). Science’s general economy, its organization, does not rests on the structures or principles of philosophy (Dyad Unity), but on ones peculiar to it (Identity → unilateral Duality). Science is thus a
unified thought and not
unitary like philosophy; it is also a simpler thought than philosophy—we will come back to this.
SCIENCE AS POOR OR MINIMAL THOUGHT: OCCAM’S RAZOR
Science as practice of thought is the critique in action of philosophical operations. These operations are founded on the reciprocity of two terms: amphibologies, analyses and syntheses, diverse or structured dialectics, and so on. It opposes to this active and interventionist style a style of pure description, absolutely contemplative of Identities, i.e., of phenomena as such or of nonmodifiable phenomena, of terms and their priority over relations, of the identity of orders or instances, and so on. Each term, word, or category that appears in the space of science must be described as though it constituted an autonomous order. Even the pure, infinitely open rapport, the order of theory in the narrow sense, forms a relatively autonomous sphere that can be described without any supplements. This is due to the Identity that is required here as a transcendental guide,
last-instance that applies to all orders, even the most complex. So much so that in order to be an autonomous identity, a scientific object (a scientific knowledge) is not an abstract identity outside philosophical mixture and dependent on it—since the mixture itself, the philosophical, is in its turn defined by its identity-of-the-last-instance.
Identity operates like a prodigious Occam’s razor. But in the name of a real simplicity and of a real poverty of thought, not in the name of a supplementary simplification or impoverishment of philosophy. Not against philosophical or metaphysical entities that are judged to be useless or cumbersome; but for itself as science, that is, “against” the fundamental philosophical disposition, against spontaneous philosophy, which is the autoposition or the fold of every transcendence left to itself. To philosophize is to trace a more or less split, partially open circle around a category, a concept, or an experience drawn from transcendence in general: of the World, of History, of Desire, of Power, of Perception, of Language. To philosophize is to start the circle from this supposedly already given entity, to make it traverse and split this entity, to displace and reunify a little farther, for no gain other than this operation, no gain as to the real itself, i.e., to the Identity (of) this entity. To philosophize is to posit oneself by repositing oneself, give or take a scission or a decision that does not undermine the real and produces the flocculation of the Same. To philosophize is to require every thing, and thought itself, twice instead of once, and twice in such a way that none of the strokes or their sum produces something other than itself, in other words: an absolute inequality to the real.
Science thinks the real all-at-once, without dividing it and without dividing itself. This is why it thinks a multiplicity of each-time-one-time, a veritable multiplicity of undivided “terms” or a chaos. That philosophy thinks twice does not mean for science that it thinks once too many, but that it is this 2 of the division, i.e., this 1 → 2 or this 2 → 1 that is too many, useless and uncertain. In wanting to intervene half a time as transcendent object = x, half a time as this transcendence, and finally as the unitary synthesis of the object and of its objectivation, it is globally philosophy (rather than one of its operations) that is in excess.
Identity, as it is implicated in science, is precisely the real whose essence is deprived of this structure of autoposition or of folding. Strictly immanent, thus immanent only one time and without complexity, timely and without delay, it renders all that folds or refolds, all that is announced in the panorama of Transcendence, necessarily contingent. When it has a scientific origin, Occam’s razor suspends philosophy globally, its very claim, instead of some superfluous notion. It suspends philosophy in an unappealable contingency, sterilizes it in some sense without destroying it. Identity then has the World and philosophy as its correlate; from now on, they are—for transcendental reasons—simple, quasi-material, nonsignifying and inert residues. They should fulfill other functions—in science—than those spontaneously assigned to them.
Science is in essence a simple and minimal thought. This is not the result of a philosophical reduction or a metaphysical ascesis: a simplicity of essence, but not of structure, which holds in suspense the complexity of division, of abyss, and of autoreflection that is philosophy’s. We know that philosophy’s liquidation of back-worlds failed. Philosophy operates globally as the World’s form, i.e., as the matrix of every possible back-world. It is in science that this liquidation takes place without remainder, because science is a certain experience of the real as ontologically invisible, but in-the-last-instance alone. It is precisely because Identity is manifest or given through and through that it is invisible to Being.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Deleuze…equally critiqued Logos, Representation, but conserved (simply purifying it to various degrees) the matrix of the philosophical, the differe(a)nce or the convertibility of Identity and of the Other. All of them conserved the fold as a last residue of transcendence, of the circle, of the back-world, of autoposition. Singularities, Catastrophes, Multiplicities, Language Games, Dissemination: these are the back-worlds they bequeathed to us. They thought they were liberating us and easing the task, but they simply showed once again the force of the strange enchantment by philosophical faith.
FIRST CHANGING OUR THEORETICAL BASIS IN ORDER TO CHANGE OUR CATEGORIES
A reform, or better yet a recasting, a non-philosophical redistribution of the traditional economy of thought is needed.
Learning to think according to science’s paradigm rather than according to philosophy’s forces us to reformulate new categories, to describe new uses and divisions—to reform the understanding itself through its introduction to the experience of science. We should, however, be more specific.
The shift in the paradigm of thought—but this is a consequence—implies less a shift in the categories than a general rejection of the amphibological confusion of philosophy’s and science’s categories. To be sure, science no longer proceeds with doublets of the type means/end, agent/effect, matter/idealization, empirical/abstraction, form/information, and so on. These doublets have a philosophical origin, and epistemology projects them imprudently into the sphere of science. Science’s major categories are instead: One or cause; last instance; immanent process; material, index, and support; theoretical and symbolic, and so on. We can also add the properly scientific operations (induction/experimentation and deduction) that replace philosophy’s operations (reversal and displacement). In particular, science is defined by the “dual” Identity/Support; Last Instance/Occasions, which do not implicate any decision and thus none of the philosophical hierarchies whose movement takes place through inversion or displacement.
But the true mutation lies in a new use of categories: no longer in terms of their form-mixture in doublet, but in terms of their “vision-in-One.” For example, “theory” ceases to be a double or a more or less frozen or deficient mode of philosophy or, in contrast, a “philosophy-as-rigorous-science,” in order to become in its turn a pure “phenomenon,” an experience manifested-in-the-last-instance in the mode of the One. The description of the phenomenon of theory in general is one of the objects of “first science” as science of the essence of science. It acquires in this science its identity of “order” or of “sphere” and ceases to be conflated with a rationalist mode of the philosophical decision or else with a mode of empiricist abstraction—with another philosophy.
To understand thought—the thought of the One—as a science and science as at bottom a thought, in the manner of their “unified,” nonunitary or nonhierarchical theory, is certainly to rectify our spontaneous logic, the logic of our relation to the “real,” and even to the most obvious phenomena of our ambient world. It is not only a matter of changing our “categories” or even our philosophies, taking up a more current philosophy in place of an older one…Nor even changing our alliances, forging new ones in a general strategy of conflicts between science, philosophy and culture, in order to improve our “management” of these conflicts. It is a matter of changing our
manner of thinking; more than manner (conversion, reversion, trope, etc.),
basis or terrain: to think
from Identity rather than
in Difference (or Being, etc.);
after Identity or in its descent rather than
by Difference and in its turnstile;
in-One rather than
by and for Being, and so on.
So conceived, through its immanence to the real practice of sciences, the understanding represents in some sense thought’s degree 1 (“first”)—its minimal form, its primitive and inescapable emergence, the ground that is more solid than every “Being” or every “Foundation.” Arche-thought if you wish or the arche-given, from which we could elaborate what technology, ethics, art, love, and politics really are outside their philosophical images, and repose for example the associated problem of “intellectuals”…
OF SCIENCE AS MANIFESTATION OF THE REAL
Take two axioms: 1/ the real is conflated with Identity as such or as received and lived by itself; 2/ it is, in this form, science’s cause (of) self. These two axioms allow us to unphilosophically pose the problem of knowledge-as-thought and to dissolve some philosophical aporias:
a/
To manifest is no longer to produce, to think is no longer to intervene-in… These confusions must be abandoned. To intervene in…the object or to modify…the real: these operations prohibit knowledge in the name of interpretation. To think is no longer for example “to reflect,” since to reflect is to claim to intervene in the real of thought and to modify it on its own basis and through its autointervention. It is no longer to produce or even to reproduce some real (production and simulation are convertible), but to produce and reproduce only thought in terms of the real alone. It is to manifest the real absolutely as it is without this “as” signifying the “Same” or the philosophical Tautology, which postulates the at least partial identity of the real (as being) and thought (as philosophy).
As signifies here that the real alone, without thought (as addition, decision, supplement, etc.), is described in the mode of thought alone, which is thus in its own way a specific
order or a relatively autonomous order. Thinking cannot consist in producing the unproducible Identity; rather, it consists in reproducing thought-knowledge under the conditions of-the-last-instance of Identity. The immanent exercise of the process of knowledge, rather than some of its operations or its “results,” is the manifestation of its cause. Thus thought does not coproduce Identity, but instead manifests it by producing validated knowledge. If the real were knowledge itself, its knowledge would not know it as real, but only as knowledge; and it would involve it in a circle of perdition. Instead, the real is the known, and so the knowledge of the real does not transform it, but ultimately is itself transformed “in view” of the real. Identity
as such: knowledge thus only manifests the
as such, but is not confused with it and does not even bring it about. The
as such instead designates the One-cause that “moves” science. A manifestation of the intrinsic, of the One
qua-One, is possible, but on the condition that the manifestation no longer claims to intervene in it, to transform or reflect it. It is the very existence of theory as “identical” process that manifests Identity’s “interiority,” so to speak. But this Identity holds only in-the-last-instance for the theoretical that manifests it.
b/ To manifest is not to unveil, to think is not to reminisce or to let oneself be overtaken by an anamnesis—nor their opposite or their supplement: to withdraw, to be forgotten. No more than those of knowledge, even less than them, these operations do not belong to the essence of the real, but to what thought discovers within itself from a more profound forgetting of Identity, absolutely consumed forgetting without a possible anamnesis; a forgetting that is otherwise called philosophy. Contemporary thought, inverting and displacing from an “Other” the spontaneous course of metaphysics, believed it could oppose these effects of the Other to the tradition. It merely extracted more crudely the invariants it obeys without much haggling. More profound than the deconstruction of presence is the dissolution of the alleged originary continuity between the real and knowledge, the One and Being, but also the One and the Other. There is a more-than-deconstructive task; it lies in the emancipation of the real’s absolutely autonomous order and the relatively autonomous order of its knowledge. Philosophy knows as liberation only the loosening of the knot, the de-stricture, all the operations that prepare other stronger strictures, other more extensive confusions: more identification and less identity; more closure by dint of reciprocity or of reversibility than opening or unilaterality. Philosophy more or less denudes knowledge in relation to the real, but it does not realize that it is in itself the ultimate, the most irreducible point de caption that founds all the aporias and all the illusions.
c/
To manifest is not to produce some manifest; it is to manifest the already Manifest itself (Identity) and to do so in the “
secondary”
mode of Manifestation. Theory is this Manifestation, to be sure, but it does not manifest the real as a being is manifested or as philosophy manifests Being, through objectivation or another mode that always integrates with objectivation (withdrawal, differe(a)nce, etc.). To manifest—in the theoretical mode—the already manifest-real in its own mode, it is enough to produce knowledge. For knowledge is an identical and specific order of reality so long as it serves—by its very existence rather than by aiming for it directly—to manifest the real, not “a second time” but in a whole other mode: as an effect makes visible (insofar as it is an effect) its cause. The One is the only instance that thought cannot aim for, intend, project, and so forth. Theory does not manifest some brute, primary, and generally transcendent real, some real inscribed in the World, even if it is a World of idealities. Nor does it not manifest essences, which are already local crystallizations of knowledge. It manifests the real—which is never a knowledge—by means of the material of essences or of idealities. Science, in the narrow sense of validated theory, is globally an effect—there is an
identity of the effect—which indicates its cause in its very identity.
“Phenomenon”—what science describes in-the-last-instance by producing knowledge—is defined by its internal or intrinsic identity, by its “static” character. Even the phenomenon of movement (for example the movement of the theoretical process) is “static” and represents a phenomenal state-of-affairs. This is how science manifests what is already real as it is, without introducing into it the movement of knowledge. Science does not impart an “ontological” meaning to the movement of knowledges’ rectification; it does not postulate that to know a phenomenon is to make it befall its essence. This is the static or descriptive sense of the most mobile knowledge: dynamic in itself, by the knowledges it invalidates or produces, it is static by its effect and above all by its “object.” Among other possible objections, philosophy will no doubt say that it is a matter of a formalism, with knowledge indifferently modifying itself without its object being modified. It is, however, only the real (as its cause-of-the-last-instance) that knowledge cannot modify—and the real has nothing to do with an “object.” On the other hand, it modifies itself (its “objects-of-knowledge,” precisely); it can only transform itself. Thus there is authentic knowledge only because the real is not modified with it.
TO REFORM THE UNDERSTANDING ACCORDING TO THE PRINCIPLES OF “FIRST SCIENCE” IS TO PROCEED INDEPENDENTLY OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGES
It is to liberate the understanding from these knowledges and thus from the philosophical closure that, like a parasite, captures them and gets entangled in them. It is to open thought to an absolutely universal dimension, more universal than the time and space we are capable of “thinking” through philosophy or knowing through science. It is to liberate philosophical ob-jects or to treat them as simple occasions. Philosophical objects are constructions based on scientific knowledges, artifacts that encumber thought by imposing on it their structure of folding, of autoposition, of doublet, of duplication, or of tautology (the “Same,” “Difference”). All of this inhibits or paralyzes thought and imposes on it a teleological closure, more or less “open” but never contested or suspended as such. The entry into theory is the entry into a purely relational, infinitely open space (one necessary term + one radically contingent term), which can be transformed without limits. This space is capable of destroying the philosophical codes or revealing every philosophy as a globally contingent and “imaginary” enterprise of coding. Thought does more than get out into philosophy’s sea, its Great Wide Open [gagner le Grand Large]—the nearby coast, the prudent coastal navigation and smuggling; it explores the Wide Open. We would readily say, if the expression did not lend itself to confusion, that it is being-in-the-Wide-Open; being-in-Horizontality or in-the-Spread, an immemorial farewell to the horizons. This is also what we call a “non-Euclidean” universalization of philosophy.
FROM THIS RESTORATION OF SCIENCE’S ESSENCE FLOWS A NEW DISTRIBUTION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS WELL AS THE PRACTICAL RULES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY
We will no longer examine here the general problems of these relations, but their new de facto distribution: the suspension of philosophy’s authority, its constitution into the simple material of a science of the One, which is now possible in accordance with science’s new general image. We will indicate, precisely at the interior of this science that uses philosophy as a material, the main rules of the new practice of philosophical statements.
These rules globally transform the decisional and positional structures. They do not derive from the philosophical decision itself, but from the wholly other instance of science: they are the rules of theoretical practice. Instead of difference, dyad, or unity-of-opposites, they emphasize a radically asymmetric or unilateral duality, the a priori that defines the space of theory and unconditionally opens the dyad.
On one hand, these rules cannot reprogram mixtures or blendings, the assemblages of the dyad, the economy of its internal operations (reversal and displacement) that decide on the lags, the strategic and reciprocal movements, between coupled and simultaneous terms. They are, on the contrary, a prioris that assert the One or Identity in the material and that, by definition, no longer program singularities, catastrophes, or differe(a)nce, but program the effectuation-without-mediation of Identity, the law of radical immanence, in the manifold of the form-dyad itself. This is what we call “vision-in-One”; it is not a transcendent or mystical contemplation of the One, but, if you wish, the immediate implementation of science’s operative mystic kernel in the effectivity of philosophy, i.e., of the World.
On the other, they are the rules of science itself. The One “applied” to philosophy’s dyad-form produces from it—we cannot demonstrate this here—the de jure non-philosophical, more universal and more powerful theory-form. Theory or science—in the real or the transcendental, not the empiricist and positivist sense—is the perspective of radical Identity or the One-cause on the manifold, directly on the manifold without any mediation. It is thus not its blending, its difference in the philosophical sense. Theory is in principle falsifiable or surpassable by…and in another knowledge; it thus does not include within it any possible, any imaginary, appearance, circularity, or mixture that would in fact prohibit its “falsification” and would allow it to save itself by continually transforming itself. Here again the major principle is to rediscover Identity—the Identity of theory or of every other order or instance.
More precisely, what do the dyads or the assemblages, which are philosophy’s tissue and “dialectic,” become “in-One”? Is it a matter of a snatching away or a subtraction, if not a negation? Rather than reversal, displacement, negation and so forth, the properly scientific operation is globally of the order of
an immediate but of-the-last-instance identification of old contraries, which is not their totalization and which lets them be in their diversity and their identity as terms. A subtraction would remove a term = X from a dyad or would modify properties of its structure, but it would allow this form itself to subsist intact as the ultimate law of thought. On the other hand, the effect of the unary Identity that acts at the heart of opposites is the extraction and the manifestation of a new instance, irreducible to philosophy’s closed dyad. It takes the form of this
uni-lateral duality, of an original space—the theoretical—which is deployed from the One to the dyad itself. But this dyad is reduced to the state of a henceforth contingent term, without efficacy on the One. A space so finite that it is boundless (neither the One nor the reduced dyad play this role), unlimited like chaos.
Unilateralization as a generic term designates the ensemble of these effects (effects of theory or of knowledge) that the One-cause produces on the philosophical material and its dyadic structure. An effect of various types according to the “eidetically” distinguished layers in the philosophical decision, which serves us as materials and which we will set out in detail and more precisely elsewhere. It is crucial to grasp that the effect of radical Identity, the identity that is nothing of that on which it acts, is not a mediatized identification, a totalization or other absurd interpretation of this kind. It is: 1/ The immanence of unlimited theoretical transcendence. 2/ A setting-at-a-distance or
in unlimited distance, without possible reversibility, an absolute loss, the remainderless suspension of every philosophical pertinence. Hence this effect of distancing without return, of “unilateral” separation or dualysis of the philosophical mixture between its philosophical economy (the unity of opposites, their co-belonging), or rather its autopositional pertinence, and all kinds of determinations of this material, including the dyadic co-belonging that has become in its turn a simple “given.” 3/ An inscription of this manifold in the immanence of theoretical-being. There is, in fact, a conservation of multiple determinations contained within the philosophical dyad and held in suspense in this aprioric element of theory.
Scientific practice thus consists in describing, with respect to any material whatsoever (in this case, the philosophical material): 1. The uni-lateralizing rejection, the distancing suspension of the philosophical forms or of the anterior and transcendent organization. 2. The effect of nonpositional identification, in-One, of opposed terms or of materials, but from the perspective of these materials, of their transcendence as objective givens or phenomena. The result is what we call science’s nonthetic a prioris (we saw that there are four types of them). 3. The effect of this same Identity-of-the-final-instance on the opposed terms—which are conserved “concretely”—but now from the standpoint of theoretical immanence; avoiding the reintroduction of every structure of coupling, every philosophical syntax. The result is an entirely original and concrete “synthesis,” the synthesis of theoretical a priori immanence and of its objective givens, but it has now lost every transcendence and passed to the state of
theoretical manifold or specific manifold: the object-of-knowledge. The same philosophical “couple,” the same given material is transformed: its representational content remains invariant, its philosophical syntax is suspended, but this content takes a new original and positive form, that of knowledge.
As to point 2, a supplementary clarification is needed. The theoretical instance does not have a homogeneous nature. It is structured and specified, so much so that the general rule of identification/unilateralization must be diversified and must give place to more precise rules. In effect, the theoretical plane, founded as identity-of-the-last-instance of contraries, represents the level of the a priori, an a priori called “real” in this case. The a priori, if it has its essence in the One, is nevertheless, here as elsewhere, specified by the corresponding structural moments of the experience or of the object of which it is the a priori. They are the moments of the philosophical Decision, in which they naturally have the form of the Unity-of-contraries, unity as difference and not as identity. Thus the theoretical a priori identity of contraries will itself contain (in the mode specific to it) the a priori yet “nonthetic” moments, corresponding to equivalent moments of the philosophical decision. This decision includes four fundamental moments: 1/ the manifold or multiplicity of terms; 2/ the transcendence or exteriority of one term in relation to the other; 3/ the position or positionality of each term; 4/ the superior unity of the whole that each term assumes for the other. To these four moments will correspond four nonthetic and thus non-philosophical a prioris; these a prioris are characteristic of the theoretical and define in some sense the a priori scientific representation. Theoretical description proper or the production of the object of knowledge will thus pass through four stages. It will consist in reformulating or redescribing the philosophical dyad—which is now a material—as an immediate or non-philosophical identity of contraries. This identity, far from being simple and having a single mode, operates according to the four previously distinguished modes. These modes have each time the nonautopositional and nondecisional form of Identity-of-the-last-instance.
Non-philosophy as first science thus allows us to describe science’s most general rules. They can be applied to every term or statement, provided it is grasped
with its virtual horizon of philosophical operations and decisions. We need not, however, carry out all the de jure descriptions and be exhaustive, because they implicate one another, and it is enough that
one of this type, a non-philosophical description, exists for all the others to exist virtually. We are in science: to produce a validated knowledge is enough, in a sense, even if its constitution or its rectification is necessary.
The produced statements no longer describe the World and, above all, nothing philosophically comprehensible or organizable: abstract statements, unimaginable for perception and the philosophy that extends it, which have a meaning, but not the philosophical or rational meaning. They have a universality or a theoretical content superior to philosophy’s, and the different philosophies can be exchanged within them as in the dictionary of a universal translation. In effect, the Identity-of-the-last-instance of terms X and Y breaks their bi-univocal correspondence, their parallelism, and makes visible the necessary change in postulates. More than that: the change in the type or nature of axioms, since the second philosophical postulate (the specular dyad of terms X and Y) determines the nature of the philosophical “axioms” (the dyad is determinant in philosophy and not only dominant). The replacement of philosophy’s anhypothetical hypotheses with true scientific (yet real) axioms liquidates every parallelism or doublet in thought; it is the equivalent of a non-Euclidean mutation.
Given its relation to philosophy, its radical transcendental nature, the science of the One discovers as scientific a new domain of realities. It gives a theoretical status of data or of objective givens to the phenomena that fill this region and that did not have such a status before it: “phenomena” constituted by philosophy itself and its “natural” language. This science is probably the one that accesses most directly—we are not speaking of literary theory, which is not a science—nonlogical, nonformalized language. It accesses this language from the perspective of its meaning and not of its signifying materiality, which is the object of linguistics. (But this linguistically formulated materiality can be regrasped in turn through its virtual philosophical formulation and can enter into the sphere of the new science.) For the first time, outside philosophy, which is not a science, a rigorous discipline of the most autoreferent language or discourse, the philosophical, becomes possible.