THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT DETERMINATION AS HORIZON OF THE PROBLEM OF SINGULARITIES
LET’S return to the problem invoked in the introduction: the reality content of knowing, of science, and of philosophy. Its solution will introduce us more concretely to the problem of fractality.
We can call philosophy, and the specific history that accompanies it, the series of watchwords, injunctions, or balance sheet programs that take the following general form: return to the real! return to things themselves! at last thinking the forgotten real! and so forth. The balance sheet or digraphic form is decisive here for identifying the philosophical style: previous philosophers lacked the concrete, this particular determination and thus the determination eluded them; the fold or catastrophe that is in the real and that forms a singularity remained hidden from them; the elucidation of this lack, of this failure is the authentic real and the task to come, and so on. The philosophical decision is a retrospection of underdetermination and an anticipation of overdetermination; it is a decision in view of sufficient determination. There is no philosophy that does not echo this complaint and is not animated by this hope.
We
suspect the following, and this is all we can say provided we stop philosophizing naively: the philosophical “real” was only ever the synthesis of this deception of an ostensible real that escapes and of this will of an ostensible real that looms, the
decision of the sufficiency of determination. This decision is itself doomed to an insufficiency and an indetermination of a new kind. It is the whole of philosophy that “lacks”—but this time in an absolute and unconditional sense—the real because it desires it and because it believes it did enough for the real by desiring it. Philosophy begins by dividing and thus losing the real; it subsumes the real under operations that are at once too large and too small for it, too general and too particular. Philosophy as such is active ignorance, the repression of the following law: the real is not a contrary that flees before its contrary, like coldness before warmth; rather, it flees before the very pair of contraries and before every decision. And it is merely a subtler form of this ignorance to conclude, like the Contemporaries, that it is the impossible or the undecidable. For the real does not even flee before the pair of contraries. It purely and simply ignores them, and this defines its philosophical misfiring in a very different way. Hence the futility of the interminable labors that consist in attempting to concretize philosophy by impregnating it with aporia, contradiction, structure, difference,
différance, the undecidable, the fold, catastrophe, language, or else logic—we can recognize, in this hunt for determination, philosophy’s contemporary history and its vain attempts to take hold of the real or else to let itself be put to the test by it. The love of singularity is not singularity, but remains the love faced with the indifference of singularity. Philosophy itself exists only insofar as it abolishes the determined and replaces it with the will-to-determination. The watchwords that punctuate the history of “Greek” and “Occidental” thinkers were not really destined to make visible within philosophy an activity that develops outside-the-real, i.e., completely and without exception in the veils of transcendental Appearance, but to make us enter better into philosophy and under the law of its appearance: the call to abandon a philosophy unfaithful to the concrete is merely the decoy deployed by another, equally unfaithful philosophy in order to recall the dissidents under its banner and thus under the philosophical Authorities in general.
It
is in the very essence of the philosophical Decision, in its
concept of the real, that we must search for the reason for its radical inability to think the Determined or singularity. We can in this way gain a better understanding of the two great historical measures it took, in the epoch of Modern Times, to justify its approach as the only possible procedure: 1/ Critique of the
determined as dogmatic and of the dogmatic concept of the determined—new primacy of
determination over the determined (Kant); 2/ Autoposition of determination, which is thus presumed to apply to the real; hence the affirmation of determination’s sufficiency (sufficiency to the real): the
Principle of Sufficient Determination. These two traits are possible in their turn only by virtue of philosophy’s oldest operation,
the sameness of the real and of thinking-as-logos, then as-reason. Hence the “Principle of Sufficient Reason.” In reality, reason can be presumed to be determinant and sufficient only if it is thus inversely
associated with a real function or if it receives a “transcendental” value; only if the logico-metaphysical is conflated with an instance of reality. Hence the amphibology of the logical and the possible with the real, the mixture of the metaphysical with the transcendental: this is the ultimate foundation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This latter is necessarily filled by the principle of
sufficient determination, which is deployed nowadays in an increasingly catastrophist pathos (turn, fold, catastrophe, etc.), because determination—a rational operation—becomes sufficient (to the real) as reason itself (reason is here regrasped in its phenomenal plenitude, whatever its mode may be—analytical, synthetic, dialectical positive, differential, etc.).
However, the real is no less repressed in this case, because Determination annuls or suspends the Determined. Its transformation into a principle ends up rationalizing it, dividing it, and dissolving its reality. It is thus not the “meditation” of the Principle of Sufficient Determination that guarantees its irrepressible insufficiency…Nor its deconstruction, since a supplement of “becoming-other” cannot by definition make this principle globally contingent. Deconstruction’s half-solution makes clear that it places itself under the authority of the Principle of Sufficient Determination. The real critique of the philosophical enterprise can be carried out neither through a supplementary decision-of-return to the real nor through the undecidable (real) that sends us back or “sends” us (Turn-without-return) to the little piece of the real left in representation. These two attempts continue to be repressive and to seek to inscribe the Determined in a Determination too wide and too narrow for it. They seek to divide and exhibit it; and they refuse to recognize transcendental Appearance’s scope and depth.
The only
solution that does not enter into the repression of the real and that allows us to “analyze” it consists in grounding the radical contingency of the philosophical decision and of the philosophical undecidable, i.e., of Determination, in the Determined itself. On one absolute condition (its historical importance will become clear): that the return to the primacy of the Determined over Determination not be simply a “return”—one more return—to dogmatism against the critical-transcendental style, but the beginning in a given or in a Determined sufficiently autonomous that it is no longer understood as a mode of reason—of sufficient reason—and that with it the transcendental dimension of thought is not lost, that this dimension is, on the contrary, included in it. We have to discover, against dogmatism itself, the Determined as a transcendental immanent experience, sufficiently determined
in itself, and to take it as a guiding thread or paradigm of a new practice of Determination itself. Instead of going from Determination to the Determined, we will pass irreversibly from the latter to the former. Correlatively, Determination will no longer be a task before us, a destination or a teleology. It will now be the absolute aprioric opening without internal delimitation, an opening that is deduced from the Determined and expresses its effect without conditioning it in return. It is the ensemble of the a prioris or of procedures devoted to subjecting the Principle of Sufficient Determination to the law of the Determined:
to determine the rational determination by the real.
When it is not simply the Determined itself, or else determination as it flows now from the Determined, “sufficient determination” is a mode of the founding amphibology of the philosophical decision, an amphibology of the real and of reason. To this confusion, we oppose the solitude of the real as Determined and its power to determine—in-the-last-instance—reason itself. It is not reason that determines the real; it is the real that determines reason. It is not the real that is the Other of reason; it is reason that is the Other of the real. It is excessive and transcendent—this is the genuine dogmatism, the most profound, of every philosophy—to say of the real that it is rational. The most we can say about the real is that it is the Determined and therefore the determinant and that in this capacity reason obtains its determined-being from the real and from the real alone. Provided, as we have already noted apropos dogmatism, that the “retrocession” of determination to the real at the expense of reason not be the simple inversion of the philosophical order, but the consequence of the fact that the real is already in itself absolutely determined—in the way in which the Last-Instance is determined.
If the philosophical decision is a hastily determinant and thus indeterminant experience, since the watchword of sufficient determination is what divides and loses the Determined, the new paradigm can no longer correspond to any watchword whatsoever or to an injunction of the type “take care of being as a whole” or the type “return to things themselves!” It is the “contemplative” way of thinking, which “starts” from the cause and
occasionally from things in order to go toward representation and its labor without the shadow of a hope (and of a necessity) of “return.” This thought discovers in itself the power to suspend philosophy’s under/overdeterminant decisions and puts an end to the authority of the mixtures that associate any determined whatever with a decision. Philosophy believes it can discover the Determined through mixtures at the end of determination, as its concretion or its global effect. The deconstruction of the Principle of Sufficient Determination, like its “postmodern” autodissolution, belongs to the philosophical exploitation of the Determined and to the contemporary implosion of the transcendental illusion. It has no validity for describing chaos, and even for thinking phenomena as “materials,”
irreducibly singular, dispersed, deprived of ideological envelopes. These phenomena are perhaps none other, as we will observe, than scientific knowledges.
We hope to rediscover in this way reason’s real phenomenal content: not such that it would be codetermined by reason, but what should be called its real basis, an instance that has the power to transform and generalize reason into positive “nonreason,” a real content concealed by the “principles” of reason (the principle of sufficient determination, of maximum and minimum, of indiscernibles, of the “I think,” etc.), which express its vicious autoposition.
THE DETERMINED’S PRECESSION ON DETERMINATION
The Determined must be given and “usable” as such before every operation of determination and thus of donation. An operation cannot itself provide the real and singularity: it has to obtain them from elsewhere, i.e., from themselves. From itself, it introduces at most division, i.e., an under-determination and a poor universalization, a loss in singularity that does not do justice to the Determined. The Determined, on the other hand, is included “in” itself, lived not “in itself” but “in-One,” that is to say, as real Identity. Unlike the logico-real Identity that philosophers construct on the basis of the Principle of Identity,
real Identity is deprived of every operation, of every transcendence; it is the One, which we have described as nondecisional as much as nonpositional (of) self. The ground of the real is of the order of the strictly immanent lived experience and, what amounts to the same, of the order of the radically “
indivi-duel”
that we call “
indivi-dual.” The Determined is already given, given by itself rather than acquired. It cannot be transmitted or produced; it cannot be created from scratch by an operation of external distinction and assemblage. It contains no determinable matter within it. Just as the individual—provided it is understood in its “non-philosophical” sense—precedes every process of individuation that cannot affect it, so the Determined—
as nothing-but-immanence or provided it is understood in the sense of objectively transcendental, nondogmatic lived experience—precedes every process of determination exerted on the Determinable and cannot be produced by such a process. The Determined is the Undivided itself, the real Identity, which has never been acquired and given in exteriority, even as
causa sui or in the wake of an infinite process. What is unlimited, on the other hand, is Determination’s work on the material of the Determinable.
From the “first”
Determined flows then a new concept of Determination. The suspension of the amphibology of the real and the rational—or rather the suspension of its claim, since the mixture is conserved in its effectivity—cannot be once again an external operation, a simple decision or separation, a
unitary duality. It has to be—between the real itself and the amphibology of the real and the rational—an absolute, originary duality that is not produced on a prior identity nor destined to be unified or closed. A primitive duality, an indifference in a unique and nonreciprocal direction. Or a double donation of the real: as the nonblended, as the already-Determined in itself,
and as blended with the rational in the style of philosophical mixtures. A duality constituted of the Determined and of another pole, that of Sufficient Reason, already reduced or suspended by the previous one, that is to say, in this case, rejected by it as unreal and transcendent. The “logic” that should be recognized here is no longer philosophical; it is the logic of the Duality-without-scission, as it is founded in the One: logic of the
a-priori-separated-being, which flows from real Identity and holds philosophical mixtures in abeyance. Far from amphibology positing itself as the essence of the real, it is now only its most transcendent side, the most deprived of reality. The new paradigm makes the real-without-reason what determines—suspends in its claims but also realizes or determines—reason-without-the-real: the presumed determinant reason must now be determined and become real, and it can become so, given the starting conditions, only as
nonreason. Nonreason is neither the negation of reason nor the reason of the no(n), but the correlate that corresponds to the real or to the One. It is reason when, ceasing to claim to determine the One, it is transformed into a simple correlate-of-representation (of) the One that determines it in this function.
Marx foresaw and masked the a priori, static duality of the sufficient real and of the de jure insufficient reason. The duality of the intra- and superstructure is of the type of these real dualities that serve to replace philosophy. But Marx assumed this duality without grounding it in the elucidation of the real’s radical or antephilosophical essence. He demonstrated—against the whole philosophical and “idealist” tradition of the Principle of Sufficient Reason—the insufficiency of philosophical Reason in its “real content.” But he was unable, strictly speaking, to found this demonstration on the precession of the Determined on Determination. He did not begin by elucidating the essence of the Determined and the nondogmatic sense of its precession and contented himself with conflating it once again with transcendent instances taken from the effectivity of History (labor power, relations of production, etc.). The first task of a thought of real determination—i.e., already determined before any operation—is thus to exhibit, in a specific and coherent mode with its object, the Determined in itself and to distinguish it from Determination and the Determinable (which is now “Reason,” determinable as “nonreason”). Then, on this real basis, which is thus manifested in itself, it becomes possible to extract the a priori or real dualities, with their structure of inexchangeability, nonconvertibility, and irreversibility between the pole of Determination (with its rules that flow from the Determined) and the transcendent pole of the Determinable or reason. This is the labor of Determination become real, i.e., secondary or “without principle.” We will describe it.
FROM RECIPROCAL DETERMINATION TO DETERMINATION IN-THE-LAST-INSTANCE
If the Determined—elucidated in its radical essence—irreversibly precedes Determination, then Determination is a process whose sense and structure will change in turn. In the context of the Principle of Sufficient Determination, determination finds its completion and its concept as “reciprocal determination.” In effect, when it is Reason that is (auto)determinant, it is so in a specific way that we should discern in order to oppose to it the new practices of the already determined determination. It is determinant
1/ through a dividing and itself divided causality (maximum-minimum, end-means, form-matter, agent-effect, matter-ideality);
2/ through a reciprocal causality of the determinant and the determined, the latter being determinant in its turn;
3/ through a causality that is underdeterminant (division) and overdeterminant (redoubling, doubling, and double); the completed determination—in this case the determined—is the result of a synthesis or an effectivity;
4/ through a spatial causality of the topological type at best (continuous or more or less dehiscent fold of the determinant and the determined; for example, fold of “cause” and “effect”), which then continually conditions all the derived causalities (sociological, economical, psychological), etc.
On the other hand, when the real or the Determined (nondogmatic, i.e., not rationally determined) is determinant, Determination becomes a new form of causality unknown to metaphysics. Marx divined this form under the rubric of “determination in the last instance.” The Determined or immanent Identity is determinant:
1/
Through a causality that neither divides its object (here “sufficient Determination,” which is driven back to the state of simple Determinable) nor, above all, is itself divided. Nondivided causality of the “last instance,” which remains in itself, regardless of the distancing of what receives its effect. Unidirectional or irreversible causality, always exerting itself from the real toward the mixtures of effectivity, from the Determined toward the Determinable, without taking a path of return and without looping back. The Determined does not share Determination with the Determinable, to which “overdetermination” alone will return: through a causality that acts each time on the “whole” as such of the Determinable. It treats this whole globally, with rules that respect a priori its indivisibility—its identity—and do not attempt to dissolve or deconstruct it afresh.
2/ Through a causality of extraction and not of abstraction. Extraction of a priori structures, which form the “tissue” of the real’s scientific representations. In the ambiguous term determination we will distinguish a noetic side (precisely this causality of Identity, the “determination in-the-last-instance”) and a noematic side (these a priori structures that “fill” or specify the previous side and serve in their turn to determine the Determinable).
3/ Through a causality that determines a function of “overdetermination” for the Determinable (without the counterpart of an underdetermination). It globally transforms the Determinable into a condition of existence (although not an essential condition) of the a priori structures of Identity’s representation. It does not divide or underdetermine the Determinable, but uses it as a necessary condition for specifying and individuating the a priori, i.e., for “determining” it in the only mode in which it can be determined (the a priori that is already determined by its cause): the mode of overdetermination. We will be attentive to a few nuances:
• since the a priori is already determined, it can at most be overdetermined by the Determinable itself;
• the real is what realizes the Determination, and this Determination consists, among other things, in liberating the Overdetermination and “abandoning” it to the Determinable. To determine the Determinable is thus also to transform it into simple overdetermination. The system Determination-Overdetermination cannot produce effectivity, philosophy’s weakened singularities, but something like hypereffectivity, knowledge’s dual singularities. The effectivity or the Determinable is taken integrally to specify-individuate the a priori structures that will have been extracted from it through the force of the Determined.
4/
Through an absolutely nonspatial or nontopological causality. The exclusion of every (idealized) space outside thought is one of the most typical traits of the new paradigm. The rejection of
determinant distance—which belongs to every rational or sufficient determination—in the sphere of the simple Determinable, a rejection by the Determined itself, ends up liberating thought from its toplogico-transcendental model and its variants (the figurative and the figural; the fold and the catastrophe, etc.). Understood in this radical sense, the Determined is not only unfigurable; it is the very force of the Unfigurable, that which transforms every figure into a “nonfigure” (where the figure is now used for overdetermining its condition or its unfigurable real kernel), every topology into a “nontopology” more universal than the topological determination of thought, every catastrophe into a “noncatastrophist” experience of catastrophes, etc.
The materiality of phenomena, their singularity, has ceased to be attached to a materialist thesis, to a philosophical position and a philosophical decision. It is now an ensemble of procedures—defined by rules that formalize this operation of Determination-Overdetermination—exerted on the Determinable, i.e., eventually on phenomena that demand a strong coefficient of “empirical” materiality. We will no longer conflate the materiality elaborated, the singularity acquired or produced dually on the real basis of the One, with the objectivated or empirical, always transcendent and mixed-unitary forms of a brute or primary materiality. All the philosophical watchwords of return to the concrete or to things themselves—whether it is a matter of the “perceived World” or “Being itself,” “Reason in history” or “Arche-writing,” “postmodern” debris or “desiring flows” of the unconscious—have something in common: they seek to place the most fulgurating singularity of the real alongside, in the vicinity of, withdrawn from…objectivation. Understood in its phenomenal richness, objectivation is a structure of thought whose invariants we have described, where every phenomenon to be interpreted is presumed to be accompanied by a space of interpretation or a universal plane that traverses it, separates it from itself, and stretches it out for an infinite becoming. This paradigm of thought is obviously the philosophical Decision, articulated and founded in a postulate that elsewhere we called Heraclitean and that we can tentatively compare with Euclid’s fifth postulate (“parallel postulate”), with which it has some affinity. In effect, when the Determined is elucidated in its mode of radical donation, from which is excluded every quasi-topological plane or space of interpretation that becomes indifferent to it, this plane—or rather all the possible types of such planes become contingent in relation to the Determined itself and move into the sphere of the Determinable.
One may obviously wonder whether we have not replaced the topological codetermination of thought with another, attaching to the thought (of) the Determined—but this time outside it—a “space-time” of a new type? Probably not. A crucial difference is that, on one hand, this “space” is at last radically abstract, free of any determinant reciprocal topology or distance, stripped of every transcendental geometry; and that, on the other, it no longer codetermines the Determined, but is “seen-in” the Determined, in its immanence rather than from itself or through a process of infinite torsion-reflection. This opening without “decision” of opening, this unfilled space of an “open” or of an ekstatic-horizontal position, this uprightness in a word is what we call uni-lateralization. Unilateralization is thus an operation of determination exerted on the Determinable, but uni-rectional and without possible reciprocity.
The new paradigm excludes, as we see, the whole manifold of catastrophes with which the philosophical decision is encumbered and that are modes of the invariant of objectivation. Unilateralization is precisely objectivation’s phenomenal or real content; it does not have its form, but can, at most, as we now know, be overdetermined by it. Unilateralization is the a priori—itself complex and articulated—that is necessary for there to be “real objectivity,” rather than “objective reality,” and an authentic experience of the object, for example, scientific or aesthetic, that no longer responds to the mechanism of philosophical objectivation and topology. The “non-philosophical” paradigm shows that the object exists, but without passing through the system of decisions and doublings by which philosophy ensures the object in its own mode and annuls the determination by seeking to realize it through doubling. Unilateralization represents something like a diachronic, irreversible objectivity, without chiasmus. It is the outcome of the “dualysis” of the decision’s mixture, the real duality of nonthetic objectivity and of objectivation. Objectivity is an old word that harbors an amphibology and conceals unilateralization’s phenomenal existence. Unilateralization operates in the manner of a “reduction,” but without recovery or redoubling. It is finished and static like duality itself—it has only its process—and has already reduced every philosophy to the state of determinable materials. It is indeed an experience (of) transcendence, but a “simplified” experience, one that ceases to be divided and folded on itself. It is the only form of transcendence that can be correlated to immanence when this immanence is thought as radical.
What we can call Determination in a new sense of the term is thus this unilateralization, with its “complement” of overdetermination. Unilateralization defines the real aspect of singularity; overdetermination, its other aspect, constituted by the Determinable that is assigned to the functions of Overdetermination. We thus abandon the old transcendent paradigm, which projects the singularity at worst on the object’s generality or screen, at best on the “back-fulguration” that illuminates the screen and that, instead of extricating or removing the singularity from its transcendent coating, has not ceased enveloping it more and more.
THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF UNILATERAL SINGULARITY: 1. THE DETERMINABLE, CHÔRA, OR UNIVERSAL MATERIALITY
Unlike philosophical singularity or singularity-by-mixture, the “non-philosophical” singularity is essentially unilateral and rests on the Determination-in-the-last-instance. We still have to develop its two sides in their specificity—both of which are (even the Determinable) an internal requirement—into a prioris of science. For the Determinable not only designates the philosophical Decision’s brute given, but also what it becomes qua givens or data of science: it is an a priori and is equally determinant by its a priori status.
In the philosophical regime, any object (sensible or ideal) contains two entangled sides, both dissimilar and partially identical. Their identity is equivalent to their interinhibition or their mutual restriction (for example, to the visible side corresponds an invisible side that delimits it; to the given, a procedure of sedimented and enveloped production; to the external horizon, an internal horizon; to the signified, one more and one less signifier; to the full case, an empty case, etc.). This is an essential law; it can be indefinitely exemplified. Even the Heideggerian “withdrawal,” which is “the same” as donation, remains an (extreme) mode of this law.
On the other hand, we move to the unilateral singularity, at least to its material or “determinable” side, by absolutely unfolding—without supplemental refolding, operation of folding or fold of Being—the two sides of the mixture and by inserting them within a “space” of another type, absolutely simple or foldless—more powerful or more universal than these sides and that manifests them in the same way. Not only is the empirical or objectivity “inscribed” in this space, ceasing to be simply something empirical, but also the withdrawn or invisible side, which concealed for philosophy the set of strata, procedures, horizons, and processes of objectivation, of decision and position, the set of conditions of possibility and even the “withdrawal” or the “reserve” that are also given or manifested in this space. They are now manifested in an absolute way (we suspect that it no longer corresponds to a philosophical “parousia”): they will be seen-in-One-in-the-last-instance. The a priori’s transcendence and ideality, and even the transcendental withdrawal, whatever its mode, belong from now on to what we call a
universal or nonthetic materiality. Not a restrained or mixed philosophical materiality (opposed or contrasted to ideality), but a materiality that is formed of the absolute manifold of all that can be given in a sensible and ideal way at the end of transcendence: all that is not given in the mode of the One’s radical immanence. But it is also not an “empircization” of ideality or a horizontal “flattening”: it is the insertion of the horizontal-ekstatic itself into a material universal “expanse” devoid of any structure of objectivation. It is thus the
object, if you want, but more powerful and universal than the procedures of objectivation, since they are in turn reduced to the state of this specific “object” of science. In other words: the absolute, reserve-less donation affects the reserve itself; it is a materiality without a materialist thesis to limit it, since the materialist thesis is now included in this materiality.
Two contemporary interpretations should be carefully avoided. This universal materiality cannot be
textual in its order: the textual (even the “general” textual) is precisely a mixed mode of singularity, in which the material side is hastily filled by transcendent phenomena (signifier, arche-writing) drawn from the philosophical object or its margins. The textual generality is restrained or limited by the signifier’s empirico-material side (and vice versa) and must be reversed in its turn in a more universal and more abstract materiality. This materiality will include it as a simple material or determinable, in the same capacity, without any privilege, as the empirico-material side. The dual singularity introduces a more radical experience of the determinable and emancipates thought from textual servitude. But it equally emancipates it from another conception:
surfaces. Nonthetic materiality is not obtained through a process of
rise-of-surfaces or through a universal planification. To be sure, surfaces and planes are said in the plural, and even “in the multiple,” but they interbelong, conceal one another or become-screen, mutually “save” or “spare” one another. These procedures of difference and identity pertain to philosophy or to mixtures and have to be transferred in their turn to universal materiality; they have to be treated as a simple material and manifested outside every
surface-of-manifestation. Contemporaries have developed the style of “surfaces” and forces, of desiring surfaces or textual surfaces, of desiring forces or textual forces. But the surfaces are generalized only through the most invariant philosophical operations: dividing/doubling; sundering/refolding, etc. To these mixed, semimaterial, and semi-ideal surfaces, we will oppose a materiality capable of encompassing ideality itself, a materiality that is not further restrained or limited by its empirico-objective contents. We will not reach a theory of truly universal singularities unless we succeed in breaking their
limitation or their
specification as textual, topological, desiring, semiological…their nature as mixtures.
This is to say, that within the material space everything is indifferently yet positively reduced to the state of the determinable: all the philosophical differences and hierarchies; all the degrees of reality, of sense and of value; all the articulations of the given and of procedures; all the syntaxes of philosophical decisions and their specified modes (for example, by Human Sciences) are de-posited as indifferent, determinable and, to this extent, equivalent. Everything is now simple “materials” for other rules: those of Determination-in-the-last-instance that stem from the Determined or the One. With regard to the Determined and Determination, the Determinable is composed of the two sides of the mixture outside their transcendent relation, sides that have become indifferent to themselves and thus equivalent. Even the philosophical decision becomes a philosophically inert material. Such a materiality can no longer be limited or reduced to its empirico-objective form because this materiality is only a “point” or an indifferent manifold without privileges. It is simple rather than simplified, without a structure of decision and of (re)doubling. It is an absolutely “nonbaroque” singularity.
Thus science does not posit the object
twice, because it includes the autoposition in a new, more universal experience of the object. But what does it mean that science “requires” this? It is the Determined itself (on account of its precession on Determination) that “extracts” its two sides outside the mixture. It renders them indifferent and equivalent and casts them into a new place. In a complementary way, this extraction has another side: the suspension or reduction of the mixed form, its pertinence, its claim to legislate, and its insertion in its turn into the Determinable. In reality, this double “operation” is not an operation; it is simply what is seen and described of the mixture in the immanence of the One. It amounts to seeing the “extracted” itself rather than proceeding to an
effective extraction and, on the other hand, to seeing-in-One the mixed form as suspended or reduced, rejected as transcendent and unreal. This nonoperational character of extraction and of reduction forms a system with the precession of the Determined on Determination and of the residue on reduction.
We can call chôra this space of universal materiality. A space that is never devoid of matter, but truly universal and devoid of topological structure, of fold and refold. Grasped in this way, outside its geometrico-philosophical determinations, and having become as a priori of materiality the object of a transcendental experience, the chôra is clearly the equivalent of the Kantian “sensible intuition”: it gives the object or the phenomenon. But it gives this object in an absolute way, since it equally gives in this mode and indifferently the a priori forms of philosophical or transcendent objectivity that Kant, for instance, distinguished from their matter. There will be no real universalization of transcendental Aesthetics unless thought accesses an experience of the object’s materiality that is not limited by the apparatus of objectivation, unless it stops wanting to fill intuition’s pure space and time with local geometric knowledges. Dogmatism’s end will be assured in the same stroke, the end of sensibility’s unitary reduction to the understanding, thanks to the dual reduction of the mixture of sensibility/understanding for the benefit of a materiality that will not be limited in the sensible-empirical way. The scientific posture is neither Leibnizian nor Kantian. It reduces every philosophical decision, i.e., every variously proportioned mixture of sensibility and the understanding, and offers a universal Determinable to procedures of Determination—a Determinable that is the object of a transcendental experience.
In the
chôra, which is itself “extracted” and “reduced,” all the transcendent determinations become equivalent. This material space free of every geometry, which reduces in a certain way every scientific knowledge or every theory to the state of a radical empirical [
empirie], is equivalent to the
emplacement or the “em-place” of these knowledges as well as of philosophical decisions that take hold of them. The Em-place is not the philosophical
displacement, which is always coupled with an anterior
reversal. It is the absolutely originary and simple place, the topos-without-topology that the scientific posture requires and offers to every philosophical decision. The Emplace is the Determinable’s absolute manifestation as such. Within it, all the determinations become of the order of indifferent material.
There is thus an absolute materiality or transcendence, a nonempirical manifold or multiple, identical in-the-last-instance and therefore not accompanied by a doubling multiplicity. The chôra is a materiality that is radically individuated as materiality. It is the manifold of transcendence, but it is an extracted and reduced manifold, a transcendence that is transcendentally extracted and freed from its philosophical or mixed forms, the forms of autoposition. It is not a site outside generic and specific distinctions, but the site, the topical manifold of and for these distinctions.
THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF UNILATERAL SINGULARITY: 2. THE DETERMINANT OR UNIVERSAL OBJECTIVITY
From the mixed to the dual or unilateral, singularity’s material side gains a nonpositional universality. The same is true for the object’s ideal or objective side: there is a “real objectivity” rather than the mixture of “objective reality”; it too must be developed for itself, unleashed from its premature blending with the object and rooted in the Determined alone. If we take the Determined as an immanent guiding thread, then a pure objectivity (without any object or any blending with the Determined) will manifest itself in the state of absolute given. Just as the Determinable is extracted from its mixed form, and just as this form—its authority at least—is reduced and rejected as unreal, so this “Determinant” is seen-in-One or extracted from its objective-mixed form, and this form is reduced or suspended as impertinent (at the same time that it passes into the “simple” universal materiality). The residue thus extracted is clearly a priori as well—like the Determinable—and it is the object in-the-last-instance of a radical transcendental experience.
Concretely, it is a matter of the abstract and absolutely universal form of objectivity, at least of its phenomenal residue. Given the Determined’s precession, this form is by definition devoid of the structures of autoposition and decision, of the dyadic syntaxes of ekstasis or transcendence, of the project or the horizon. Absolutely open ideal milieu, purified of the traces of generic and specific distinctions, as well as the traces of every more originary philosophical operation. This ideality without object-rupture or internal limitation, without folding, doubling, or flow, is the objectivity = X (of) every object, nondecisional and nonpositional objectivity (of) self because it has the One as its essence. The
chôra was the manifestation of the hidden itself, the absolute donation of the withdrawal in a mode that was no longer the opposite of the hidden (“parousia”); it was in some sense the philosophical object’s “full-employment.” To the same extent, scientific objectivity is in its turn the “full-employment” whose philosophical form is the restricted use. Real and not effective objectivity, but unreal in its nature, an unreal that has as such an absolute positivity in its order. This formal a priori of objectivity is now anterior to the mixture of the “objective reality”; it is extracted “by” the One and reduced in its effective form, voided in its turn of every philosophical topology.
Experienced and described in this way, the Determinant is simple only by its essence-One. In its specific nature, it is complex and includes three a prioris that correspond, in this nondecisional mode (of) self, to the a priori structures of objectivity: the object’s transcendence or exteriority, its positionality or its stability, its identity or its unity. There are thus three non-philosophical a prioris of real objectivity: 1/ a nonthetic Transcendence (NTT), experience (of) a simple, not redivided and redoubled alterity, without autoaffection; 2/ a nonthetic Position (NTP); and 3/ a nonthetic Unity (NTU), of which we can say the same thing as of NTT. This objectivity is in itself, by its essence, undifferentiated, in the sense that it applies to the most universal Determinable or constitutes a “space” that is absolutely universal, an ideal and no longer material space. But this a priori field of nonthetic objectivation is intrinsically constituted of different moments. It ceases to be a philosophically de-cisive, discriminating or differentiating factor, a factor of hierarchy, of sense and of value. It is “defatted” of every decision and forms a field of presence without a present object, an objectivity without ob-jectivation. To the chôra as intensification or densification of materiality thus corresponds an other side (which is autonomous in its order), the side of an ideality that is itself intensified by the suspension of all that is presented, not only as object, but as mixture of “objective reality.”
Obviously Determination’s
complete concept contains not only the three procedures of nondecisional objectivity (of) self but also the
chôra’s procedure, which has the same nature. Given that these procedures are all founded in-the-last-instance in the One or the real’s immanence, they are unified by this immanence with only the occasional help of an external or transcendent agent of synthesis. Together, they give place to Determination in the broad sense. Determination, as we see, includes not only Determination by nonthetic objectivity but necessarily this determination’s overdetermination. It is ensured this time by the material or the Determinable, which represents the conditions of existence of scientific objectivity.
The edifice of the unilateral singularity is complex in its own way. It is no longer the bilateral or circular mixture in which determination is at once under-and-over-determination; it is the dual or, better yet, the unilateralization, through the determination (in a nonthetic form) of overdetermination (by the Determinable). Such a concept of singularity eliminates, once and for all, the philosophical effect of underdetermination by which the Determined’s reality was dissolved a priori. When the Determined precedes Determination, Determination becomes autonomous and full in its order, not affected by a lack. And the overdetermination befalls it additionally and necessarily, but in no way as the wretched complement to an underdetermination. This is complexity’s positive concept, which philosophy does not know for the same reasons that it has no full and positive experience of singularity.