RETROSPECTION (2014)
PHILOSOPHERS always present their undertaking with the seriousness of ferrets at work and usually without much humor. Saving their irony for the world or for their predecessors, they are more reluctant to take on their own fictions, their “novels.” And yet they dream. Plato and Nietzsche suggest that philosophers “dream” of the fumes of intoxication rather than of intoxication itself, of poetic inspiration rather than of poetry. In most cases, their dreams come very close to reality, lingering for a long time over concepts. But these reveries are philosophy’s matrix, its preparation or the lying-in-wait of its rationalization, the way Descartes presents his dreams in order to prepare the exposition of his cogito. Others, wide-awake, still fantasize about chaos, explosion, breakage, rupture, and collision, but also, and quite differently, tsunami or drowning, always like Descartes. These are the philosopher’s dreams within the limits of simple reason, according to Kant, that cold dreamer, one of the most humorous perhaps, who was surprised to find himself dreaming of Swedenborg.
As for us, it is time to sound the alarm and to clarify an ambiguous situation. We hesitate between two modes of classification grounded in the style of our object, a corpuscular mode earlier and—given the final impossibility of maintaining this corpuscular distinction between stages or eras—an undulatory mode now. Each of non-philosophy’s works contains all of this in an indivisible or “holistic” way. But even the division into stages or steps serves to mark doses or proportions, nuances and accents that should not be dogmatically isolated. Non-philosophy is a system of stages as much as of phases, of particles as much as of flows or waves. It is risky to prefer the classification by steps or stages and to fail to notice the waves that sweep them away and render every classification undecidable.
No doubt we too have dreamed. We dreamed of a joyous Iliad that left too hastily to look for its Odyssey, that believed it reached this Odyssey from time to time, and that wandered from shore to shore without ever finding solid ground, doomed to sink in the contemplation of immobile stars that the river Metaphysics carries along. Let’s say immediately and clearly: non-philosophy is a dreamed philosophy, a reverie or a fiction that owes a great deal to a certain power of dreaming peculiar to music.
Theory of Identities is the book of the milieu, of the middle. Such is its situation, the one from which a balance sheet starts to become possible. It presents itself as a balance sheet in a doubly forced writing—forced by the problematic results of the Philosophical Enterprise and by the crucial question: “how can we continue with so weak a productivity?” Let’s think for a moment in terms of capitalist humor, i.e., in prosaic terms: philosophers have spent lavishly and imprudently, overindulged the zero unemployment, and consumed without restraint the abundance of materials. Let’s have them work “part time” and experience a labor scarcity. Most of them do not worry about their means of subsistence; the decline of these means is not their problem. But what can existence and the whole of ontology do without means, if they are merely consumptive, i.e., if they simply reproduce their own sterility?
The work’s
milieu, its middle, is a way of rejecting the system. And there are many possible rejections. Treated negatively as a caesura, the milieu determines a philosophy’s fairly rigid and definite order of exposition (Heidegger and Wittgenstein). This is, for us, the sure sign of a will-to-system and to-unity that failed. But it does not always divide in half a work that will be stitched and disjointed a thousand times by the interpreters. Treated more positively as a continuous milieu of existence, it does not exclude modalities, nuances, and accents. We began by practicing the care of the One against the care of Being, but we have also cut and recut a great deal in the classical concepts. The One has become the One-in-One, then the under-One, then Idempotence. The classical duality has become the unilateral duality or the complementarity. The ekstatic vector was divested of the double ekstasis and has become underekstasis, identity a nonidentity. Non-philosophy is a thought of the duality that began through a reclamation of the One rather than of Being. But the One founds a very different lineage (One-in-One, flux, duality, under-One, before-priority) from Being’s (priority, difference, stases or stages or figures) and leads more reliably to duality than Being does, which aspires to the One and is satisfied with that aspiration. Under this complex form,
Theory of Identities is—after
Biography of the Ordinary Man—the retrospection on the construction of a philosophy, the central arc of a bridge open to the circulation between the first construction of non-philosophy and its current or “nonstandard” forms. It is the
mise en tableau, the visual concentrate of a long caesura that shapes philosophy’s intimacy through science’s means and that appears here according to a vertical cut, which clearly shows what the battle between these two thoughts (science and philosophy) has been. In this sense it is a synoptic book, a systematic capitalization of acquired knowledge, a book that crosses once more the various possible paths within non-philosophy, as the digraphia of a balance sheet, recording the advances and retreats, at times lacking the balance and symmetry of later works. It brushes against the encyclopedia, without returning to Noah’s arch of absolute knowing in which Hegel recollected history.
Let’s bracket the dream (even though we will have to come back to it). Is there anything real left in this book and in the entirety of our work? There are three possible strata of interpretation. Superficially, a partition of the still very academic material according to classical themes and, above all, according to stages or eras. More profoundly, a quantum distribution by waves and corpuscles. Lastly, a musical affect, at least an aesthetic inspiration of the whole, which can be detected ever since the first text on Ravaisson.
The most superficial appearance is the exoteric, scholastic, and contingent multiplicity of courses, a tradition that stems from Aristotle, with its transformed remnants in
Theory of Identities and in the moderns of stratification from Hegel to Badiou, according to objects and domains (ethics, ontology, psychology, logic). Within this, we introduce the central theme of identity as a weapon against the postmodern theme of difference, but it does not yet reach quantum indivisibility. We carve out an essence of science; then an essence of non-philosophy and of its fundamental concepts like determination-in-the-last-instance; then generalized fractality, which is conjugated with philosophy as a terrain for the exercise of this problematic. Here fractality anticipates the future use of quantum mechanics. Generalized fractality rather than textuality: this
mise en terrain of the problematic corresponds to some of our “experimental” contemporary texts, which exhibit an artistic fractality. Lastly, its application as “artificial philosophy,” which anticipates a mode of nonstandard philosophy or of philosophy through the quantum model.
The question of stages is reifying. It engenders continuous appearances and dogmatic and unilateral interpretations. Non-philosophy is an elementary material, but it can be distributed differently through waves and oscillations. The undulatory and particulate form is not just an image or a metaphor. Each work has a near-absolute autonomy; each restarts the trajectory that assembles the various phases or brings the entire problematic into play. This is the corpuscular aspect with its various emphases, which are so many oscillations, so much so that each of non-philosophy’s works as well as their totality give the impression of a wave or a thrust and reject as superficial philosophy’s classical distinctions. Hence the replacement of the division-by-stages—which appeared inadequate and surpassed—with another more supple and more individualized schema, no doubt more in harmony with the current schema of a quantification of the work (in the “qualitative” sense that quantification takes in physics rather than in the sense of the quantity of books and titles).
Nevertheless, we are still dealing with a surface-inventory that has to move from discursive themes to another model, for example to leitmotifs à la Wagner. Non-philosophy is doubled more globally by a musical organization or tissue. Vertically, it is a spiraled thought, contrapuntal in spirit or with superposed themes (in a musical rather than quantum sense, but the former announces the latter). Horizontally, it is a melody that exposes and reexposes the themes. Its profound or desired model is musical. To be sure, its form is still too classical and insufficiently inventive, and nowadays it dares to go beyond the academic form only in some experimental texts grounded in repetition. It is born of relatively precise obsessions, of repetition through a system of variations, the ideal of a repetitive or variational thought from the great classical models (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner) up to the most recent (Cage). A work is a retrospective self-knowledge, the permanence of solutions and of obsessions, a theoretical confession of faith. And music is the placenta that has to give birth to non-philosophy.
What does it mean to philosophize in a nonstandard way? Theory of Identities is a moment in the search for a new practice. We can now expound a few of its traits. It always involves philosophy, but in new relations to science, to art, or to religion. It is not a matter of a new “philosophy of… ” nor, on the other hand, a scientific, artistic, or religious practice of philosophy. We touch on all these old relations, but their confusions would denature our project.
On the side of the knowings [savoirs] that are our materials (empirical but also philosophical knowings, which we no longer distinguish as the philosophical tradition does), what we claim as “gnosis” in a modernized sense is a double knowing: it pertains to being and to having. On one hand: the one we “are” for the having that is acquired and sedimented under the rubric of universal humanity and that we all assume; on the other, the one we are currently acquiring the knowledge [connaissance] of or the one we “are” only under the rubric of non-philosophy. Obviously we are no longer dealing with traditional relations founded on the hierarchical distinction between philosophy and some knowings, since philosophy now forms part of these empirical knowings. This old distribution is replaced by another, indexed to being and having, to the historical tradition and the current acquisition of a new knowledge via “nonphilosophical” paths or procedures. This is the distinction between universal knowing (which seeks to be total in the sense of philosophy) and the knowing we will dub “generic” “or “man-oriented” instead of “philosophy-oriented.”
We are not specialists of the postures called science, art, and religion (we are not even specialists of philosophy, which, to begin with, is any posture whatsoever). But we assume them each time as materials or variable properties of an object = X to be determined. We obviously assume them as our virtually universal being, which participates in this acquisition of the primitive reserve of knowings. But we also assume them more profoundly under the current rubric of non-philosophy, which deals with “having” or acquiring a knowledge of a new type and of another destination, a knowledge that no longer enters into this primitive reserve but makes use of it in order to go beyond it. For this reason, we posit the identity of the variables of science and of philosophy, to be conjugated in view of this object = X. But we also distinguish as quantum and generic the knowledge of this knowing that has a new object of its own, neither that of science (of art, of religion) nor of philosophy. It is the generic object par excellence, which can only be humanity. Not the humanity of humanism, but the humanity of the last-instance.
How can we gain or produce this second knowing, the knowledge we call “gnostic”? The first operation of the method, the first product, is specifically quantum in spirit and consists in reciprocally weakening the brute spontaneity of the two opponents and in transforming them into simple inventive, productive, or variable forces for a nonart, a nonethics…that will therefore be deprived of every principial [principielle] and dominant value. This first product of variables (multiplications = interpretations) derealizes and idealizes the science that is extracted from the real and interiorized to the concept. At the same time, and inversely, the second product, the inverse of the first, deprives the concept as brute variable of its instinct for domination and does so by means of quantum algebra (the imaginary number). We thus transform the brute properties of the primitive reserve into variables (nonbrute this time, but quantum) within the chamber where the struggle between disciplines unfold. And we prepare a wholly new—and this time generic—determination of the struggle, which will interiorize in its own way the quantum struggle that neutralized the opponents.
The outcome is an equalization of variables and a quantum knowledge, probable rather than certain, a way of asserting quantum indetermination. For the moment, and at this stage, the indetermination is neutral; it holds indifferently for the two sides of the conflict. This method of reciprocal double interpretation is a symmetry, give or take an inversion. The products’ inversion implies noncommutativity itself for the symmetrical instant; it implies the primacy of one or the other variable or of any product whatever. Symmetry is still formal or indifferent and, in this sense, has to be broken. We still have to decide which variable will sweep it away, if this role is not assigned to philosophy on its own, science on its own, or to one of their products.
Hence a second operation: a new (this time “generic”) decision has to be grafted onto the quantum. It will no longer be a decision of overdetermination or of mutual reinforcement in view of a superior knowing à la philosophers. It will instead be a subtraction by the real, i.e., by science, which ratifies quantum noncommutativity. A third instance, a third term, is needed to materially break or realize this symmetry, which is still entirely formal. Either the quantum symmetry remains in itself as a virtual third term or instance of overhanging [
surplomb] or the break in symmetry pertains to a nonquantum origin, even if it also affects the quantum. It is a matter of actualizing the quantum and its still-formal indetermination. We cannot stop at this pure formalism of products. We have to tie them together, if only to find a real order between them; this order makes possible a nonformal inversion that does not remain external to the hands of an agent.
The instance that has to carry out this passage from the quantum to the generic and break the quantum’s still-formal symmetry—by realizing it concretely in the experience of the real—is what we call idempotence, a fundamental algebraic notion. Idempotence is what subsists of the One when it is affected by the imaginary number. In reality, we distinguish the double transcendence or the doublet of the philosophical variable and the absolute instance of the One-of-One, which is also specifically affected by the imaginary number of the quantum real. We introduce here the One that finishes the philosophical edifice. And so, there are three variables to be considered and not only two. The One must also be brought face to face with the imaginary number, it has to be affected by it as idempotence. But this number, at least insofar as it is multiplied or interpreted by philosophy as a simple variable, is also stripped of its philosophical sense in order to become a variable or a productive force, as we have already said. We understand by this that the productive forces are multiplied by one another and are so retroactively from the generic One of idempotence, an instance that is superior to transcendence itself. In one way or another, and in the more or less long term, all the strata of philosophy will be affected and reduced by the imaginary number or the real. The paradox is that the formalism, which continues to reside in the quantum, is realized and broken only if an instance intervenes that breaks the formal symmetry by relating it to human experience. And this instance has to be identical to itself, but also capable of tying together the three instances, which are all affected and reduced by the imaginary number. This general reduction of philosophy, i.e., of the three stages that constitute it as real (in the narrow sense of the quantum real), as reality (in the sense of the now-simplified transcendence), and lastly as absolute (become strictly radical), which moves from the theory or image of the world to the theory or image of humans, constitutes it into a correlate of the generic humanity of the last-instance. Non-philosophy is also the unification of quantum theory and of Marxism.
We
have surpassed the thematic and even the theoretical level of
Theory of Identities. This suggests the direction in which our future research will develop. Our practice mobilized scientific as well as other models (quantum, Gödelism, Euclidism, photography, theology…). These are forms of dual thought; they conjugate two objects or two postures. The one is not specifically philosophical, but the other is necessarily so, as if it were each time a matter of the unification of philosophy (which has become a simple empirical theory) with an empirical discipline elevated to the state of paradigms. Nonphilosophical practice has no proper and well carved-out object; it seeks fluid models of the undulatory, the fluvial, and the oceanic rather than the topological. Or again: the river’s unhurried drift, the casualness of the great wave, the furor of the tsunami, and among them the hesitation of the drunken boat that transports us. These models are purified of their positivity, universalized and idealized. They become Ideas or paradigms. Scientific, artistic, and religious theories in their multiplicity are our Ideas, our paradigms. This is not a dogmatic and terrorist purification of a discipline, which is transformed into a constraining model, but a double transformation, a purifying idealization, a realizing subtraction, and, in the middle, an idempotence of the drunken boat.
Some philosophers have almost understood that musical metaphysics merits the name “meta-physics” only if it is a microphysics. Provided we understand it as a quantum superposition and not as an identification, non-philosophy (at least the one of which we philosophers pursue the dream, failing to perform it—but does it need to be performed a second time?) is theory interpreted as music and music interpreted as theory. The musical form is not so obvious. It has no doubt been dreamed more than executed and so has the theoretical form. But this is the most profound, perhaps the most absurd dream. A multiplication of music and theory by each other as variables, their noncommutativity, their fusion as generic human properties, the utopia of a musical philo-fiction for generic humanity.