Descent into dedifference
Our brief poverty
With the early end of a deciphering we thought ought to have lasted longer, some people were amazed at the brevity of our genome. What, so few base pairs! Around five times fewer than a small tropical freshwater fish, the dipnoi Protopterus aethiopicus! Since we dominate living things through research and technology, we ought to win out over all of them in richness, and here we are, reduced to poverty. Fortunately, we have known, since about 1970, that there is no correlation between the complexity of genomes and the complexity of individuals. The fact remains that we find ourselves poor here.
Specialization and despecialization
Evolution develops like a tree whose branches are divided into smaller branches that are always better adapted to the environment. Species that are more and more specialized bifurcate along this neo-Darwinian schema: some given species discovers a niche favouring, in return, the specific function housed in it and exploits this niche best. A fold in the skin, intended, it seems, for thermal equilibrium, launches reptiles into flight, and their wings become shaped according to a thousand wingspans, profiles and colours in the turbulent air; migratory birds develop a liver whose reserves allow for migration, and others develop countless beaks marvellously adapted to their diets; the melodies given out during mating season also vary in the same way. Does extreme specialization, at the maximum possible of ramification, reach a dead end?
I don’t know why – perhaps someday someone will – we left this kind of duration, why we extricated ourselves from this schema. An evolution seeming to shoot out in the opposite direction, and which I have described regarding Love, despecialized us, dedifferentiated us, programmed us in deprogramming, as though we were going back to the main branches of the tree, even to the trunk. Did we forget speciation? Did this indifference, in the broadest sense, this non-differentiation, result from the forgetfulness of just now? We forget the world and time. Do we also forget our program? Can I name our species Homo negligens? Does it unbind itself from nature? Does it sometimes neglect to read its own code? We doubt today whether it is even a question of a code. Other living things read it better, obeying it like genetic automatons.
Yet, along time, the organic uselessness or weakness proved to be an omnivalent technician. Thus the hand, despecialized, can be called a universal tool on the entropic scale since it hits, carves, sculpts and sorts … but also on the informational scale since it designates and counts; likewise for the mouth since it hums, munches and chats. Likewise especially for the brain: an excellently universal tool, as soon as it takes up abstraction. Does an invention or a new gesture, whether practical or gymnastic, by the hand or the body give evidence of a forgetfulness I don’t know how to name?
As it advances, evolution differentiates; should it despecialize by erasing boundaries, it seems to go backwards. In progressing, it multiplies colours and shades; in regressing, it seems to turn pale and produce a candidate for incandescence. Dedifferentiated, forgetful, we became poor; we became the most destitute of living things. Poverty again.
An incandescent indifference
Yes, we discovered – how, we will never know – that this incandescence mixes and potentially contains every colour. By losing countless specificities, valences or real powers, the zero-valent, nil-potent human became, without meaning to no doubt, virtually omnivalent, totipotent, global and infinite. These impoverishments disadapted it to every thin and precise local niche and left it with no bound or definition. Undefined in a few organs as well as in our possibilities, we became the champions of inadaptation; we don’t even know how to define ourselves.
In going back up ordinary evolutionary time by dedifferentiation, we returned, if I may, backwards and went from the many species, well-named since specialized, to a kind of common genus. Non-specialized, humanity became, if I may, a counter-species: literally, it became generalized. Losing its specifying characteristics, it planed down its programme and became a generality. Humanity, that unknown: x with every value because having none.
Becoming human tends towards this white indetermination. Zero-valent, omnivalent, nil-potent, totipotent; good-for-nothing, good for everything. Every bit of progress, stroke of genius, invention or discovery originates in such a backwards movement and advances by choosing from among the range of a totality opened in this way. Consequently, human nature or, if you like, human nascence [naître] can be defined, without definition, as a tendency towards this forgetfulness, this deprogramming, this dedifference. Who are we? Indifferents. I exist and think in a point where nothing concerns me.
Finitude
Adapted, every species – perfect, defined; finite, filled – fits its niche to perfection. Who doesn’t admire the wild corporal beauty of big cats, parrots or rattlesnakes sculpted for millions of years by natural selection? What artist has more time? So we left this perfection in definition, this exact finitude; non-finite, we became infinite. Without niche or cradle, without house or path, without borders or bounds. Poorly finite, certainly, imperfect, assuredly, but launched into an unpredictable space and time, into an open universe.
Many philosophers bemoan our finitude, a pose that provides them with beautiful moving pages. No, without bounds from our own dawn, we are unpredictable in an environment whose strangeness never becomes adapted to our opening. This infinitude frightens, with good reason. Where do we come from? From a defined integral of contingent bifurcations along the Grand Narrative. Who are we? Poorly finite. Undefined or without definition. Where are we going? An unpredictable and improbable history begins in this dedifference.
Cultural differences set sail from the natural indifferent
Starting from this generality, human time relieved, replaced, stood in for the evolution, normally and again, going towards species, but outside the body, which remains incandescent. Through the process of setting sail or exo-Darwinism I touched on in detail elsewhere, evolution promotes, via externalization, tools and cultures. Whereas with birds, evolution’s duration, direct and positive, produces chickadees, bullfinches, chaffinches, hummingbirds and parrots, with diverse talons and beaks, colours, flights, wingspans and musics, with us it invents, in advancing again after the backwards movement towards dedifference, clubs and javelins, hoes and hammers … languages, Indo-European or Dravidian … cultures, Kwak iutl or Berrichon: tools and customs. Organic dedifference conditions technological, linguistic and cultural differences, which thus become our own external species.
Behind the relativity of cultures, the universality of corporal nature is revealed. Yes, nature: this is how we were born. For, having become this generality, humankind only produces species in language and customs when the climates, distances, the environment of flora and fauna make it Maori or Lower Breton. Whereas other living things differentiate themselves, corporally, by species, we differentiate ourselves, culturally, by language family. We differ by gods and meaning because we have the same dedifferentiated body. We have changed little since Adam and Lucy, but we become redifferentiated in myths and technologies, fashions and cosmetics, become species again by means of knowledge and occupation, peasant or sand fisher. As I’ve said, the human body, stable, leaks: my body and my lacrimal glands have leaked forty volumes of traces and ink. The mosaic of customs thus originates in the indifferentiation of our bodies. Why did we separate nature and culture? Because we were seeking to attach them directly, whereas they are linked by a twisted Moebius strip. When nature withdraws, culture explodes; the second one succeeds in proportion to that first poverty.
This passage must in addition be dated: our acculturation has recently taken the reins in a vastly old evolution. Objects of the social or human sciences, cultures form an ultrafine temporal film over the enormous thickness of the duration of bodies, objects of the sciences of living things, soon of the cognitive sciences. This completely naked and wrinkled newborn, scarcely out of its mother’s womb, let’s practise seeing it as being millions of times more ancient than the Cycladic sculptures or the drawings of Lascaux. A crowd of new cultures covers over with a few millimetres the universality of nature, anchored in a thick time. The relativity of customs and mores is also due to their newness; the stability of bodies is also rooted in this ancientness.
Let’s call the evolution diverted, redressed by cultures, history. I shall speak further on about this redressing, about this re-addressing. Maybe we diverted it to protect ourselves; the more we protected ourselves from it, the more we had to throw new artificial objects into the current of time in order to protect ourselves from it even further since from the evolutionary point of view, our body, less evolutional as a result of the artificial objects, became more and more fragile. This could no doubt have been happening from our beginnings the way it continues on today. This loop maintains the flow of history, which continuously sets sail from a body that evolved so much the less, thus remaining our common ancestor who always only evolves but very little and remains contemporary and ancestral. This chapter needs to be added to the De senectute from just now. We all live as Eve and Adam, primitive, although recently hominescent.
The body in pieces and quasi-objects
A saying sums up and launches this history: ‘This is my body.’ This, this object, replaces my body, comes from it, emerges from it. This hammer, my fist; this handle, my forearm; this wheel, my ankles, hips and knees; this bow and its string, my tensor muscles and tendons … Divide up this ancestral body, present in every language, in every custom, in every culture in the world. These cultures cut it up into parts, reproduce it and devour it, feed on it in its every species. 1 Emerging from the crudest technologies, avatars of the body in scattered pieces, cultures then display the species we didn’t become.
Nothing expresses this evident fact as precisely as the archaic and barbarous rite of diasparagmos, or the body in pieces, as the Egyptian cult of Osiris, whose sister Isis looks for the members scattered all around the Mediterranean, as totemism as well, that profound philosophy on our ways of producing. If we could unite here and now, at least in our heads, every culture, the way biologists classify species, plus every language and every vernacular usage, we would discover, as an asymptotic or virtual sum, our own body. Not an idea or a notion, but the body, of each and everyone. All this, as different as possible, bread and wine, rice and beer, stone and bronze, hoe and wheel, is summed up in my body, yours and everyone’s. From it, everything arises, sets sail, separates itself, specifies itself; everything gushes forth from it like an eternally young spring. The body, our trunk barren of branches bearing cultural twigs.
Orthopaedics
It’s a question of orthopaedics. For the device to slide over the organ, that organ must indeed have dwindled to the point of threatening to disappear, thereby weakening the entire organism and putting its life at risk. 2 Hence the need for substitution.
As humans, we have no definition. In that specialized philosophical language I only use when necessary, this could be stated: deprived of substance, our body produces substitutes. One of these two similar words describes the fact while plunging it into the processual; the other immobilizes an error and promotes a lie. Orthopaedic substitutions: equipped with a stump, no one can attack or defend except by equipping themselves with a hammer or a lance; nothing useful comes out of this limp hole replacing the mouth other than noise, cries, music and language, supplications and beauty.
Every living thing survives by its adapted organs. It has so much confidence in its pincer or its jet of ink, speed or venom that evolution pushes to refine or strengthen this vital and victorious solution, sharper and sharper pikes, more and more concentrated poisons, long, hard or cleverly twisted beaks. On the contrary, defeat leads to death, except in that strange case where, a good adviser, it encouraged an animal to cover itself with skins, externalized from its own skin, and whose frail back was substituted into a thatched roof. Do we know how many died before this huge detour bore fruit? At the beginning we must have died a lot; we were always on the path to extinction: children of weakness and poverty. Arrested in time, we play with death, or death makes light of us. Hence our cruelty.
Orthopaedic, behind their recommencing refinement our technologies conceal an organ which, sprawled out in this soft protective fleece, incessantly dedifferentiates itself. We will more and more resemble flabby foetuses under the lances and cuirasses invented by our lack of claws, horns and beaks.
Technology according to exo-Darwinism: Death …
Refining their organs by mutation and selection, living things attain a new behaviour, reached in this way without finality. In this way reptiles become birds that fly; in this way former inhabitants of the sea walk; in this way parrots acquire thick, curved, highly sharp beaks. These newnesses, which then exploit new niches, require a vastly long time and as high a number of non-selected organisms or non-adapted mutants, pu t to death in both cases by these two fundamental operators of evolution. Hard beaks eliminate soft beaks.
When we attain technology, we invent an intention that replaces the absence of final causes. What is technology? The advent of finality in an evolution that knew nothing of it. If not the first stone, which came about God knows how, then at least the second one was carved by someone or other in order to hunt or fish, to harpoon some prey, to jab, to cut up, seeking, for an aim, new means, a newness that, for an intentionless evolution, would have taken millions of years, plus the vast crowd of the eliminated, dead by means of mutation and selection. So by carving and sharpening flint, forging bronze, making picks, lances and sabres in this way, we saved, at least virtually, the vast number of humans whose nails or fangs wouldn’t have attained such effectiveness in cutting. We therefore economized first on this endless transformation of organs but also, via this short circuit, on this merciless elimination. A sublime benefit, technological invention, even the invention of weapons, saved from the work of death evolution leaves behind it. May the denigrators of technology ponder the charnel house it spares us from. Instead of killing the ill-adapted, we throw the devices that are no longer of any use into the sewage fields. What is technology? An economizing on death: saved cadavers. A thwarting of necrophagous evolution. Of course, every technological invention entails risks; but this number of dead has little weight in the face of the host of cadavers it spares us.
From having confronted death by inadaptation, we therefore invented orthopaedic cultures we could change at leisure, in the event of emergency, without waiting for a long and problematic adaptation from the genetic bank, putting the entire species at risk of extinction. The contemporary paradox immediately bursts forth: while our technological masterworks protect us from elimination, why do we, quite the contrary, think that the most contemporary ones cast us into it? We will only be able to answer this question on condition of thinking about it at this depth and in comparison with the laws of evolution.
... and acceleration
In externalizing it, we accelerate it to the point where it becomes this human history, with a changed velocity gradient. What is technology? A tremendous acceleration of the time of living things. This ‘setting sail’ changes our pace so much that it prevents us, once cast off, from assessing the ever so slow length of the times that preceded it. It makes us forget them. As a result, the extreme slenderness of history can in a certain way be compared to millions of years of evolution: we have changed speed. Opposition to Darwin came above all, I think, from the incapacity to conceive of such colossal durations, and I still wonder today whether we conceive of them easily. Our brief history prevents us from understanding evolution and from remembering it because the effects of the former block in part the laws of the latter.
But also because the lightning-fast acceleration of the former renders it, in a certain way, compatible with the latter. Conversely we sometimes make the mistake of saying that our human history more or less follows evolutionary laws; a correct assessment of the times, so incomparable, prevents us from falling into this trap; the several millennia that separate us from the Neolithic, during which certain of our fathers cultivated corn, have the same relation with the millions of years required by organic transformations as a book of a thousand pages does to its final letters. Such a change of scale requires different laws. Technologies, precisely, change the scale of time; their acceleration catches up, in a lightning-fast way, this vast lagging behind. Our enormous oldness outstripped us; through knowledge we assess it, through technology we imitate it. Everything is transformed by change in scale, of course, except for a knowledge that, invariant and light, flies among its rungs. Space formerly crushed us; today, time crushes us; through thought, we understand them.
What is hominization? The exit, via finality, from slowness and death. The progressive liberation from the laws of evolution. The exit from evolution? Many of religion’s early books, which we hardly understand and sometimes scorn, in reality relate, although blindly, the stanzas of this liberation or this genesis. Humanity is therefore born from this acceleration and from an involuntary but real pity. Did our phylogenesis blindly practise what we call a virtue? Can we conceive that this counter-evolution engendered a morality or that this latter furthered this exit? Darwin himself did not scorn this hypothesis. This lightning-fast acceleration of time that liberates us from an interminable evolutionary pace, this change of scale, this savings of an enormous mass of cadavers prevent us from reducing technology to its practical finalities. Technology sculpted the human, which sculpted it, its time, its habitat, its customs, its morality. Technology carried history with it.
In addition, technology has cognitive virtues or at least mnemonic ones: once brought into the world, it has no need of genes to perpetuate or transform itself. Individual, collective, hardware or software, devices in turn act like memories. Organic genesis gives way here to artificial reproduction, the word ‘reproduction’ meaning both vital birthing and the imitation of artefacts. Transmission no longer passes through a molecular bank but rather through imitation. We learn the workmanship of the tool and the gesture it requires from the master. This is how we became, as Aristotle said, the most imitative of living beings. The most given over to learning. Knowledge begins. But sometimes we forget or disobey. We sow our memories with revolts and acts of negligence. So invention begins.
Return to poverty
Linguistic or objective memories function faster than the one lying in our genes, although less faithfully; we pay for our extreme speed with tatters of forgetfulness. We survive as cultural species, in a certain way overadapted, because we live as an organically or naturally ill-adapted genus.
As far as life is concerned as well as in other domains, poverty therefore wins out over wealth, counted in numbers, fragility over power and weakness over strength, the white and empty state over a more or less full state. Let’s be delighted with our indigence and sing the praises of poverty, riskier but more adaptive than affluence. We are familiar with a thousand examples of this: immigrants courageously prepare the future of filled peoples, more attentive to their muddy dogs than to their children’s education. Austere exercise is more befitting than distress or food scarcity but also than bloated satiety.
This body situation has repercussions on morality. As repetitive and idiotic as a unit added to the preceding number to get the following one, avarice heaps up figures the way gluttony does bottles and sloth or lust do beddings. These evils all proceed from envy, which compares and seeks, through pride and wrath, to win out: I put on more weight on than you; I built my house taller than yours; hence this addition whose perpetual repetition inflates the frog facing the ox but above all before his sister. These capital vices drive to violent death.
Stem cells, stem bodies and stem cul tures
The whole of this reasoning has its source in the very sources of life, really in its origin. Dedifferentiated, a stem cell, in the very first state of the embryo, will give birth, during its development, to this or that other blood cell, liver cell or cell of the nervous system. It can therefore be called omnipotent since it contains in potency every specialty of cell the body will, in act, be formed from. Stem cells show the white state; every other cell shows a more or less filled state.
The prow of exo-Darwinian history, our body plays the role of cultural stem source. Omnipotent, it contains in potency every cultural variety. Each of these varieties adapts to the climate of its niche the way a species does in and through its environment. I have called my contemporaries and my successors by the name of Eve, Lucy and even Adam. See there, in the past and tomorrow, the stem body. Not really primordial in the sense of a linear time that would experience beginning, middle and end, but a kind of stem species having the potentiality of cultural actions to come by a process in which the possible comes to existence.
No doubt our body contains in potency thousands upon thousands of cultural virtualities; the fact that we are changing customs and thoughts today brings a concrete proof of this. What is to be done with a culture that only sought to preserve itself, that no longer created, even within its own framework, what is needed in order to transform? I love my culture in that it gives me the means and the freedom to reject it, to change or recreate it. I receive from it and from other ones possibilities with whose help I try to construct a work that chance will make necessary or impossible. Contingent like a living thing, culture, a stem source in turn, opens up ranges of possibilities in which works try their luck, works mostly eliminated by the filter of impossibility, but among which extremely rare successes become necessary. Like life, culture develops in the square of modality. The stem body opens up these modes.
Descents into dormition
The spectrum of sleep
My hearing deafened by the dull and monotonous sound of the wheels on the tracks sleeps; drunk from the passing bursts of landscape, my sight becomes blurred; my skin dissolves underneath the fabric of my clothes; buried in the fold of my underwear, my genitals, folded, go absent; tucked up under the seat, my legs drown in unconsciousness; curled up inside my teeth, beneath the palate, behind my lips, my tongue is anaesthetized; my muscles are concealed, my bones are benumbed; what are we to call that which, in my breathing and my body melted into the mist, sleeps, suspended, even though I’m not asleep? Is life wrapped in kinds of sleep? The stem body inhibits its functions. In a white state, the body puts to sleep its other full states.
Roots hibernate in the ground, as do trunks beneath the bark and, without leaf or bud, twigs in the wind; the genes inhibited by interfering RNA sleep; does the inhibition vary on the sleepiness? Ecstatic animals sleep in their instinct; the soil and the inert rocks sleep, as do the mountains beneath the thunderstorm and the glaciers in their ever so slow descent, the ocean during the calm after the storm, Garonne below low-water mark and Iceland’s lakes above the volcanos’ fire; the nuclear lights that have been expanding in the dark Universe for billions of years sleep.
Dozing in the primordial soup, life sleeps as well; it slumbers curled up in the uterine cavity; the child coddles itself; adolescence drugs itself; what tosses old age into the rocks and the dead? Don’t be afraid of dying, grandfather: an increasingly numb sleep will protect you from this fear, the way it helped, symmetrically, your childhood with the torment of growing. Institutions sleep in the dark labyrinth of the administrative moles; politics renders our obedience blasé; societies, masses, crowds are enveloped in groups in which stupidity and repetition sleep; violence and loves always sleep.
History and physics sleep in the background noise of the world. Everything sleeps: the Earth and the sky; spores and sperm, virgin ova and unsown seeds; the anchors and hawsers of a ship in route, and the same ship, conversely, at anchor or moored in port; the fixed parts of a doorframe and the standing end of a rope; our intelligence, silence, our blindnesses, the total language in our rare words, the meaning in deep things, the life and beauty beneath the cuirasses heaped up by idiocy. The dark sleeps. A few sporadic islands sometimes emerge from the sleepy blue-green sea, increasingly dark as one dives down.
Embracing the universal dormition, thought is awake. How long will I cling on to its window?
Steps of speech
In other words. I keep quiet; talk with a friend and confide some secret to her, one to one; around the table, during the meal, I speak to my family; give class to thirty pupils, or, in the lecture hall, to 600 students; in the Palais des Congrès, 3,000 experts listen to my lecture ... Here are several ‘speeds’ of language and wakefulness, each stage of which, of course, depends on the number but also on the quality of the interlocutors and the pertinence of the questions asked afterwards: general public, professionals, devotees, the indifferent, the hostile or critical. 3
When I, whether a little runt or a Leviathan, adapt the volume of my voice to the audience, as well as the slowness or haste of the delivery, the rhythm of the periodic sentences, the expressive music, the vocabulary itself, the distinction and the clarity of the meaning, in short the range of techniques said to be eloquent, I feel – from the tension of the backs of my knees to the furthest point of my attention – my body climb up several different types of excitation and sometimes arouse such an overexcitement that it afterwards takes hours to get to sleep, so much does vigilant vivacity perch above the vegetative and in the end delay rejoining it. Conversely, at which stage of sleep is speech established when it whispers and lets itself go, sliding from inattention into muteness? Each level requires specific behaviours in which wakefulness and dormition are mixed, in precise proportions, all the way out to the two extreme states where the one tends to dissolve the other: white sleep and sharply discriminating and many-coloured attention.
I suspect that this staircase has flights so high at its tip and low at its depth that we ordinarily only explore a narrow part of it. Expertise, talent and virtuosity add this or that level more to this unfolding towards the top, the descent of which plunges towards as many types of stupor. Our tensor body and sharp-pointed attention can always climb up an additional step or fall lower into the delectable quietude of nothingness.
From supersharp intelligence to divine stupidity, genius comprehends the entire scale. For thought at least is not confused with the extreme apex of wakefulness. We always overestimate too much a certain light and its focus, whose point bestows clarity to explanation, and distinction and transparency to exposition, while thought, dozing and hunkering down in the numerous twisti ng recesses of dormition, winds about and, enveloped in sinuous inattentive virtualities, has worth: mute, deaf, blind, black, it crouches down like a wild animal ready to leap into the intuitive day. The professor expounds; the thinker listens to the background noise of the body and the world. Heavy and light, thought weighs down low, flies high and hears the entire staircase. But the word, at the peak, drugs all the rest the way it forgot time.
The descent into the body
What organ, what function, what acts are not constructed from such flights in multiple instances and unfolding landings? The entire body traverses them of itself. The bones, except when they break, and the liver, the gall bladder, the intestines or the kidneys, when they interrupt their functions, attain wakefulness less than the heart, whose rhythm is submitted to strong emotions, or than the lungs, whose tempo depends on the will or the involuntary, at will. Consult males regarding erections; this ‘non-willing’ that’s folded or unfolded, as soft and hard, in ways so diverse that each one, it seems, is the mark of a singular partner, whether present or virtual.
We will probably never be conscious of our cells, of our DNA, of the water and carbon molecules constructing our body. These pieces of hardware, with all the software assembling them and directing their function, sleep. Almost all of the vast organic activity is buried in a happy night and only lets rare points of audible wakefulness appear. The multiple folds whose shadows and numbers are unfolded by biochemical research sleep. Sometimes pain precedes and announces the emergence of consciousness and prowls, another wild animal ready to leap, it too, from level to level. Health dozes in the organs’ sleep.
Said unconsciousness, if it exists, and its irrepressible language only form some particular case, a step, in this long descent into a hundred corporal levels sometimes giving vent to the sounds of suffering issuing from their dysfunctions. Like the body, it only calls when in distress.
Descent into identity
Thus identity itself unfolds into the same ladder, as long and detailed. Who suffers, who screams, who talks and keeps quiet, who sleeps and becomes animated, brought to life, who takes pleasure, sings with joy, who vegetates and jumps with vivacity, who thinks and how? Which I suffers or is awake? Does it have the same ‘identity’ as the one who repeats or invents, who speaks and thinks at this or that level of clarity? We would be lying if we said and believed that it was, in every case, a matter of the same identity. Here rather are diverse landings or stages of equilibrium, different ‘stases’, several temporary invariances across variations in time and, between them, operators of transformation, emotions, feelings and thoughts: a little, a lot, passionately … Numerous, I live ten different wakefulnesses, a thousand mixed sleeps, a hundred incomparable naps and how many deaths, ultimately? Certain great inventors confess to having received their definitive intuition in a single night, a week, a wonderful year: how did they think the rest of the time? How many differential deaths, limit ordeals, overcome pains, spurned loves has life exposed us to? After so many agonies, what eternity do I enter?
Speaking before different publics or letting myself go during this train trip, my sexuality or musculature for walking, for porterage and climbing sleep; ascending the Matterhorn’s Lion Ridge, discursive thought and the speculative functions of language sleep while the sight of the slightest handhold and the tension of exquisitely differentiated muscle fibres intensify. The body is laminated; sensation and speech unfold in a spectrum; the I is stratified into stages or landings; presence and absence to oneself, attention and forgetfulness come undone into a thousand folds.
The fact remains that the one who tells of these differentials of self and their permanent swinging better than me is constantly named Michel de Montaigne. But his sharp consciousness forgot to dive, as living, wakeful presence or dormition, into colours, sounds, time and the world’s sleep. Our region – Du Bartas, Palissy, Lacepède and Montesquieu – did it better than him.
The flights of memory and forgetfulness
For the body, speech, consciousness and identity, these descents and ascents with their numerous steps resemble the voyage of perception in universal time with its succession of terraces or balconies, doll, house, torrent, mountain, sky … and even resemble the calculation of our own age: seven decades for the assemblage, several million years for the species, four billion for DNA, fifteen for atoms.
This dormition resembles, once again, the forgetting of this time and the slow ascent into wakefulness and its distinct accounting. Everything goes from a white state to another one, cluttered. Knowledge wakens perception, and, in front of the alpine-pastured farm or the Grand Canyon, around me and in me unfolds the vast scale or ladder of the universal duration of things, of the world and the living, but its astonishing forgetfulness sinks down as well: global amnesia or universal dormition.
The way we lose time, we forget the world, our bodies, our sufferings, graduated speech and our graduated identity. My body sleeps like a stem source.
Descent into incandescence
Zero and infinity, our body externalizes, into technology, its organs or functions, taken from among its infinite state; can it also externalize its zero or white state, as such?
Ploughing and grazing
Why has the peasant, for millennia, broken the ground, cleared, ploughed? To eliminate every species that could, with their wild fertility, kill the fragile domestic plant. Said weeds owe their power to natural selection, and wheat owes its weakness to that artificial selection that served as a model for Darwin and is practised by livestock farmers. Why do these latter surround the field with fences, the barn with walls or the sheep pen with planks? Why do they raise the chicken coop as well as the pigeon house? To protect the lamb and the fowl, fragile due to the same artificiality, from the wolf’s and the fox’s enterprises, expert and implacable because they have hunted for millions of years. Clearing, ploughing: here, let nothing remain. Livestock farming: chase out every other animal from there.
So, after the ploughing, the first tabula rasa and the construction of the enclosed farm, well-named, the harvest comes up thick and the fat cattle thrive. 4 In these two white, zero-valent, empty spaces, our crops [cultures] flourish, differentiated at leisure: wheat, corn, oats, rye, buckwheat; green grass, clover; horses, cows, pigs, turkeys and guinea fowl … according to the environmental constraints. Every crop [culture] presupposes the same gesture of destruction or devastation, of nihilation: breaking the ground and ploughing. Once again, cultural diversity, in both senses, proceeds from a nature, here deliberately and actively whitened, an expression literally meaning that nothing else is going to be born or will be able to be born there. Rendered naturally virgin, axenic, that is to say, without foreign bodies, these sites produce every crop [culture] chosen by human free will. Just as a thousand technologies and cultures set sail from our zero-valent body, so all agriculture comes up from this white field.
The first answer to the initial question: for everything happens here as if we were externalizing the white or zero of our dedifferentiation. Objectivized, this dedifferentiation then produces the differentiated.
White house
Do you want to produce or invent? Plough, dig, exert yourself. Build a stable for a mare and its foal, a sheepfold for a ewe and its lambs, a sheep pen, a farmyard, a pigsty, a dovecote; this promises harvests and large litters. Now do your housecleaning with care: let no trace of rats or spiders, flies or vermicules remain. According to the precepts of this method, your niche becomes smooth. Field or room, let the white body export, here again, a white site. It will live there; it will make it its abode.
If it left the least stain there, it would appropriate it, the way an animal marks its niche with its excrement. On the contrary, in whitening this site to make it clean, aseptic or axenic, it makes it into a hotel that can receive everyone and anyone comfortably. This cleanness, this white, this zero, this nothingness become a universal hospitable space. Like the cereals in the breeze or the fowl in the farmyard, all humankind will feel at home in this new site. What should we call it: drawn out of everything, extract … abstract? Do you want to produce or invent? Is abstraction born from our bodies, in the fields and at the hotel?
General equivalent
From the pagus, where the peasant exerts himself and where he is going to bury his old father, his wealth rises up. Which wealth? The wealth counted in heads of cattle [têtes de bétail] – pecus in Latin and cattle in English – and this is where the words ‘capital’ and ‘pecuniary’ come from. Long ago certainly but now no longer, for these cattle, heavy and slow, are not easily exchanged. The wealth counted in Florentine florins, Byzantine bezants or ducats struck with the doge’s effigy? Formerly certainly but not today, for these coins can be stolen, again too heavy and precious. Why does money, now, have changing and abstract appearances?
Because, in divesting itself of all of its concrete attributes, this token is worth everything because it isn’t worth anything in itself. If value consists in what fulfils needs and desires, we can’t drink or eat this symbol, nor can we take shelter under a roof it doesn’t offer, for value resides in us, in our desire and not in it, therefore become, by our own decisions, a general equivalent, a kind of stem thing. So, from these white dedifferentiated coins proceed, once again, barley and bulls, movable goods, the immovable house and farm, the social bond, all the rest of the differentiated values, even the ploughed land, the clean house, even – alas! – the body of the other. Equivalent to everything in the world, this treasure replaces field, niche and flesh.
White money, without odour or taste, virgin and fecund, growing beyond the limits of need or desire, contractual and fought over, diabolical and divine. It has every attribute, even the most contradictory ones, for not having any: a rich fool is rich; a poor fool is a fool. White, transparent, without responsibility, administration takes every power, for those who manage know everything, are in charge of everything, build bridges and roads, know better than scientists, invade political and cultural posts, direct everything, always and everywhere present because they aren’t worth anything. White money is worth everything, can do everything, rules over everyone, omnipotent; the administrator who manages money in our societies obtains a hyperpower there because he parasitizes it. Money and administration devour the entire social bond.
A little interlude for days of worry: Auguste Comte invented sociology, the word and the thing, against the economics of Jean-Baptiste Say. The positivist was the first to understand that money dissolves the social bond and that this latter must be reinvented. Today we are witnessing the end of the era inaugurated by his philosophy. In the West, money has invaded everything, destroyed everything, by taking everything up into its measure. Traditional societies, consequently, try to defend the ties they fear to see destroyed or undone; they try to bind themselves again. But do we know what bond gathers us together? Neither the politicians, in practice, nor, in theory, the social sciences know or teach this invisible adhesive.
Poorly named because new, contemporary war sets two twins in opposition: terrorism’s invisible hand versus capitalism’s invisible hand. For how can we effectively attack white capital, whose global enterprises employ individuals who are not responsible, without having recourse to local individuals who are just as ghostly and unlocatable? But, even more profoundly, the social bond as such, still present although translucent, collides there with abstract, white and transparent money, which tries to replace it by dissolving it. Of course, the terrorist with the invisible hand fights Adam Smith’s invisible hand, mano a mano, but again Comte is still waging war against Say, sociology trying to hold up against economics. Who will win? And what should we call a fight that only sets invisible beings in opposition? End of the interlude. We shall return to this.
Balance sheet: by externalizing a white land, a white house, by externalizing relations whitened like this, the body enters into abstraction or into a symbolic world. Better than to a species, it belongs then to a genus, a generality.
Symbol and tessera: Tabulae rasae
Our behaviours called symbolic thus proceed from such a whiteness. Beyond its market value, the token from just now attains precisely the greatest generality. Assigning a meaning to a sound or a sign presupposes white signals and free relations. Broadcast, transit and reception presuppose that the multiple spines of the chaotic primordial commotion have first been carefully razed away with a plane. Filled with the stones of language, Demosthenes’ eloquence rises over the sea’s fracas; it first confronts the chaos of waves and the background noise of the world. Between the howling of the wind, the thunder of the earthquakes, our squawkings, moans and sobs on the one hand and music on the other, a certain acoustics smooths out the waves. And the sound whitens the noise. Just as no one can speak without this prior planing down, no one can write except on virgin wax, a smooth parchment or white paper, on the page that derives from pagus. He who wants peace – also d erived from the same word, pagus, the field – raises a flag, white as a page, so that no one can mistake the message. Cultures, languages, styles and later words redifferentiate these previously whitened signals. And the relations between signs and meanings also become planed down. We wouldn’t understand one another without these three sandings: of tabulae, of signals and of the links putting them together. And, once again, the white body externalizes itself as these tabulae rasae.
The word ‘symbol’ describes this process. When they parted, the host and guest would divide a tessera, a token that was witness to the hospitality received and given; the random fracture of this terracotta piece, broken to be shared, follows a fine jagged outline, one that’s haphazard, complicated, inimitable, specific. Upon meeting again, recognition would take place when the two broken edges were reunited, adapted like a key to its lock: συν-βολον [sým-bolon] expresses this con-vention. No more spines, ridges or teeth on the piece reconstituted in its totality, the joint playing the role of the plane. The smooth piece thwarts noise’s treacheries. The piece has become white again. This is my body; do this in memory of me.
Specialized, equipped with sharp teeth, spines, ridges and claws, species adapt to precise niches, fractally scattered on the planet. They enter into the background noise of the inert and of life. Despecialized, our body produces white pages or completed tessera thanks to the bonds we maintain. Who are we? Living things that are close to symbols and coming all the more closer the more we multiply our relations. From this whitened body, our white behaviours proceed, of course, but whitening, in their turn, our acts and our bodies, as in a cycle feeding into itself. Who are we? A tabula rasa species, a symbolic genus. Generality has visited us twice.
The occupations of the whore body
So we return to the body. No longer genetic, but individual, it practises gymnastics: even though the old Greek word means naked, I see this nudity whiten. Stretches, jumps, limberings and rolls open up a thousand possible positions and movements to the practicer; they again transform his body, thus ground up into virtuality, into generality. The physical education teacher carries out on it a work similar to the work the farmer does in his field or the scribe on his tabula rasa: they all produce a white page on which a differentiated bouquet of specialties will appear. Well-versed in all gestures and expressions, gymnasts and their brother dancers therefore make symbols of their bodies, better yet, semaphores. Objective or collective, all the preceding practices, stemming from the body, return to its singularity in order to dedifferentiate this singularity again.
Consequently, it can practise every occupation in the world because it excels at the oldest one: whore, as they say with good reason. ‘Pro-stitute’ signifies: situated in front, the way ‘preposition’ signifies: anterior position, the latter denoting an elementary relation and the former a first site. A corporeity that’s courtesan and, as they say, professional: plastic and suited to every occupation; a white land that receives every domestic species in its furrows; a white house that lays every guest in its bed; a general equivalent body, the husband of every woman and wife of every husband, giving itself in return for money. Our practices proceed from there? A gymnastic body, a dancer, prostitutable, therefore an actor, changing masks with each performance; an interpreter, going from languages to cultures and a traveller, running from mores to customs; a shopkeeper, exchanging wheat in return for beef and anything in return for money; a clever handyman, making use of every means at his disposal and making of necessity a virtue; a thief making off with whatever presents itself; a politician, representing each individual of his group … a philosopher, running along the flow of the chronopedia … losing all substance in favour of substitution.
More authentic, since ingenuous, than Plato’s Socrates, the Socrates of Xenophon’s Symposium defines philosophy as μαστροπεια [mastropeia] or pimping. A procurer, open to every stranger because axenic, purified, cleaned of all excrement, a universal host or exchanger, the philosopher places his body, a white gymnast, under the angelic sign of Hermes, the father of skillfulness.
Agora, templum, tribunal
Through conflicts and disputes, hatreds and rivalries, we never, of our own free will, stop paving hell on earth. We can only with difficulty conceive of a paradise where all these energies would be pacified. Leibniz described it, quite rightly, as the omnitude of new things; again a totality that’s contradictory – how can we conceive something new when the whole presents itself? – and white. Yet, we construct, here and there, sites where we carry a little bit of this hope, just as ineradicable as war. The agora or marketplace couldn’t exist without a tacit contract allowing the general equivalent to circulate in a site without any conflict other than debates over price. There is no fighting in the souks. This zero of violence allows everything to be bought and sold there.
Likewise, the temple draws the cut out of an enclosed space inside of which holiness imposes behaviour opposed to that of the outside: don’t kill your son but only the ram whose horns are caught in the branches of the neighbouring bush; reconcile with your brother before bringing your offering here. Not only does war die down here but what is called lawlessness rules here: the police don’t enter this place. The sacred and the taboo cut out a white space whose definition boils down to the literal meaning of ‘definition’: a site surrounded by a boundary, finis. In ancient Rome, in the round temple of the vestals, whose white chastity watched over a pure fire, the filth they swept up had to leave by a door said to be stercoraceous: a clean expanse, even whiter than the agricultural pagus or the smooth page, even more than a cleaned house, as virginal as each of these young priestesses. What religion doesn’t purify ritual sites as well as the bodies of its officiants or of the pious flock seeking an impeccable soul? Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas.
Lastly, in the tribunal everyone brings their cases and accusations; opposing forces balance each other there; the word replaces wounds, lumps and blood; actions are debated there, as with the general equivalent in the market. A symbol of the contracts entered into there, here is the flat and level equity of a balance in equilibrium.
The above are white spaces and a white object, and without them no social practice could appear.
The apeiron as origin of knowledge
This generality of our condition doesn’t only unfold within the horizon of practices, whether work practices or social ones, but within the horizon of our knowledge as well, which for its part is also infinitely open. Just as the common zero-valence of our nature conditions the multicoloured omnivalence of cultures, just as the common nil-potency of our bodies conditions the virtual omnipotency of their acts, just as the field’s white space opens up to every crop, just as white places and white objects condition all life in society, just as money tends to replace all things and every social bond …, so our various pieces of knowledge come into being in this incandescent emptiness. Before receiving our language and its singular syntax from the tribe and our mothers, we bear a totipotent capacity to speak. Likewise, do white cognitive objects exist?
The origin of geometry, no doubt of philosophy, maybe of all knowledge, is revealed in a fragment from Anaximander, which calls this origin apeiron, an indefinite stripped of bounds. Rigorous and abstract knowledge becomes differentiated into principles, proofs and theorems starting from that very thing to which neither definition nor programme can be given. For the sciences to be born, whether formal ones like mathematics or applied ones like mechanics, it was necessary to regress to this totality in potency having no determination. Geometry (pp. 3–36) already called this formal space – in which, since the Greeks, we have lived body and soul – white, a space later defined and mastered. This space received, fairly quickly, the name Earth, which is measured and mastered by Geo-metry. This space, which was invented and described over and over again by Plato, Theodorus, Euclid or Eudoxus extends the ploughed square, the house of men, the temple of the gods, the agora, the tribunal to the Universe, to the world and to the backworlds. The global meaning of geo in the word ‘geometry’ is akin to the global meaning of the apeiron, our indefinite habitat, open and white, the definitionless world of our being-in-the-world. An indefinite living thing wandering in this white space and haunting it – this is the process of knowledge.
At the origin of algebra, a thing (the cosa, as the first Italian algebraists said) called x takes on every value because it doesn’t have any value of its own. Again a symbol, again a white token or a general equivalent. We already carry in our incandescence the potential origin of our knowledge; we have already said of the human: this unknown = x.
In the same way, when he tried to draw the first horizon of our research, Auguste Comte assessed the driving couple formed by the generality of the problems we had posed from the origin and, secondly, our incapacity to resolve them then: minimal poverty equipped with a maximal potential. Like Pascal, he touched on the two extremities of our condition, nothing and everything, zero and infinity, minimax and maximin, but better than him, he joined them and drew the power of a dynamic from this. For our totipotency can be described as a universality that is at first without any specific or singular expertise but already at work unfolding such details. Anaximander describes an indefinite expanse, whereas Comte shows the positive dynamic from which our indefinite time shoots up.
De arte inveniendi
Do we thus attain an art of inventing? Does every advance, here biological, human and cultural, there cognitive and technological, elsewhere artistic or religious, require everywhere, at its beginning and in quest of its driving force, this regression to a kind of totality equipped with a radical erasure?
The flat balance of suspended judgement in Montaigne, hyperbolic doubt in Descartes, different ploughings, new purifications leaving nothing behind their annihilations; the ‘sentiment’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau seeks in the Reveries and which he seems to discover during the ecstasy that comes over him lying in his boat in the middle of the lake; indifference or idleness, absolute standing-aparts sometimes professed by the eighteenth century; the transcendental named by Immanuel Kant; the epoché or putting of everything and myself between brackets among the phenomenologists … these are so many varieties of white erasure. In his Timaeus, Plato calls a virgin expanse χωρα [khôra], imprint-bearing wax, a space onto which we can put any topology, the primary uterus in potency of all things, that feminine womb about which we shall soon say that contemporary biological research rightly said that it is an exception to all the organs since the immune system doesn’t always defend it from the outside, hence a fecundity issuing from the open welcome that results from this non-aggression; a pagus womb and page, a white house, a universal hostess, our bodies all began in this very space. And in his Symposium, the same Plato celebrates Poros, Expedient, and Penia, Poverty, whose union produced Love, therefore every human. We are born from a defenceless womb and from an extreme destitution that calls for, promotes and exalts resources.
The more we whiten, the more we invent; the more we set sail, the more we externalize, the more we whiten. The more we produce, the more we become innocent: by this holiness, you will recognize a discoverer. Invention extracts from the dedifferentiated body a flow of differences, technological, cultural, cognitive, and as this exo-Darwinism functions, we become dedifferentiated, even more disposed to make it function. Innovation gushes forth, exponential, never ceasing to feed on itself; this dynamic explains its multiple and vertical spouting up.
Not only do these specific functions set sail from the body but this latter also externalizes its global dedifferentiated status from itself. We surround ourselves with spaces and objects that are as white and immaculate as it is. And thanks to this corporal indefinite, successively subjective, objective, collective and cognitive, we invent.
By means of these whitenesses, which philosophy discovers and describes via that generality it makes its specialty, philosophy invents nothing singular, neither tool nor theorem, rather it anticipates a global world we will live in tomorrow, equipped, before this horizon, with these instruments of action and thought. It is therefore concerned about and gives itself the mission of inventing the dedifferentiated habitat of differentiated inventions.
The white relation
We don’t maintain any definite relation with the apeiron or with these sites or ‘objects’, except that, through a kind of symmetry or face-to-face, they require us in our entirety, without any bound of any kind, without any work programme or specialty programme, without any specially cut out organ or ‘faculty’. We think about them with all our floating and indefinite attention; we rememb er them with all our vague memory; we imagine them without any image; we attach our reason to them without any reason; we apprehend them with our seven senses; our entire body bathes in them, bones, muscles, genitals and skin; we desire them, love them with all our heart, await them with all our soul … A flame suddenly burns in us, melting our focalizations into a single one, indefinite in turn. We go back up to our own incandescence. Like the ‘subject’, the object becomes apeiron; like its ‘object’, the ‘subject’ itself becomes apeiron. Translucency upon translucency, nothing separates them. What living thing constructs this white relation like this?
But above all, we invent our encounters starting from this wide land. For a half a century, I have been seeking to construct a philosophy, one that has been lacking, of relation, moving from saturated models – Hermes, Angels, the Parasite or the Hermaphrodite – to the generalities this philosophy requires – translation, communication, a bouquet of prepositions. In any case, human freedom produces, in each of us, the capacity to construct with others links that are even more singular than the individuals linked by them. Slavery makes them fall back on prior models.
The class of white concepts: Freedom
If then there exists a class of white concepts, whose indefiniteness distinguishes them from the concepts defined and refined by the sciences so as to make them falsifiable and operational, Freedom belongs to it. How many women and men live free? Slaves of a party, of an ideology, if it’s a question of politics, of societal conventions, of cosmetic or intellectual fashions, of any pressure group in which clones surround a perverse leader, of voracious appetites disgusting to others, of an organized network in which the paths always lead somewhere, would they agree to pay the price of a free life with open relations? Who doesn’t instead rush towards a directed existence and directed relations, as though having a passion to carry an emblem, the trace of a classification, a brand of party, car or clothing, all relations of belonging? In its school, each fish orients itself parallel to the others, directed by some social magnetic field. It doesn’t invent its relations.
Yet, indefinite, the human bifurcates from animals precisely through the minimalization of a pre-established programme, of a required speciation or specialization, of fixed direction, of ready-made relations. Thus its natural birth takes place in freedom: the human is born so transparent, so incandescent that freedom enters into the white class. Not only does freedom concern us, it identifies us. When the Declaration of Rights announced that man was born free, did it know that it was touching on the biologically, on the genetically correct? Freedom takes on the colour of the evolutionary cradle of men and women, becoming attached to their bones, their flesh, their hands, mouth, skin, brain and blood, to the billion-year-old whole of their cells, in brief, to their incarnation; to the tongue that speaks and shouts to others, to the genitals-hyphen, to the entire expressive and receiving body. 5 Universal twice over, in its comprehension and its extension, therefore in its content or its signification, both indefinite, and its transcultural application, freedom therefore can, it even must be said to be natural: in the literal sense of birth, in the genetic sense of deprogramming. We are born despecialized, therefore free. This indeed merits a solemn declaration.
Whoever renounces freedom loses his stem body and drifts towards another living kingdom: leaves this minimalization, loses this poverty, grows richer, becomes specialized in a relation, like a parasite, in a pressure group like a cow in its pasture, in a party, in the bestial passion for power, the vice of avarice or envy, an opinion, becoming shark, crow, asp, ivy or mycobacterium because of it; a predator rarely, a host frequently. We live surrounded by companions undergoing animalization, in the course of metamorphosis, the way Ulysses’ sailors became swine under Circe the enchantress. Our fetishist ancestors sculpted it; Aesop and Kafka recounted it; Ovid and La Fontaine bemoaned it. The daily effort towards freedom is measured by exo-Darwinism’s divergence; we must continuously leave life as such, the powerful impetus of its flow, not lose the temporal distances separating us from the bifurcations taken by the other living things. Plants, animals, mushrooms, single-celled organisms obey their programmes or the environment or both at the same time. We abandoned this automatism; we entered into forgetfulness. This transparent becoming of incandescence made us free.
Incandescent man and woman
As early as terrestrial paradise, Adam and Eve disobey. They choose freedom over their Creator even though He gave them a delightful place to enjoy everything in abundance; they prefer freedom to happiness; less due to passion than to nature; better yet, they define it then and only then. The departure from paradise gives birth to humans, who no longer remain among the plants and animals they enjoy and have just named. They choose poverty over this obese wealth. It would therefore be better to suffer and labour, but live free. Freedom is paid for with the pain of work.
Knowledge, the serpent says, who knows a thing or two about programmes, will make you like God, as invisible as He is, as transparent. In storybook images and religious paintings, I see them incandescent, at least as much the gleaming angel with the flaming sword chasing them out. Incandescent with pain, poverty, guilty disquietude; incandescent with anger and disobedience; incandescent with expectation and improbable future; incandescent with solitude and sin, with misfortune, with possible knowledge and holiness; incandescent with hominescence.
Ecce mulier et homo. Naked.
The group and not the class of white concepts
A white concept, freedom is born from the other white concepts: from our totipotency, certainly, from God, assuredly, who infinitely allows us to disobey his weakness. Faced with any power of this world, no thought opens more to freedom than the one that whispers: if God exists, He surely doesn’t sit on this throne, on these cushions and in the light of these gildings; beneath this canopy rules a living thing that’s other than human, tiger or shark, oak or reed, a vegetable, some animal. Better yet, this thought, like this behaviour, opens to invention. Do you want to invent? See to it that you remain free. White concepts form a group rather than a simple class: they proceed from each other. Seek freedom, and you will know; seek knowledge, and you will invent; seek knowledge and invention at the same time, and you will not be able not to love.
Let’s call metaphysics the discipline that deals with the group of white concepts. Universals. From the deprogrammed body set sail pagus and house – objective; next, from the relational set sail money and signs, to return in a loop to the subjective; then, individual and swept along, the body leaves again, in turn, for other externalizations, to the temple, the marketplace, the tribunal – collective – to all professions or kinds of work – objective – to the cognitive: symbol, apeiron …, lastly to the freedom that sums up and starts the loop again. Thus this class is structured as a group.
Work and metaphysics
All work, all practice, all invention depart from these dedifferences, imitators of the body, and from these relations, indifferent, so as to differentiate or redifferentiate. At work: when the mother matter, hyle without specification, from which everything in the world is made, becomes wood, stone or metal, crystal, molecule, atom, particle, quark, then we toss the idea of matter, become useless, into the trash. When space, the translucent and basic content of everything in the world, becomes Euclidian, relativistic, projective, topological and multiplies its dimensions, we no longer say anything about it, and it disappears from our concerns. When biologists claim life is no longer being interrogated in laboratories but rather proteins, their foldings or kinesin, they are saying that life, dedifferentiated, has reached the extreme of its differentiations. Vitalism vanishes like some kind of ghost.
Metaphysics has the worst of reputations at the end of its practice but the best at the start. For without its ideas, which end up no longer saying anything at all, we would never have been able to begin; we erase conditions and premises; we always kill our parents; we forget our beginnings. The cognitive sciences speak little nowadays about our understanding, a tabula rasa; does theology still discourse on God’s understanding, the sum of eternal truths? And yet, how can we do without an invariant of truths before constants arise without which no science can progress? How can we do without a universal cognitive function, undefinable God, about which we can only say what He is not? Would we merely speak about, would we conceive what we know without these white premises? Can we begin to think without these universals? What can we do with them except for falsifying or redifferentiating them? Do we dispose of an axiom of closure to limit the list of these white concepts having, I repeat, the worst possible of reputations? Can we, for the sake of our future, do without metaphysics? When it reaches, like evolution, the limits of dead-end specialties, can science itself, entirely human, in order to revitalize itself, not reinvent new global concepts, even if difficult to use?
What is metaphysics?
After having asked for an axiom of closure, I will now ask the decisive question: is there a bound, a lower limit for dedifferentiation? Can we determine a lethal threshold of minimal despecialization below which a body can’t survive; where a field becomes sterile when stripped of even its bacteria; where a page loses its inscriptibility and the general equivalent its value; where a language, stammering, loses its syntax, its meaning and falls back into a noise bushy with spines; where a society, with attenuated bonds, no longer holds together and gives itself over to wars in which it risks eradication; where none of our knowledge has any dynamism or content anymore …? Yes, there is such a limit; the whole of Metaphysics itself draws it, provided that it be given the general extension of all the whitenesses whose sequence we have just listed off. The prefix meta designates this threshold. It doesn’t signify beyond, as has always been said, but below. 6 Below metaphysics, wheat doesn’t grow, for lack of elementary life; cattle and horses die without reproducing; all exchange freezes up; language no longer has any framework or meaning; knowledge and freedom vanish; the collective comes undone; the body itself no longer lives.
What is metaphysics? It describes the minimal thresholds of our despecializations, whether corporal or externalized. The thresholds of whiteness, abstraction, symbol, the low limits below which we cannot plunge without dying. What purpose does it serve? To watch over these dangerous critical points. It watches over our mouths and our hands, over our white organs, over the species with the symbolic body, over gymnasts and dancers, over ploughed fields, dovecotes, the marketplace, bankers’ accounts, temples, churches, the balanced scales of courts, the diverse bed of whores and derived occupations, the boards for actors, political meetings; it watches over the minimization of the social bond, over the cleanliness of our houses; it watches over the tabula rasa, Anaximander’s indefinite, geometry’s earth, algebra’s unknowns, matter, space and life; it watches over the Universe so that the whole of living things and their places won’t regress – below its minimal and precious whiteness – into the abyss of nothingness and nonsense, where neither plant nor animal are found, not even a bacterium. It erects a guardrail: above, our hominization; below, the chasm and its commotion. It watches over the human source.
Programme, syntax, white and black tablet
When I use a computer, I change software depending on whether I’m word-processing a text, setting out a household budget or having to find my way on a trip; my language on the contrary has a single syntax, a minimal one, which serves in every possible case, whether I’m writing, calculating or planning a trip. Dedifferentiated to the maximum, metaphysics likewise supplies a minimal tablet, one as razed as language’s syntax, ploughing’s pagus or the house’s cleanliness. It proposes the idea, even before Plato distinguished ‘the idea of bed’ or of tablet; 7 it imagines, in sum, the other world of ideas. It tells of matter without specification, well before crystal and molecules; the individual, before Pierre or Paula; consciousness before it becomes ‘the consciousness of something’. It imagines backworlds from which the justice that rewards life’s acts is equalized; in brief, it constructs zero-valent tabulae rasae of being and knowing, of fate and meaning, of acts and relations, in imitation of our white body, always present beneath these enterprises. And this zero-valence, once more, opens up to the omnivalence of all the differences unfolded by our actions and knowledge. It thus conditions knowledge, founded the ancient world and will found the next one, reinvents my body and that of my female neighbour.
Below metaphysics, the states of things vanish, the social bond dissolves, societies kill each other; death is always present beneath these enterprises. The simplest tablet, the universal tool, such that none simpler could be built. Is the success of theology in the style of Saint Augustine or ontology in the style of Heidegger due to the fact that they attempted, particularly when the sciences had tossed the ancient universals into the trash, to move back again into dedifferentiation, to construct tablets that were even more razed, where the name of God or the verb being and its present participle were repeated in every mode?
Would the virtuoso pianists of the baroque or the accompanists of songs, through exclusive love of Couperin or of Brassens, scorn the piano itself, built as a universal tablet suitable for playing any music and to compose even more of it, new and unexpected? What could be simpler than such tablets since time hardly changes them, unlike so many techniques? Of course, this common succession of white and black strips, this tablet without prior music is no good for anything without scales or arpeggios, without practice or finger exercises, without tonal or atonal decision, without harmonies bounded by wrong notes, without virtuosos or composers. But what would all these talents do without this tablet? Here is a white syntax that’s as visible as the ploughed field, the smooth page, the clean house, the virginal womb, the temple of Vesta, the wedding of Penia. Metaphysics abstractly, that is to say, in a white way, expresses all these tabulae rasae; it constructs the most razed tablet below which there aren’t even any more tablets.
Who and what purpose does metaphysics serve? Its incarnation
Nothing could be more ‘useful’ consequently than despecialized metaphysics, despite the mockery of the specialists who seem to be unaware of how destitute of future its absence would make them. Metaphysics serves to remain human and not die from it. It allows the subjective, the collective, the objective, the cognitive to survive. It ought to serve to build a new peace during these times of new war in which invisible beings put invisible beings to death. Who does it serve? At least it doesn’t serve anyone, whether tyrant or guru.
What purpose does it serve? There could be nothing more useful, even indispensable, in the visible and concrete than metaphysics because it imitates our body, comes out of it, returns to it, both of them dedifferentiated, both of them properly human; it is born of the body and stops at death. A triumphant result whose newness is enchanting: nothing could be more carnal than this apparent abstraction of quintessence, nothing could be more incarnated, closer to the hand, to the mouth, to the womb, to the naked body, to the very gymnastics whose movements practise for everything, to the nervous system, to the repertory of gestures that give signs, free, to music, to dance, to the voice that sings or speaks, to the labour of the earth and to the relation to living things. Corporal, peasant, gymnastic, vital, metaphysics marks the threshold below which our body can no longer be dedifferentiated without mortal danger. Highly physical, metaphysics positions itself at the boundary (meta). Below it, the gravestone, the statue of the Commander, better, the totality of Statues.
Return to incandescence
Our nature blows, flows and burns, incandescent. Our totipotency makes the class of all these white concepts possible: the beyond of all knowledge and all experience, in which the heart of my silence prays to the silence at the heart of all things; eternity in time; our bonds in fusion, the serene peace beyond battles and all resentment, all of them concepts that have been banished ever since knowledge no longer trusted in anything but defined and falsifiable formats, ever since we no longer heard that call in music and without voice, audible nevertheless ever since we received the chirping of birds and the cries of ancestors buried in the Africa Rift, ever since we suffered from thirst, hunger, cold, poverty, solitude or being crammed together, ever since, children of poverty, we gaped from lack, ever since prophets psalmodied absence, ever since scientists gropingly began to know and rejected lovers to weep, that call we no longer hear and which nevertheless murmurs like the air and the sea and the fire that surround or beat the earth and can destroy it, the earth defined, delimited, rigorous and exact like the scientific disciplines, conditional and founding like a cognitive science, solid like experience, the earth, habitation and niche, support of the species, of their wanderings, of their wars and their labours, but always surrounded by the rumbling of the immortal sea, enveloped by furious and turbulent or calm and transparent air, an earth devastated, nourished, dug up, annihilated, reborn through fire, serious exactitude edged with the trinity of incandescent elements.
We have quit earth for air, water and fire. Humble humans with the name of the earth, we live on it, depend on it, on its multicoloured immanence, rendered so by grid-patterns, mosaics, landscapes, networks of a thousand forms and varied circumstances; we carefully and without dreaming keep our two feet on it, our hands on things and eyes lowered; we cut out a white pagus on it, which reminds us, in us and around us, of that large encircling on the part of the blue-green sea, the translucent air and the pure white fire.
Elementary immanence and elementary transcendence
Of course, no one can work or write except on the crystalline solidity of the earth, well differentiated, never on the blurry water, in the capricious air or on the untouchable fire no one traverses without dying. But the earth, full and black, awaits the white in order for writing to be read or transparent fluids in order to bear fruit. We don’t merely dig into the writing media, we must still shed light on our scarifications for reading and comprehension to occur; we don’t merely plough furrows, we must water the plants and the aerobic seeds for fruits and harvests to occur. The earth therefore needs the water and tears stemming from the seas, the wind and its ceaseless sobs, flashing fire and burns, so much does brilliance and fruitfulness come from passionate joy and pain.
The form and bounds of work and meaning, of course, come from the earth and its immanent hardness, which is dry, rigorous, exactly precise, but no form, no bound could be read there without formless and boundless incandescent transcendence. We wouldn’t understand the first word of any knowledge or the first benefits of any work should this beginning of light, heat, movement and flux be absent. Just as the earth shows its borders in its ocean robe, beneath the atmospheric scarf and in the aura come from the Sun and the constellations, so the plane of immanence plunges into a volume without which this plane could neither exist nor be thought. There can be no earth without the other elements; without the Universe, there can be no world; no chromatic state without white state. Work, language and meaning would remain black without this first and indispensable light. Useful immanence, cold and black; burning and shining transcendence, conditional. Recent, complicated, cooled off, the Earth descends from hot fluids and primitive simple bodies, from elementary incandescences; and meaning descends from the divine apeiron; and the range of colours from whiteness. Just as every culture proceeds from the stem body, so all our thoughts, all our feelings descend from the white.
Who should we love?
The same goes for desire. Certainly, we fa ll in love with him or her, but the infinite, before all and after all, tempts the totipotency of our condition of being a stem species. Our deprogramming erases every orientation and places us before the possible totality. After the list of the thousand and three women he loved and abandoned, Don Juan ended up praying in a monastery, his face lifted up to the infinitely populated empty heavens. Except in known pathologies, mysticism doesn’t reduce to a sexual frustration. Or rather, our white, infinite and symbolic species cannot avoid frustration, its daily bread. Who or what can fill our desires? Who, even filled with riches, hasn’t at some time experienced in his flesh that humans are more often fed by privation than by satisfaction? That they drew what they did best from this inexhaustible spring? That hundreds of thousands of years have trained their metabolism for lack, hunger, shortage, dearth, scarcity? That obesity overburdens and kills us? We quit specialization even in desire. Destitution, our condition.
If, positively, love sometimes experiences the excellent seraphic union in pure and naked eroticism, this satisfaction alone however, even if perfect, whether punctual or of long duration, never fills the ineradicable – because infinite – lack of an inaccessible totality tied to our infinitude. Widowers of God, we love all women and the world, our neighbour and those who are far away, plants and animals, landscapes and life, the world in its tabulae rasae, deserts, high seas, white mountains, existence and death, good and evil, being and non-being, the Universe and women again; there is no love but universal love, directed towards that inaccessible integral of our acts of love called God Itself by wiser people than I.
And if I love you, I know that this totality visits you, becomes concentrated in you and inhabits you, singular. We live in nothingness or infinity, sometimes plunging into this finite milieu in which other species have their niche. To zero or to all, many does not matter. Loving him or her, named, occurs when the All becomes condensed in him or her. A lightning-fast experience that creates a short circuit between emptiness, named frustration by our incomprehension, and the filled infinity of the pleroma. Mysticism prowls around all of our loves, which are always universal.
Saintliness, poverty
So the Greek innovators of the abstract set out an apeiron, humanized here under the idea of a totipotent stem species that was born of a reflux in the reverse direction from evolution and starting from which all cultures are born. Mystics experience it as the sum of desire and knowledge, as the God they can only speak of apophantically, that is to say, negatively and regressively, only saying what one cannot say about it. It remains indefinite. Paschal fire.
Who bears witness to it? Since, put into networks and professionalized, our sciences function on collective intelligence, we have less need of genius; since wars have become impossible under the threat of atomic eradication or reciprocal invisibilities, we are wary of heroes; we feel today an enormous lack of saints, who return to the same deprogramming, to transparent indifference. This latter whitens them so that they become invisible, in the image of God. Discreet, secret, without any halo of glory. Witnesses.
Poor in language: silent, transparent, almost absent from the world, who could locate them? Poor in intentions: virgin, naive; saying yes infinitely, without any no. Poor through gift, pardon and abandonment. Poor, period, without any determination by luxury or superfluous needs. Poor in mind, learnedly ignorant, limited to carnal metaphysics. Poor, seeking total – and without any condition – humility before the Earth, life, thought, the different cultures, the others. Destitute: without self, without I, without subject. They have wandered so much, without any roof over their heads, that the differences met with have noiselessly planed down any differential spines in them. Forms, lights, shadows and colours have been mixed in them by the meeting of humans, the Grand Narrative of time and the trip around the world.
If we don’t all decide, individual and collective, to become these poor people, as we genetically are, we will die. Poverty: the hope of humankind and the future of the world.
Identity, belongingnesses
We, I
Since, irrespective of porous cultures, absurdities still exist as outmoded as borders between nations, you have to show your passport or identity card to one of the functionaries who keep watch at those walls. He first makes sure the photograph of an inimitable face matches the singular one, passing before him, between your shoulders. Then, if he is in doubt, he reads your last name, first name, age and sex, written on one or the other of the documents. He verifies your identity. But is it really a question of identity?
No. For depending on whether you are called this or that, your name, carried as well by ten or a hundred thousand people in the world, doesn’t designate you in any way: you merely belong to the subset of those men and women who answer to the call of Martin, Chang or Gonzalez. You likewise belong to the subset of those men or women called Sarah or Bruno. You sometimes meet, on your journeys, pretentious people who bear your first and last name. At least for this homonymous reason, the one, even associated with the other, doesn’t make your identity precise in any way but merely an intersection of two of your belongingnesses. And depending on your sex, you again belong to one of two subsets, male or female, lastly to the subset that saw so many births in such-and-such a place and at such-and-such a time. Who can boast of having alone been born there and at such-and-such an hour, such-and-such a week? Your supposed I plunges into diverse we’s.
Confusion between belonging and identity
Thus we always confuse belonging and identity. Who are you? On hearing this question, you state your last and first name, and you sometimes add your place and date of birth. Better yet, you claim to be French, Spanish, Japanese; no, you aren’t, identically, such-and-such, but, once again, you belong to one or the other of these groups, of these nations, of these languages, of these cultures. Likewise, you say you are Shintoist, Catholic, Democrat or Republican; no and no, once again, you merely belong to this religion, to some political party, to some sect full of obstinate people.
But who are you then? This verb opens up to meanings that are so vague it would be better to put it on hold; we shall return to it. So say your identity. The only truthful answer: yourself and only yourself. And this is so especially as the principle of identity is stated as follows: p is identical to p, logicians and mathematicians being in the habit of writing it down with three little horizontal bars in order to distinguish it from the ‘equals’ sign, which only gathers together two of them. As for belongingness, they designate it with a little sign shaped like a barred semicircle, literally resembling the Greek letter epsilon or a kind of euro, and whose pre sence shows that such-and-such an element is part of such-and-such a set, the way you are a member of the Portuguese, the Muslims or such-and-such a football team. The confusion between belonging and identity then begins with a grave error in reasoning that a teacher of an elementary class would punish.
Customs and excise, police, FBI, taxes …
Of course, most often, your last and first name are sufficient for the police to locate you. We, alas, no longer remember the indignant protests against the institution of identity papers uttered by those who refused, only a few decades ago, to be issued a card by the government like a whore. The Nazi state humiliated the Jews in this way by obligating them to carry such a document on their person and to show it upon command; the men and women said to be free found themselves exempted from this, whereas the women and girls who were victims of this measure were all equally to be called Sarah. This decision, as can be seen, eliminated identity so as to only keep belonging. The method of location used by the police shows that belongingness functions as a kind of address; if the police want to apprehend you, it is enough for them to ring at your place of residence, whose department, city, street and number is known to them. While you are asking the question: ‘Who am I?’ the FBI is resolving a completely different one: How can we find you? The mistake in reasoning concerns two distinct disciplines: you are confusing ontology and anthropometry. Maybe you are even forgetting the freedom allowed by a certain anonymity. Conversely, carrying this card protects from murder; I have heard ten African friends envy it, saying that at least their state counted toubabs; if one goes missing, they search for him; it becomes difficult to eliminate him.
Life and death
But the list carried on the passport, the identity card, plus all the administrative, bank and medical papers, not counting telephone, gas and electricity papers, does not exhaust, and far from it, the belongingnesses of a woman or a man. Should they learn a language said to be foreign, they will be plunged into a new community, inaudible to the neighbouring one and often to their own; should they practise a profession, they will be in a company, a department, a division, even launched into competition; a sport, they will be on a team that, next Saturday, is going to oppose some other team; should they become specialists in a discipline, they will be participants in a knowledge, in a department, in a corporatism; should they take delight in opera, dance, the piano, they will start an appreciation club. This series of belongingnesses grows all the longer the more you possess a concern for living. It allows you to share your experience with others, and its openness increases your accomplishment. So don’t hesitate; multiply your belongingnesses; your bonds will become proportionately richer. This series doesn’t close; you will only finish weaving this network the day you die.
Once again, say your identity: supposing it is decided to be the union of the intersection of all these subsets or the sum of the series of all your belongingnesses, you will not know your identity; no one will know it, except at the ordinary moment, solemn for you, of your death. If and when it exists, it may reduce to the sum of belongingnesses, but never to one or the other of them. Does there exist, at the limits of this series or of this sum, an accumulation point outside their unfolding? Either your identity integrates the niches you passed through in your existence, the doors you forced open, or it (another identity?) always resides in some site irreducibly exterior to this sum. Only the tautology ‘self is identical to self’ rigorously closes this bushy immanence or this inaccessible transcendence. But the white transparency, the incandescence of this repetition doesn’t teach anything.
Drawn in this way, two cards tend towards each other: the belongingness card runs towards a complication increasing in number and intersecting overlappings; the white identity card, silent and smooth, shines.
Racism and its two reductions
Now, for quite some time scientists, politicians, journalists, regionalists, lastly everyone, have used the word ‘identity’ ad nauseam without first seeing in it that pure logical error that slides into a worse mistake. For let’s examine what is covered over by the expressions: cultural identity, national identity, religious identity, masculine or feminine identity, African, European or Islamic identity.
Shocking injustices and an unbearable poverty can arise from these ways of speaking and thinking. What does the racist say? He treats you as if your identity were exhausted by one of your belongingnesses: for him, you are black or male or catholic or red-headed. He loves the verb ‘to be’, as vague as it is reductive. Racism draws its power from an ontology whose first act of speech here reduces the person to a category or the individual to a collective. It nails you into a compartment the way an entomologist sticks some insect into his collection with a needle; hunted, killed, pierced with steel, it incarnates its species. No, you are not Muslim, a young woman, Protestant or blond, you are merely part of some country and its spring fashions, of this religion and its rites or of a sex and its changing roles. As much as logical identity determines a rigour, so much do belongingnesses fall and float like time, chance and necessity. So much misfortune sweeps down on to the world from this that it would be better to correct this error that quickly turns into crime.
Racism can be defined by the reduction it carries out between the relation of belonging and the principle of identity. Don’t use this word anymore, so widespread when it’s a question of culture, language or sex, since the logical error becomes a social and political crime there. The racist reduces the I to an us. Who hasn’t experienced that this simple mistake in language conceals an attempted killing? So consider the following expressions, so common today, to be definitively racist: cultural identity, sexual identity, religious identity, national identity.
Ethics: Inclusion and exclusion
Corresponding to these elements of logical and sociopolitical order are now things that are as highly simple in ethics. For belongingness, as is little said, implies a singular libido and drives more burning than the drives said to be of the body and the mind, attachments that flame in contemptuous attitudes, during heated discussions, and in war, during which everyone defends less his identity, or even his ideas, than the glue [colle] of his collective, sect or corporation. These pathological delights sometimes find their treatment (the learned say ‘catharsis’) in the rows of the stadiums where soccer is played; better of course to watch while shouting the victory of the Blues against the Greens in the number of shots at goal, which never kill anyone, while waiting for another competition for a tin-plated cup in which the results will be reversed than to bury a hundred thousand useless dead the evening after a battle of my country against yours. Belongingness’s terrify ing lust, from which perhaps comes all the evil in the world, is expressed in a universal, although unspoken, rule of conduct – ‘love one another only inside one’s group’, – exclusive on the inside, excluding towards the outside. 8 So belongingness again repeats the verb ‘to be’: this one is one of us. I spoke of a subset, and here we find it closed.
If some individual belongs to this subset, this presupposes that there is at least one other individual who doesn’t belong to it; in fact or by force, we will expel this person outside our walls if perchance he crosses their enclosure. Outside this boundary drawn by belongingness, this other cannot benefit from the same benefits: inclusion implies and explains the exclusion. Thus certain animals practise extraspecific murder. The question revolves around the Other. Since identity merely applies the self on to the self, identity rigorously expressed remains innocent of this exclusion; but the belongingness or gluing of the self into the us rejects the others from this inclusion.
The libido of belongingness: Exercises
With, as driving force, this unleashed libido of ours. Does every evil in the world come from belongingness? I’m inclined to think so. Evil prowls in these boundaries, closure and definition, ensuing from comparisons and the rivalries they incite, it being roused by this libido’s heat.
May you, once a day, in order to cool it down, forget your culture, your language, your nation, your dwelling place, your village’s soccer team, even your sex and your religion, in short, the thickness of your enclosures. Women do change names after marriage; travellers change address, and emigrants passports. Translate [traduisez] some foreign word; betray the easy dialect in your mouth; imagine that the person being accused of betrayal is traversing, in the literal sense (traducit), a border, is quite simply travelling and that, whether an importer or exporter, he is giving across this barrier (trans-dare). Call this traitor an exchanger instead. Bless the translator [traducteur]. Women, marry your brother’s enemy. If you live in the shadow of a modest church tower or cathedral, look upon it once a day, at noon for example, as a ziggurat, a pyramid, a mosque or as a shadowless pagoda. Happy religions whose founding narrative doesn’t deify their own land but on the contrary blesses an entirely different one, distant, said to be holy and so inaccessible that the land upon which real life unfolds becomes a valley of tears and place of exile. Where are we from? From nowhere, from elsewhere, from transcendence. Let’s lastly practise, during this hour of light, dressing our friend up as a Persian and seeing our dragonesque beasts as beloved princesses calling for help. May we, from time to time, forget our belongingnesses. Our identity will gain from it. With peace, on top of that.
An admission by identity: Entirely innate, entirely acquired
I love the fact that the principle of identity reduces to an empty tautology, the ontology supporting identity becoming, by this stroke, nullified. My face takes on the form of a white circle, my body that of a candid coat. A portrait without lines or traits, a piece of wax that’s as malleable as you please. So the populated card 9 is projected onto the white card, every different thing being imprinted on such an incandescence: the beauty of some female friend, the ugliness of American cities, the sparkling Sahara, the transcendent Andes, the currents of the Baffin Strait with its successive icebergs, Japan’s triangular volcanos, bandits and saints, the humble and kings, crane operators, labourers, hookers, ministers, killers in power and love’s secret lovers, knowledge and music. The noisy echo of a thousand voices, the white light with ten colours.
I love the fact that the sensualist philosophers, during the century of white enlightenment, plunged the self into this virgin wax. The world is figured and disfigured there as much as you please; the others hold an infinite conversation there. In my body, my soul and my palimpsest-understanding, a thousand texts and drawings arrange to meet each other, heavily overburdened, speedily forgotten, memorized, overlapping, ceaselessly erased and nonetheless always repainted and rewritten in reshaped furrows. Everything written on this absence; or: no one plus the others; that’s the self. Ego nemo et alii.
Identity, vacuity, virginity. From this emptiness, every possible thing that can fill it jumps forth. The pleroma or plenitude needs a vacation. A virgin becomes a mother who becomes virgin again after her pregnancy. Almost all living things, plants, animals, mushrooms, are born endowed, only know what they have been given, marked, equipped with stiff limits resistant to learning, in sum, programmed, innate. For us humans, everything is acquired, as I just said, like traces on wax or colours in the colourless. But our native identity precisely includes this possibility of acquiring everything; given at the start, this is an omnipotency, a totipotency, in the sense that everything sleeps in potential. We find ourselves universally endowed by this whiteness itself, innate. There is no discussion or contradiction or even proportion between the acquired and the innate, between the two cards I’m talking about: entirely innate, entirely acquired, humanity is formed by this strange addition.
The compound body
Objection: an extreme difference on the contrary separates the self from the non-self since the immune system defends the organism from the outside by recognizing the others with enough precision to better attack them if they invade the place. This then is a counterexample in which identity becomes confused with belongingness, closes off its borders and wages an implacable battle against intruders. Everything happens as though an entire defensive army was keeping watch from the battlements of the numerous walls included in the organism, skin, pia mater, dura mater, pleura, peritoneum, tunica externa, cellular membranes.
But sometimes one organ is an exception to this rule: the uterus, in which, if I may say so, a partial lifting of immunity rules. For the womb mustn’t defend itself against the intruder the male puts into it; femininity must actively welcome alterity since, in the contrary case, it would kill or expel the spermatozoids, single-celled organisms that are always foreign. It accepts them without fighting them. As far as immunity is concerned, every mother remains virgin in some way. She can receive the semen of an infinity of males, which she doesn’t protect herself against. Otherwise we would never have children. The uterus resembles the self, not defined by some belongingness but by the transparent principle of identity. I love the fact that this incandescent identity descends into the belly of women; love this welcoming organ.
What then should we say about identity in addition to the tautology of its principle? Ei ther it follows the ordinary rule, arming itself and multiplying cuirasses and walls, engaging in a battle against any alterity in order to end up expelling it; or it prefers the womb, sometimes outside immunity; so, immersed in the uterus’ possible, identity disarms any defence, whether collective or particular. Our body puts together both solutions, combats and doesn’t combat, closes and opens, forbids and allows passage. If you choose the solution of the intestines, the liver or the skeleton, you opt for individual life, the life that lasts for the time of mayflies and passes like the grass in the fields: a blink of an eye, fighting, death rattle; you will have lived for the useless flash of wounds and bumps. Should you prefer love, unfurl the white flag. The time of a new narrative occurs then.
Three bodies, three lives and three times?
The individuated body, the phenotype and ontogenesis fight but, buried at least inside the uterus, phylogenesis invents a peace in order to last in a different way. Does a secret lie in this origin place? A war always costs more than the conditions of a prior armistice that would allow it to be avoided. Always ultimately beaten, does the individual organism pay the price for its defensive system with death? An enormous cost, in truth. It only survives, partially, in and through the organ that’s sometimes without defence. Everything happens as though we were living two lives, one of the individual and one of the species, as well as two times, short and long, because we have two bodies, with open doors and crenellated walls, the one in white identity, the other in belongingness.
Hidden in the depths of the vagina, the peaceful solution causes another life than our own to be born, another time, the time of a narrative that surpasses the duration of roses. Does the identity of humankind lie in women’s wombs? Does human culture lie in feminine nature? I love this metaphor.
Third body, third life, third time: four centuries ago, Montaigne met a ‘savage’ from the New World who dazzled and disquieted him with his strangeness. Under the various pretexts of these differences, we normally kill each other. But we have just learnt that our common forebears, coming out of Africa, separated several millennia ago; with our cells bearing a code akin to the one carried by that Indian dating from the Renaissance, we meet again as close cousins. The Age of Discovery opened culture and the social sciences up to the alterities scattered in space; the time of the Grand Narrative brings them back to the family; predominantly natural, it relativizes the former cultural differences.
Life and the self as works
So we take up again, over a longer duration, the slow patience of our contingencies. Thus the self is founded in the work of time and assembled like a work that grows, in turn, like the destiny of a life. All of them together begin with blessed encounters, at random, and develop by epigeneses. Like the self and time, the work advances, falls back, never linearly, bifurcates, returns back along itself, sleeps, dreams, rests, explodes for a long while, suddenly empties, often becomes muddled, and also fills with hopes that die and unpredictabilities that shoot up like jets of water, abundant for a long time or gone dry the following day, parching or flooding the rare lands that are erased, revised, transcribed, the mixed places, the whole coded on an initial whiteness. Contingent, time and the self expand or collapse like the work.
When Flaubert says: ‘Madame Bovary is me’, he only reveals a small part of the truth. Precise and exact, this identification only goes in one direction, from him to a character. He could have, at leisure, identified just as much with Bouvard, Salammbô or others. In reversing the direction of the famous sentence, in therefore seeking the author’s identity as such, we would discover to what extent his self is swarming, overloaded with princesses and Roman soldiers, with Saint Anthony and erudite theologians, with simple hearts and complicated bourgeois, with Norman landscapes where cows splash in the mud and dry African shores, with Telliameds and Pécuchets. This identification in the forward and not reverse direction, an identification unfolded then like a fan and not reduced to a single one of its branches returning towards the pivot, says as much about an author as about the self in general.
Certainly Balzac and Zola identified, in their works, with ministers and murderers, washerwomen, miners, duchesses, bishops, women peasants or men of law just as much as George Sand, Cervantes or the Countess of Ségur did, but the former objectivize on paper, the way others paint on canvas or sculpt marble, the thousand and one figures of a self that’s common to everyone and thus always constituted as a coalescent and slow work. Just as ‘author’ means augmenter, these great proper names enlarge a process that everyone experiences, even if minusculely. The former make this process set sail from their body, and the others keep it, hide it, sometimes even forget it, as though it had shrunk; but it’s always a question of the same process of mimetism and assimilation. Alterity penetrates in droves into incandescence, as does the chaotic card into the white card. But how could these identifications reach such a number, such qualities, this leafy, sonorous and hued landscape complexity if the self eliminated, if it expelled, if it didn’t function like a uterus, welcoming and sometimes without defence, or like the trunk of a wide family? Dense with legions, each of us assembles his whore-identity from this crowd that’s encountered, accepted, not merely tolerated but actively invited. Thus each life, each self, each person’s time is constructed like works. A single precept for behaviour holds: build yourself, life, body and duration, in the patience and the suffering of a work of art.
Pedagogy imitates the organism
Why wouldn’t the pedagogy of human children follow the evolution of this organic map, composed of territories of belongingness and terrains of reception? This pedagogy consists first in coding them; I was going to say whatever form the code might have. Its work, later, will plan to be decoded, to return – why not? – to the incandescence of virgin wax or learned ignorance, to be recoded, to change languages, sounds and images, but it won’t be able to do so unless it knows how to code. Why not consequently accept necessity? The first code, inevitable, consists in receiving one’s own culture, the subset of one’s earliest belongingnesses, even if it means refusing them later. Transmit your language, your customs, your religious rites, in short, your ethnology; don’t scorn them. For how can we avoid these necessities of enrootedness? How can we, impregnated, not love them? Up until my death, I will retain my accent, tails of inveterate habits following my ethnology, certain bad table manners, a streak of Gasconitude, the practice of Christian and courtly love. The generation that didn’t transmit the codes it had received is learning, too late, that it was unduly arrogant, believing it understood what it hadn’t mastered and criticizing to the point of abandonment what it hadn’t understood. So don’t let the wax stay virgin, don’t let the child choose always and too much, for learning, always difficult, co nsists in letting oneself be scarified. A harsh ordeal. In order not to remain naive and foolish, plasticity has to learn the act, less passive than is believed, of receiving. The verb ‘to capture’ designates this mixture of capturing action and captive passion that’s at the common root of the learning words: perception, concept, interception, reception. The predator hunts and kills; the charmer attracts to her. On the one side, the capturing immunized organs, on the other, the receptor. On the one hand, one’s own ethnology, which tends to defend itself, on the other, the journey of life, which laughs at these fortifications and which fortifies itself by not defending itself. Yes, I live with demolished defences.
Look at the tapestry, put together during the day and undone at night, on which Penelope draws and erases the map of her sailor husband’s wanderings. The cartoon develops with time, depending on the storms and calm seas, on the position at noon and at twilight, on the bearing and explorations, on the monsters and enchantresses; the self resembles the changing couple of the weaver and the seafarer, resembles the single body formed by the organs that remain in Ithaca so as to defend themselves every day against the odious suitors, who, invading the palace, seek to devour the heritage, and by the other who becomes transformed on Circe’s island, hides beneath the ewes’ wool to escape the cyclopean prison and sometimes also makes himself deaf with balls of wax in order to pass through the sirens’ strait safe and sound. This one and double self, named Nobody and who at leisure captures the monsters met with in the inhabited lands, is constructed, by time, like the Odyssey, a masterpiece of art. Travelling and stay-at-home, its narrative is striped with an inextricable network of warps and weft, of verses sung and then written, nothing but crisscrossed scars or traces of wounds. Learning requires actively enduring this passivity, formerly called feminine, of receiving. I live scarified. Wounded, almost destroyed. A hundred times shipwrecked, therefore wonderfully living.
Temporal invariance
For the past few pages, time has occurred. It forces us to go back over the name, the one the identity card bears. Apart from the belongingness to the subset of those who are called in the same way, the name at least ensures that the person who was born there and at that hour, but who subsequently became an adolescent, an adult and, sooner than can be believed, an old man, remains the same: the naming guarantees a constancy across time. The principle of identity – P repeats P – remains outside of every framework, of every order, of every place, of every time. Yet, its opposite, the principle of non-contradiction states: P cannot at the same time be non-P. For example, I can’t simultaneously be someone else, nor can I at the same time remain a newborn, a young man, an adult and dying. Yet time makes us go through all these stages; they therefore do not contradict each other if and when duration occurs. This is why my identity can be defined as this constancy in becoming.
A good definition of time therefore eliminates these contradictions so well that many recent philosophers, taking everything in the opposite direction, made the mistake of engendering time through contradictories. On the contrary, it recovers them through identity, in such a way that it transcends and combines these two first principles of logic: time makes identity stable across contradictory states. Far from any place, duration creates me. It stabilizes my contradictions. Terrified by wandering and time, those who seek places flee, if I may, into the space of belongingness and think that only statues ensure perenniality, as in the niches of Paris’s Hôtel de Ville. A bad sign, only these people are seen. The self stays as invisible as the principle of identity. White, transparent, the colour of constancy. So finally say your identity: incandescent, I remain; contradictory, multiple and mixed, I plunge into time. These are my two cards. Does their confluence ensure that I live, a little, in eternity?
The end of two-valued logic?
All belongingness presupposes a subset; every subset is defined by one or more properties. With the libido’s help, we have a tendency to consider ourselves as being part of a community endowed with a human property, the others – women, children, strangers or animals – being excluded from it and gathered into a complementary subset inhabited by those who are not human. Consequently, there are two subsets and two only: ours and this opposing one. The verb ‘to be’ and ontology conjugate this logic wonderfully; we will say being and nothingness, the human and the non-human, true and false, good and evil. The deconstruction of this operation carries out the same gesture as the metaphysics it wants to bring down since it adopts the same two-valued logic in triumphing by positioning itself outside Western metaphysics: here we see the return of the same division.
Yet it suffices to understand, as I just said, that I grew for thirty years in order to think that I am big and small at the same time, modulo time, without my collapsing for all that; it suffices for me to learn a language or music in order to think I am capable and incapable, modulo these recently acquired specialties. Two-valued logic is used wonderfully for certain demonstrative systems, but only there. Life is hardly acquainted with it, nor time, nor learning, nor projects, nor construction in general, nor the Grand Narrative.
Which fluctuate instead in a four-valued modal logic: possible, impossible, necessary, contingent. This possible, plastic and in a certain way totipotent, plunges into an environment in which it encounters the impossible and the necessary so as to blossom into the contingent. When the impossible sorts among the bouquet of possibilities, we never emerge except as a contingency sculpted by necessity. Time and life flow from and to the possible, passing through channels percolating with impossibilities; the past immediately becomes necessary there, the future remaining possible and the present contingent. Even the physical theory of chaos is better understood within this framework, a fortiori vital and historical phenomena. Philosophy thus frees itself from two-valued logic.
Intersections
Outmoded, your identity card only included two or three of your belongingnesses among those that stay fixed for your entire life, for you remain woman or male and your mother’s child; you can no longer change your date or place of birth. Such logical poverty confines you to destitution because in fact your authentic identity is more greatly detailed and even seems to dissolve into a thousand categories that change with time. For your travels, jobs and the things you’ve been trained in, your professional, sports and political experiences quickly make the number of groups into which you are integrated grow: tomorrow you are going to be part of those who speak Vietnamese, play rugby, know how to fix a moped; nothing augments the number of collectives of your peers at the same time as your personal characteristics as much as pedagogy or the acquisition of new competences.
So how can your identity be described? As an intersection, fluctuating across duration, of this variety of belongi ngnesses. You never stop sewing and weaving your own harlequin’s coat, as many-shaded and multicoloured, but freer and more flexible, as the map of your genes. So don’t defend one of your belongingnesses; on the contrary multiply them so as to enrich what we call, by common accord, your self, all the happier and stronger precisely because it gradually frees itself from the places you wanted to defend. In doing so, you even honour your earliest culture better. Never do I feel more Gascon, more French, than at the other end of the other hemisphere.
Towards a first limit, the multicoloured multiplicity arouses singularity, strengthens it, as though this singularity gave its main colour to the whole of the painting. At the other limit, it rejoins universality. You as well as me, her as well as him, African or Eskimo, let’s present such a many-shaded palette to everyone. Humanity arrays itself with bright colours. You will recognize it by this harlequinade. The distinctive feature of humankind? This sort of mixture. Incandescent like Pierrot; many-shaded, mixed like Harlequin. The more you imprint others onto the self, the more it becomes established as singular – for no one else presents this remarkable colour – but also the more it runs towards a sum as white as the wax we began with. This whiteness can be regarded either as a colour or as the integration of every colour. Pierrot tends towards Harlequin; Harlequin tends towards Pierrot; this double incandescence forms human time.
So universal humanity becomes that virginity that was received at birth, achieved at death and whose plastic becoming we recognize in ourselves. We will therefore give it two identity cards, the one white, the other multicoloured.
A new identity card?
Imagine going back over a border in front of the border guards, equipped with a variable passport resembling the instantaneous cartography of your changing aptitudes. New technologies allow the chip you show to the customs official to be instituted. The official will pinpoint each person and yourself among everyone since this chip describes the changing profile of singular identity, but above all we see mixing in it a thousand collectives corresponding to your experiences and the things you’ve been trained in. Each person can even show it to potential employers who have less of a need for specialists than for fluid aptitudes or intersections of various expertises. A diploma, for example, only tells one of your belongingnesses, first of all old, often forgotten, always stiff due to its unicity. In fact, your aptitudes must be said to be, in the closest sense of the word, polytechnic, I mean at the intersection of a thousand expertises, understanding by this repairing mopeds as well as translating Sanskrit, running computers as well as an infinite sympathy towards those who are poorer than you. Fingerprints formerly came close to such a drawing, but it would in addition be necessary to suppose them changing in real time. The self becomes identical to an inconstant finger. As wrinkled as the skin and as mobile as the face, smiles, winks, tears and old traces of crying, this Harlequin coat therefore varies, whereas the thumbprint, given at the start, never changes. Easy to create, such a chip, as universal as the virginity from just now but in addition eminently singular, paints your portrait in real time. Might such a chip contribute to putting right the aforementioned logical error and injustice and, all in all, a great deal of human misfortune? Or should it be kept in secrecy inside each of us?
Balance sheet
In total, this description of identity traverses the following domains: logical, through the principle and its tautology, temporal invariance across contradictions; sociopolitical, in the critique of racism and the process of exclusion; biological, through the immune system and its fluctuating uterine exception; psychosociological, since this description defines a libido of belongingness; it ponders space and time and identifies, to finish, the self with three states: a virgin plasticity, a complicated landscape and transformations vibrating from one phase to the other.
From identity to belongingnesses, we slide from the I to the we. For I at least belong to a culture. How should we define it?
The culture of the ‘Honnête Homme’ or ‘Gentleman’
The French language primarily detects two meanings of this word. Cicero long ago called philosophy the cultivation [culture] of the soul. The humanist sixteenth century repeated this signification with the ‘development of intellectual faculties by means of appropriate exercises’. 10 Our Italian colleagues use the expression uomo di coltura to designate the signification French classicism recognized in l’honnête homme, common throughout France for so long and become now rare. For, inherited from the Latin language, from a Christianity equipped with its Greco-Roman and Middle-Eastern roots, in sum from what two or three centuries later will be called Renaissance humanism, this ideal that’s corporal, intellectual, scientific, moral, aesthetic and also sometimes religious remains in a few consciousnesses and still irrigates certain lives with health, sensitivity, and gentle [honnête] behaviour. Our German friends call this education made of knowledge and courtesy Bildung. But social and political correctness considers this education to be academic and elitist, sins that are now deadly.
Born with the translation of Greek philosophy into Ciceronian language and ancient languages into European languages, based then on the ‘humanities’ today in danger of going extinct if not vilified, it started dying at least a half-century before the new technologies; so the latter did not kill it. Reading a thousand books taking Piraeus 11 to be a man and reheated banalities to be postmodern discoveries allows us to observe the ravages produced in the head by the absence of perspective brought on by the ignorance of antiquity, of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; a few university specialists frequent these dying humanities, specialists themselves suffering the symmetrical ravages of the ignorance, just as serious, of the exact and social sciences, which this cultivation entails. The university only had to separate, on the whole recently, men of letters from scientists for two families of imbeciles, crammed full with repetitive formats, to be born. Where can we find a lantern whose light, strong enough to shine during the day, would discern the ‘cultivated’ person? This latter would strive to reconstitute a humanism based on truly contemporary requisites.
The cultures distinguished by anthropology
A second meaning, rather Germanic in origin, prevailed during th e nineteenth century in the wake of Kant and established itself in anthropology. For the Aufklärung and then the social sciences added to ‘civilization’, a term of a more Latin origin and judged to be more normative by said sciences, that culture which today signifies ‘the set of acquired forms of behavior in a singular human society’. The adjective ‘acquired’ highlights here the opposition between the cultural and the natural, the latter gradually losing lots of ground to the point where human nature became negated, as in Sartre for example, at the very moment when the discovery of DNA was giving us the hope of redefining it with exactitude and generality. So the ethnologist describes the Aboriginal, Berber and Gascon cultures; the sociologist analyses their shock; politicians and ministers defend their exception during international negotiations since, it seems, cultures are bound to territories, to places, to climates as Montesquieu said and as is also said for the wines of Burgundy; do cultures thus find the agricultural meaning of the word again? Since economic globalization vaporizes the identifiable differences between the zones in which cultures are born and live, they must then be defended in the same way as the living species, which themselves owe their survival to local conditions and constraints. Since the parallel with biodiversity is imposing itself, we shall speak of a fragile culture or a language having few speakers as endangered species or of already dead civilizations as eradicated phyla.
Going-returning
I like to say that culture, in the third place, ceaselessly transits, in returnings and goings, between the second of these meanings and the first one. Those who, distinguished, only know the aforementioned humanities, the Salle Pleyel, the Paris Opera and the entrechats of ballet are to my eyes lacking in culture if ignorant of the cuisine of pig slop and the rites of greasy grub they sometimes scorn; I see them at times being more horrified at the knife stuck into the pig’s throat by the slaughterer than by human murders represented in images, especially if these distinguished people have any power. Conversely, the pork butcher cleans up the mess smeared all over him to enter the Louvre.
The cultivated man departs from his roots – dialect, customs and mores, ceremonial clothes and rustic expressions – so as to steer his way towards the distinguished convention of his group or at least tend towards it, without forgetting to return to the servant’s hall where the kitchen boys live. Such a coming and going never ceases with great artists: from his tower at the edge of the Mediterranean, Gascon-accented Montaigne frequents Plutarch, Virgil and American Indians; laughing at the learned, Molière caresses maidservants; conversely, washerwomen sang refrains from Couperin and Rameau while the Court, in ribbons and lace, danced their minuets; Shakespeare, in the forests, Giono, a peasant, Céline, a suburban doctor, never fail to get us lost on this always intersected path where Don Quixote, a man of the book astride his charger, can’t do without the proverbs strung together by Sancho Panza on his donkey; Cervantes makes the mounts of his two twin heroes run ex æquo. Without dung or grease, there can be no dignified academy; archangels visit humility. Great art builds this entirely human-arched bridge where a crowd, whose members converse with and teach one another, bumps into each other. Masterpieces have long embodied what we proudly call multiculturism.
Local and global
A redefinition has recently imposed a fourth meaning. In parlour games or television quiz shows, the questions said to be about culture mix the first two meanings – ‘What did Cervantes write?’, ‘What was the Australian Aborigines’ favourite weapon?’ – with this other one, where I always stumble: ‘What nickname were the half-naked girls who wiggled their hips around some singer in vogue several decades ago known by?’ Mass culture thus designates the whole of what the glossy magazines, radio, cinema, television channels or websites broadcast or make accessible between their advertising pages. It has come to this.
If culture has this fourth meaning, then yes, it is becoming globalized and brings in cliffs of dollars for those who control access to the media. To defend against an invasion that seems to some people to be as dangerous as the Flood, which we know covered over the terraqueous globe, some people advocate a quick return to the second definition, the anthropological one. So a war begins, which Rabelais would have called Picrocholine, invaded with acid bile, between the local and the global: McDonald’s from everywhere crushes the blue cheese from Roquefort; Hollywood erases Pagnol from Provence and Guignol from Lyon; let’s wield Astérix against Disneyland. Museums where the elite line up and concerts with hoary heads are opposed to the crowds got moving by the decibels in which young people romp about. Cultures in the second and maybe even in the first meaning then would amount to particularisms, to conservatisms, alas, to folkloric old-fashioned things. Consequently, a thousand risks spring up; fundamentalists and fundamentalisms are in return fed by this war. We find ourselves condemned to choose between multinationals and Taliban. Our current terrors come in cultural forms.
The question of space
For this stupid and monotonous dialectic to have any meaning, culture would have to be born, live, be spread and rule for only one type of communication space, whether divided or not: homogeneous, isotropic and transparent, it allows everything to be done and everything to pass; so a powerful financial group can control access to public noticeboards, newspaper advertisements and rumours in order to monopolize all definition of culture and, by repeating this definition in all places and at all times, transform it into dollars.
The word ‘universal’ always seems to conceal an imperialism. Often true, this accusation, a falsifiable one, ignores several non-violent global expansions, to which I shall return, like the expansion of fruits and vegetables, a quite old expansion, one which saved many scattered families from starvation, or the expansion of mathematics, whose theorems were not imposed in time and on the five continents by force. Whatever people may say about it, the universal exists – we’ll speak more about it later; agriculture, the linguistic and practical root of culture, has shown it for several thousand years; the exact sciences have followed agriculture for more than two millennia and have thus contributed to a few curings and to making our labours easier. These sciences in principle succeed without imperialism and utilize this space that has no obstacles to their spread. Should merchandise and money transit there, this favoured exchanges in the Mediterranean as soon as coins sprang forth from Lydia and the river Pactolus. Did this invention create the space I am talking about? We indeed find ourselves in the domain of ‘laissez-faire, laissez-passer’; does this space adapt to cultural circulation? The question of knowing whether a cultural ‘product’ reduces to a merchandise comes down to the constitution of this space. Did it exist beforehand?
N o, because a thousand mountain chains raise as many obstructions. ‘Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side.’ ‘How can someone be Persian?’ There are only exoticisms and exceptions. Let’s accept universal laws for the rectangle and gravity, the stock market fluctuations for the value of aluminium or coffee, never for works. The set of boundaries inscribed in this communication space – become then, conversely, opaque, heterogeneous and obstructed – draws cultural world maps in which archipelagos of islets and islands, of departments, are defended by inaccessible shores and walls; to each his truth, his tastes and his beauty, defined then as local specificities; forbidden to talk, think or taste outside differences, a motto repeated ad nauseam.
Although opposed in appearance, this global and this local agree about the space in which they confront each other. For at first sight, only it exists, considered in its expansive totality or thousand differentiated parts, a space bare or entrenched, traversed with various networks in which armies can circulate freely or blocked with customs gates to stop them. Chicanes to slow traffic only exist due to this homogeneity; barriers only exist because of this free flow of traffic; we will block passage because everyone can pass. Conversely, we will seek to overturn borders that are absurd because conventional. The Alps never did stop smugglers or their donkeys; not only did the armies of Hannibal or Bonaparte cross these natural borders, porous, but so did languages and religions. There are different truths on this side and the other of the mountains because you built shacks there where a duty must be payed. Since no one likes taxes, let’s all stay home, where we eventually cultivate distinctions that will someday seem natural. Local because of the global; global owing to the local; global and local, the same battle. This simple, stupid, repetitive and dangerous evident fact of space organizes everyone, violence first and foremost. What luck, we would indeed have to tear each other’s guts out.
In truth, on both sides of the Alps, the Piedmontese speak a language that mixes Italian and French; Basques and Catalans, sometimes the Aragonese, live on horseback on both sides of the Pyrenees; Blaise Pascal, a native of Auvergne, was clearly unaware of this. This is how Alsacians and the people of Karlsruhe speak and act on both sides of the Rhine. Is there really only one space, I mean the space of roads and fortifications? No, for there are infinitely more types of expanse than it appears; we have long known a thousand other topologies and in particular those of the human habitat.
Confession
Forgive me, please, for continuing in the first person an argument that up to now has only concerned groups. Not out of narcissism but for better precision. Like many people my age, such as a Guarani or a Scottish Highlander, I have a culture in the second meaning of the word, yes, an ethnology. Proof: people more learned than me, without any lived experience with the place, already hold colloquia about it. Some family of farmers and bargemen installed there, on some quay, waiting for the barge, instilled in me the trades of my forefathers, land and water, along with the customs and appropriate languages, expressed in Occitan. One day, I shall try to write with that portion of language that, still sonorous in my breast, becomes caught in my throat, silent, in public. None of this happened without our rural customs, some hard labour, tools that have vanished with time, an oblique vision of the world, typical human relations, a disquietude regarding the social inherited in an obscure way from the Cathars, a joy in the body and a cult of laziness, dark beliefs, light doubts … Local culture?
We shall see, for already my father, born in Gascony on the river Garonne not far from the confluence with the Gers, between two catastrophic floods, was often opposed to my mother, stemming from Quercy, by the dry and pebbly hills of vineyards, like a foreigner to an exotic woman, distant from one another by thirty kilometres, which in the past was equivalent to an astronomical distance. Since they loved each other, they adapted to each other; since they adapted to each other, they loved each other. But when they argued for a little bit, each reverted to their own dialect, for they didn’t quite have the same words said with the same accent to designate bread and salt. Although nurtured on a tiny particularism, I nevertheless experienced what the latest racists today call the clash of civilizations. The smallest municipality is granitized with sub-localities the way an atom is composed of dozens of particles. There is no Occitan or Gascon language, strictly speaking, but a multiplicity of subdialects, the dentals of the one sometimes being opaque to the ears of the other; so there is no local culture in the above sense but rather a spectrum of nanocultures scattered from Bas-Quercy to north of Moyenne Garonne, and this is still too big.
Consequently, culture, even in the second meaning, doesn’t stop at the borders of Quercy, of Berber country or the Zulu mountains because it has its source there, as though tied to a place, already composite, where it would quickly suffocate with lethargy by becoming atomized into tiny hamlets, but throws out around it random roads geometers call analytic continuations and, happily, crosses the thirty kilometres separating Quercy from Gascony so as to end up at the wedding from which my body came. Culture leaves a local that I can no longer define so much does its size diminish, from the region to the village and from the lieu-dit to the farm, all the way down to families whose generations invent words only belonging to them, leaves, yes, a place so exiguous it is sometimes reduced to a point; culture therefore leaves this tiny roundabout point, not always to invade the world, by imperialism, but first and foremost to be amazed at the vicinity, like the rat of the fable, my father temporarily angry at his wife or the shepherd practising transhumance. It therefore walks step by step, hesitates, visits in small stages and, shy, educates itself; marries from outside its locality, the way my mother, Quercynoise and a winegrower, married my father, Gascon and a bargeman, water and wine, like Sabine in Rome and Camille with an Alban. Often exogamic for, endogamic, it would perish from incestuous rapes and mortal jealousies.
I therefore didn’t become uomo di coltura by remaining Provençal, a naming that’s already global and not local, as is believed when one isn’t acquainted with this vanishing local, but because, travelling when young in Guyenne and in Armagnac, ‘I had passed the mountains that bound this state’, 12 then, older, in Spain towards Andalusia, in Germany, Hanover and Leibniz, in Ireland next, lastly in Japan, where the spring bedecks the almost Aquitanian valleys with flowers, towards Alice Springs, where the flora and fauna amaze, and to Pretoria, where during autumn blue leaves fall in the streets, but transiting as well in the lightning-fast times of histories and the longer time of evolution, I took, little by little, at each stopover, what I found to be better than back home. I make my bed in the German way, wash my face in the fashion of the Quebecers; my religion is rooted in the writing prophets of Israel, who are so far removed from my ancestors the Celts; I know of nothing more delightful than Brazilian handicr aft nor more intelligent than Bulgarian and Malian popular musics, nor better engraved than certain cave paintings of the Aborigines of the Outback. I have merely continued the footsteps left by my Odyssean father when he departed to become betrothed into unknown lands where the peasants had no experience of rivers.
The crude opposition of the local and the global shows that those who find their delight in this single space have neglected to launch their lives into the cultural adventure in order to, on the contrary and like everyone, devote them to war. For this latter takes place on the imperialist world map of barriers that are put up or taken down. So the real world is reduced to the space of its map, the one being as homogeneous as the other. In wandering on the contrary from proximity to vicinity and from foreignness to remoteness, they would have quickly noticed that while national, political, military or economic borders, in short the whole infernal kit and caboodle of power and of public convention, open or close, culture’s borders, porous, permeable, evanescent as well as individual or innermost, filter and percolate so much that I would readily define culture itself as this process of filtering and percolation, therefore as a process of acquisition, of digestion, in short, of acculturation. How can one become a philosopher without speaking Greek, Latin, German and Sanskrit, at least? I think, in the French language, like a half-breed pieced together with Anaximander, Lucretius, Leibniz and the Vedas.
Am I defining culture by acculturation? It’s less a question of a tautology than of a succession of foreignnesses. Never did art sound more French than in the seventeenth century and yet Molière, impregnated with Italian, Corneille with Spanish, Bossuet with Latin, La Bruyère and Fénelon with Greek at first seem to come from somewhere else than Lutèce or the banks of the Loire. This mixture occurs when, in space as well as in time, a Castilian discourse opens up a singular road to Rouen before spreading to the city and the court via a theatre expressed in an uneven and alexandrine French, when the commedia dell’arte, the botanist Theophrastus’ Characters and the Latin novel clear the paths by which they will spread into France and when the latter welcomes them in an incomplete fashion. For how on the contrary did it happen that, having set sail from London to the mouth of the Seine, a hundred English sailing ships rushed into the port, a few cables’ lengths away from the house where Corneille wrote, and Shakespeare’s plays, already old by several decades, never embarked under those sails? One long road runs from El Cid Campeador to Normandy; another one, short, running through the English Channel, gets blocked. This defines an original expanse, neither global nor local, neither homogeneous nor sporadic. We have to change spaces in order to understand the ‘cultural’.
Cartography
Don’t try to draw the cultural as a frame or an isolate, nor as an imperial invasion, as an isotropic block, nor as an unconnected archipelago but strictly speaking as a marquetry or a mosaic where the local sometimes resists and sometimes yields to the global, where the global sometimes goes everywhere but sometimes retreats from the local and where also long-distance attractions operate even though neighbours don’t know each other. World and place mix their scopes, cross their paths, combine their colours. We must even leave the mosaic, already too divided into units and pieces, so as to appeal rather to paintings in which colours mix and whose drawings often lose their clear edges, as with Turner or the Impressionists. There can be no culture without this mixture, intimate here and lacking elsewhere. In an expanse as intertwined, as crumpled, as mixed as the universe of the things themselves or the universe of time, we travel with as much ease and as much difficulty in the vicinity as very far away, and rarely uniformly. I have lived longer in San Francisco than in Limoges and longer in Kyoto than in Narbonne, although I understand the inhabitants here better than those over there; I read Borges, not Mistral, Steinbeck more often than Jasmin, who was nevertheless born in the same city as me; I deciphered Russian music earlier than that of the troubadours, my direct ancestors. I regret it, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Conversely, I delight daily in prunes from Agen, white wines from Sauternes or Graves and reds from Médoc, hardly tasting guava, kiwis or wines from California, nevertheless quite close to my residence at Stanford. Our cultures draw our matters of chance at least as much as our belongingnesses. They retain traces of our random journeys, of the lessons received from people chanced upon, of tastes contracted any old how, by the side of the road. They resemble stars with multiple and unequal branches, or better yet, those neuron tissues certain axons of which endlessly lengthen and traverse the brain whereas other ones stop short, Darwin or God knows why. Such chance tastes made me prefer, when quite young, downtown Hanover over the village of La Haye-Descartes. When a certain distant becomes my near at the same time that a close relation, unknown, therefore very far removed, neighbours another close relation who is intimate, the drawing is no longer engraved on a space divided into local gridding and unitary global but guides towards a singular topology where unexpected distances must be incessantly defined and measured. When Isidore Ducasse, a Uruguayan, signed Lautréamont, was he saying that two people were coexisting in him, one of which resided in Tarbes while l’autre-est-à-Mont-evidéo [the-other-is-in-Mont-evideo]?
Thus everyone carries with him his singular cultural chip, variable with the time of his trainings, as different from his neighbour’s as the design of his fingerprint or the count of his DNA, natural chips, and travels over a multicoloured cartography in which, a half-breed, he celebrates weddings at unexpected crossroads. Culture invents many-coloured topologies, spaces that are entirely different from the space of battles, history, politics and the economy; the space of these latter, always geometric, metricizes the earth in order to master it.
The universal and the singular
Thus conceived, singularity can attain the universal as much as it requires exception. Thus some visual neuron, unique, traverses cervical space and connects to all its functions. Likewise, original and highly rare, masterpieces can reach men and women of all ethnicities. If we limited ourselves to our cultures said to be local, the Irish Celts of the first century shouldn’t have converted to a religion of Semitic origin any more than Westerners should have gaped at Chinese opera. And yet who among us doesn’t fall over with admiration before certain African masks or Aboriginal divinities as much as in listening to Bulgarian music or Renaissance harmonies? Better, in this strange space where distances and durations are abolished, the more home life attains the authentic, the more chance it has to open up to the Universe.
Banal and profound, this assessment defines what was formerly called substructure. As long as we stay in the same space, we remain in the superficial framework; armies, parties, businesses, currencies or fashions confront each other there, striving to conquer fortified towns or parts of the mar ket, at the distance of regions cut out from this same homogeneous expanse; nothing new under the sun nor across monotonous history. But we enter the foundation when, changing spaces, we reach a terrain without points of reference for distance. Just as topology founds metric spaces, so the substructure of human constructions lies in culture.
In biological descents, the distribution of genes, shuffled like playing cards, sometimes produces similarities on the other side of the ocean and strong differences in the same lineage. What traveller hasn’t encountered his twin in exotic places, while his own brother, a homebody, never left the house? Hardly several decades ago, who would have guessed this paradox which establishes a connection between work and existence, culture and nature? What’s surprising about it, since both of them augment us and contribute to life?
This is the fifth meaning, first topological, then substructural, lastly vital and temporal, of the word ‘culture’, even more singular than the second one, but, profoundly, even more universal than the first one, humanist, and than the fourth one, commercial and financial, in that everyone’s aleatory bouquet of paths, multiplying at leisure the comings-and-goings of the third sense, runs towards the vision of an asymptotically common space-time. No doubt there is culture only in growth towards the human universal.
Joy
So if globalization merchandises culture, I don’t see culture as being in danger since it’s not a question of culture. Whatever maritime experience Titanic may claim to stage, the film remains a gigantic turkey, as comical for someone who sails as Vertical Limit is for the alpinist. If ridicule killed, Disneyland’s pasteboard would collapse into pulp, without any harm to civilization and with benefit to the rearing of the children of men. It takes a lot of courage or deafness to call music what one sometimes hears by this name. Don’t confuse philosophy and Sophie’s World. These are merchandise. They are consumed and consume their consumers, who come out of it diminished, sickly, discouraged. Post Disneyland omne animal triste. The Iliad and Le tombeau de Couperin aren’t consumed nor are they consumptive; they augment with age and augment their readers or listeners.
The burial, the strangulation of culture in a place embitters it, suffocates and kills it just as surely as mercantile globalization. I don’t know of a single one that, having closed its doors to the others, didn’t die from it; nor any that, crossing borders to conquer customers, didn’t collapse into monotonous tokens. The true one lives on acculturation, where broadening contributes – oh paradox – to home life. You recognize it by the joy.
The crumpled network
Precisely the internet takes shape today in the same way, topological or in networks of diverse neurons. We formerly imagined it to be a homogeneous space of transparency and freedom allowing access everywhere and always. It has evolved, like every place where interests, desires, base acts and power, generosity, humanitarianism and longings for knowledge confront each other, with as many obstructions as passages. Mixture took place, increases and gets denser every day. Just as several maps of a given territory exist, so the internet presents, under a thousand cartographies, a topology that’s crumpled, granulous, as mixed with local and global as cultures themselves. Little culture takes us away from the internet and a lot of it brings us back to it.
Spaces and times
Topological and projective spaces
A new identity card would mix the thousand and one different belongingnesses life meets with, undergoes and invents; in a completely different space from the one whose uniformity permits the war of cultures, an individual or group mixes influences at unexpected distances and times. These two varied representations accentuate, and ultimately define, everyone’s singularity, whether individual or collectivity. How are we to describe, positively, this card and this space? Can their particularities converge towards a common humanism?
That such a thing can happen has been known for millennia since an adventure told starting from an island as narrow as Ithaca turned the inhabited Mediterranean upside down before entering further afield into the world and since another adventure, come from a distant Roman province, Judea, gave more than a billion and a half humans in every part of the world their faith. Particularism sometimes leads all the better towards the universal for seeming to abandon any such pretension: leaving from a hamlet in La Mancha, Sancho Panza travels in the world on the back of a donkey and, closer to us, Cyrano delights audiences everywhere when only the inhabitants of Bergerac ought to understand it.
A hundred scenographies for one geometral
Having had the experience of its possibility, how should we conceive this passage now? By changing spaces, once again.
Look at that terracotta vase in the middle of the room; you who have just entered perceive it from behind and don’t see its handle or what decorates it; you on the contrary can, from the middle of the room, view it from the front; while ascending the staircase towards the landing opening onto the room, I perceive, from below, its base instead; perched on a chair, my grandson sees its upper opening and its curved edges … In short, everyone only perceives a profile of this jar or a projection of it as geometers would say, or in architectural terms, according to the plan or the elevation. Nothing could be more characteristic of a singular point of view than this scenography of an object or a landscape.
Ten lines of reasoning about relativity draw their arguments from this: for the thing as such, if it exists, hides from every eye beneath these different and sometimes contradictory profiles; for a given section on the cone of vision that leaves our eyes towards its contours, you see a circle with a centre, I see an ellipse with two foci, and he sees a parabola with asymptotic curves. Conversely, what a delight it is to see turn at leisure, on a computer screen, exquisitely folded molecules whose various sites would be poorly seen from a fixed point of view!
Perfectly conversant with these respective particularities tied to irreducible views, marks, they said, of our limitation as finite creatures, seventeenth-century philosophers, Leibniz for example, wondered if they could conceive and if there existed a privileged point of view, a kind of site adding up all possible sites, from which the one who found himself there would see the object as such or in itself. We never see it; we nevertheless believe it exists since we say the vase in the perception example or the building for the architect’s drawings, like we say language or music in spite of or owing to the variations of style, accent, instrument or musical score. Leibniz conceived there the integral of the points of view or of the endlessly unfolding human scenographies. He pushed this site back to infinity, as if the cone of vision specific to everyone became at the limit a cylinder. Situated thus outside the finite, God sees the integral of the profiles, revealing the object in its reality. Leibniz called this integral the geometral of the object or its ichnography.
When we talk about language, even though we only read styles and only hear specialist words in oblique accents, when we cite some piece of music, even though we only hear interpretations of it, when we say the vase, even though we only see its sides, when we designate the flower, even though we only smell the rose or reseda, we silently or blindly designate this geometral. We think the universal daily without knowing it. Leibniz even readily added that we know how to read the geometral behind every profile. Why wouldn’t the same line of reasoning be renewed for what concerns people and human cultures?
New space
At the end of ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’, Balzac describes the portrait of a woman nicknamed ‘la belle noiseuse’, 13 a canvas taken by the painter, its author, to be the ultimate accomplishment of his genius. Long kept in secret and then suddenly unveiled, it appears to the young Poussin, a student of this master, as well as to every visitor who looks at it and can’t believe their eyes, as an inextricable chaos of colours, blurred boundaries and vague tones, in an indecipherable disorder. The work of a madman, the decline of an old man, a brilliant presentiment? The identity card [carte] I just spoke about as well as the multicoloured map [carte] of a culture both resemble the painting by Frenhofer, the hero of this short story. The canvas is also named The Noisy Beauty. The noise or sound doubled with fury conceals the beautiful woman in it, veiling her and making the visitors blind to the perception they could have of her body.
Poussin and the others stoop and bend down in order to see better but don’t succeed in comprehending. And no one can because the painting, more anticipatory than crazy, changes spaces. It’s no longer a question of representation, equipped with relief, distance, forms and the colours that highlight them, nor of perspective, projection, point of view or a scenography cut into the expanse common to seers, but of an entirely different space, precisely of a topology, which Leibniz had intuited and Balzac conceived and painted before Riemann and Poincaré invented it.
Remember: before the alpine-pastured farm, you also changed spaces and representations so as to see an overlapping mixture of time.
The trace of the step 14
But, Balzac recounts, in the margin of this jumble without any apparent order or reason, the figure of an admirable sole of a foot appears, as though saved from a mad accumulation of ruins, a foot whose delightful tonality seems to emerge from the catastrophe. But again, the form of a foot left on a medium – a dirt path or deserted beach – is said in Greek as ιχνοσ, ichnos, the mark of a step, or more generally the trace of someone absent or the one left by a murderer who can be discovered by means of this vestige; this is how detectives, historians and commentators proceed. Ichnography therefore signifies the writing of the trace. But if noise means rumbling sounds and violence, here the distinctive mark amounts to a stigmata or a signal that can be distinguished from the white noise. 15 However indecipherable and mixed a singularity plunged in this commotion may appear, this indication signs an absence or, better, makes this absence present. The Noisy Beauty remains noisy, singularly, through this chaos or through this individual background noise but appears itself in its beauty through the emergence of this mark. It, beautiful, through the ichnos or the trace, noisy through its individual scenes. It, singular like you or me through this mêlée or mixture, but bearing in a corner, like each of us, the signature of the Universal. In each of us, amid the noise of our multicoloured card or culture, there exists somewhere an indication of the Universal or of beauty, a trace that’s faint here, illegible there, elsewhere warm and sonorous, and sometimes, in a rare place, dazzling.
You will recognize a work of art by this mark, whose sign never deceives. Don’t give an inordinate amount of attention to the singular signature of this man or that woman, a signature scattered in the noise of the work itself, so particular it nears the closest vicinity of noise, but rather give your attention to its indication of absence, to a form, a sound, a word, emanating from a hole of universality, to the trace of a step marked on its blurred wax. The scar left on the envelope of a seed by the filament or nutritive cord breaking off is called the hilum. Nihilism rejects the very existence of this hilum, this filum, this hardly visible scar, this often broken thread attaching us to the species, the genus, living things and the world.
The Universal hides or shines in the singular the way the world does in Ithaca, Bergerac or the village of La Mancha, the way the ichnography is concealed or appears in the scenographies, language under the styles, a palace on its plans and the beautiful woman in the noise. Equipped with its elements at infinity, projective space aids in representing such a lost secret. Let’s seek the Universal less by making our way towards this infinity – our limitation would wear itself out doing so till the end of our lives – than its trace in the singular. It is hidden under a stone, in the straw of the stable, on the sparkle of your smile. Eternity itself sometimes seems to mix with passing time like the gold lost in the ducat or this perfume filling a moment with an herbal fragrance. We can never find or give anything of it except a fragment of thread and then pull this thin end up until it breaks – I would like to invent a hilism – but, like a straw of hay, it glimmers on the ordinary tablet of the work and of singular existences. The intensity of its light flickers.
The trace of the step towards the universal
Follow this thread, difficult to read but visible, like the foot of the noisy woman in the middle of the painting: amid the ruins of Greek culture, some Cycladic sculpture; amid the Latin rubble, some lamentation by Lucretius; in the Etruscan silence, two people betrothed united over their tomb, resurrected from the night; amid the Khmer jumble invaded by the jungle, some Angkor bas-relief; in the middle of the dances of the Australian Aborigines, some dazzling painting Westerners call abstract; and amid the oblivions into which the classics of the West are falling today, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face and the melancholy of Couperin. Beauty leaves, left and will leave its trace amid the incoherences of every cultural singularity so that everyone, near or far, in space or time, stranger or intimate, may one day recognize the trace of its step.
Differently: of languages, we only hear the singular noises, sound and fury; but, in the course of a sentence, Virgil or Cervantes lets language be heard such that everyone can hear it; they find the shadowy hole through which it gives out signs in the middle of the squawking; of an object, we only see the noise, sound with a thousand profiles, fury of opinions; but with a lightning-fast stroke, storytellers, prophets, painters or musicians indicate it, and we suddenly find ourselves in its presence; at a blow, they pierce the thickness of the scenes and unveil its nudity. Of beauty, we only perceive the noise, sound and fury; but in a corner of a painting, in a fragment of marble, in a yellow high note, Bonnard, Houdon or Chopin bores the tunnel through which it flows; of the true, we only know its noise, sound and fury; but in the intuitive course of a theorem or a poem, Galois or Apollinaire scarifies its mark. The foot or the trace of the step of The Noisy Beauty opens a gorge in the painting, from noise to the beauty, through which we pass, one by one with all of humanity, from the other side of the mirror of profiles, from time to eternity.
The time stemming from projective space
If we want to achieve a common humanism, we therefore have to change our vision of the world, therefore have to first conceive new spaces, topological or projective, abundantly supplied by the mathematical sciences, themselves common. Next we have to try to decipher the rare signs amid the noise. We must also change times. This effort, more considerable, especially concerns what we have learnt under the name of philosophy of history.
Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, the writing prophets of Israel conceived history. Before them, time didn’t exist. They invented history, in the singular sense we give this word in the West, and have handed it down to us. Before them, it didn’t exist. They were the first to know how to read a notable mark, unique and divine, amid the sound and the fury of battles, successions, inheritances. A God that’s difficult to decipher, as though behind the cloud that guided the Hebrew people through the desert, but always present and absent, always in the state of being a trace, lost, found again. Hoped for among some, later already having come among others, the Messiah-Individual, contingent and necessary, first figuratively represented and then incarnated this trace of the universal in the noise of chaotic time. The realization of the transcendent God across the immanent, haphazard and contingent history of the people of Israel, the fulfilment of the promise or the achievement of the figuration which are described in Pascal’s Pensées show that here history unfurls this mark-bearing confused space by repeating more and more clearly this signal, this call, this logos that emerges from the noise, this breeze that blows on the originary commotion and even on the psalms or the Song of Songs. Time unfolds the ichnography across the infinite series of scenographies. The project unfurls projective space.
Chronocentrism: The battle against the first windmill
Readers of the prophets, Bossuet and Pascal inaugurated the philosophy of history, followed by Condorcet – who put science in religion’s place in order to battle against this latter, while repeating its schemas – Hegel or Auguste Comte. An evolutionary flow, continuous and linear, sometimes broken by obstacles in the dialectic fashion, advances in such a way that individuals stemming from certain nations or these collectivities themselves seem to progress or fall behind in relation to other ones, like species that are more or less developed. As long as the only and universal God realized itself as a trace in the history of a single people, the comparative question was not often asked. As soon as history, globalized, invites every nation on Earth, how can we differentiate their respective states of being? By considering, in a truly racist manner, that the spirit descended upon these nations, one after the other, the last to thus receive this unction being – oh, manifest surprise – the philosopher himself’s nation.
These judgements, still very widespread, surreptitiously transport into time the various ‘centrisms’ erased with great difficulty from space. Some such centrism, triumphant, finds itself less in the Sun’s place, the middle of the world, than at the extreme point of a temporal process conceived as a progress, while its rivals remain upstream, in the primitive, the archaic, the unfinished. Without it always being precisely seen, this point replaces every centre of space. These abuses could be called chronocentrisms. Instead of taking the place of the Universal in space or giving this place to his own collectivity, the historian-philosopher seizes it in time. The spatial centre becomes the most advanced point. The others have long since disembarked from the forward-moving boat and are drying out on the bank on which time has left them. Imperialism passes from space to history.
A thousand travellers have thus thought that the men and women of their age that they encountered elsewhere, of course, but even in the now, illic sed nunc, were nonetheless living in times anterior to their own under the pretext that they wore strange clothes, inhabited different latitudes and were subject to different legislations. Did they perceive phantoms or ghosts? How did it happen that we were able to believe these absurd datings? Yet even today, when we allude to the different degrees of development of the nations on the planet, we make the same logical and experimental mistake, the same moral and political error. Conversely, in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville or in the Supplément au voyage de Cook, Diderot and Giraudoux attempted to date our customs and mores back to a time that’s archaic in comparison with the positive evolution of these good savages. 16 Not to the left, not to the right, we are all contemporaries.
The second one: Narrowness and breadth
The battle against the first windmill is easily won. The second one is outlined against another hill, one better defended. When Pascal and Condorcet invented the idea of progress, when Hegel predicted the coming of the reign of Mind and Marx the reign of the classless society, the duration of time they were examining always seemed to us to be so long that almost anything at all could be said about such vast intervals. Like Haeckel and certain naturalists of his time, Auguste Comte compared the march of humanity to the successive ages of individual development; positivism sounds the hour of adulthood for the one and the other: from the fetishism said to be primitive to the dominant sciences, this scale still appeared to be interminable to us. Here the optimism of the seventeenth century stops. Husserl lamented the crisis of European scie nces, Heidegger the forgetting of Being. A despair follows the triumph, a despair that tinges the colour of the flow without changing its nature.
These evolutionary schemas that sought universal laws from now on err less through too much breadth than through narrowness. For the adventure of humanity unfolds first in this living world, and this latter, in turn, unfolds in the inert Universe. We had no idea of our common oldness, nor of the oldness of our life, nor of the oldness of our common earth, nor of the oldness of our universe. In our recent individual noises, the innumerable traces of the Universal date back to periods that are unintuitable due to their billion year age. So I love to recount again, but differently, Balzac and his Noisy Beauty: not far from the craters formed by falling meteorites, tiny fragments of radioactive material had to be unearthed in order for the exact age of the Earth to be reckoned on them. Amid the enormous disorder of the things scattered on the planet, a minuscule trace – a thread, a hilum – suddenly says its global time. In the middle of the East African Rift, a few bones reveal our antiquity. Admire how much art and the aforementioned humanities have preceded, and by far, the methods and visions of the world that the sciences only discovered long after: universal time is read today on atoms and particles, as improbable and difficult to translate as the trace of the step in the painting’s chaos, as beauty in the noise. And by the new scale, our philosophies of history amount to a few seconds.
Four extensions
Seemingly long, the tradition drawn by the narrow thinkers in fact broadens today at least four times. We are taking the Grand Narrative up again by starting, at leisure, at the big bang, if it ever existed, at the cooling of our planet, at the appearance of RNA, around the Kenyan Rift, according to whether you are dealing with the Universe, the Earth, life or Homo sapiens, at the four respective times of their emergence.
In these four cases, the entirely subjective belief in a globally positive or, on the contrary, globally negative gradient of a simple and linear curve seems naive today; global progress or general regression, this depends on your digestion, whether clear or grouchy, from the night before. Lastly, while we may have spent the century laughing at these prophetic judges in assessing their overly extensive aims, therefore open to criticism because indeterminate, these aims seem to us today to lack broadness of outlook; by excluding non-Europeans, other humans, all the living species, the inert planet and the world as a whole, these corporatist intellectuals, believing themselves to be alone in the world, practised a universal racism.
Hence the new access to the Universe. For the Grand Narrative truly invents globalization by virtue of the fact that it attaches itself, for the first time, to the fate of the entire Universe, of the entire Earth, of all living things, of all humanity while only attaining politics and cultures at the end of the account and contingently, both of them minuscule in such a picture. Certainly not a Légende des siècles, but by contingent backwards steps and advances, a probable truth over billions of years. When philosophy doesn’t open up to these extensions, it dies from smallness and repetition. By virtue of the fact that it pours onto all things, this Grand Narrative imprints onto them a trace of the time that passes like a step, a rare indication, not very visible, difficult to decipher, but an indisputable trace of universal time in different and wildly mixed physical, living or cultural spaces.
That a flash of thought of mine, with a life as ephemeral as the life of that insect that dies the very evening of its birth, attains this almost unintuitable universal duration is a miracle that charms the moments that remain for me to live.
Prescription
Short time, long time
Already Sunday, already the return of winter, already my old age. We all experience how fast time passes whether mature in years or juvenile, at work or on vacation. Production rates, financial due dates, circulation of goods and information even speed up; the media glue us to a so-called piece of news, without distance or space. 17 We sometimes envy our predecessors who, deprived of fresh news, without planes or electricity, enjoyed slow trips and dawns with hues in endless gradation. This comparison bears a strange contradiction inside itself.
For the old and everyday perception of this dragging duration was accompanied by a short estimation of history: during the era of the pedestrian and the horse-drawn cart, the world was four or five thousand years old. Conversely, today when we are living at the speed of light, it tallies fifteen billion. We used to move step by step in a recent Universe; we now manipulate real time and simultaneity within a horizon of an astounding ancientness. Save for a few generations, we don’t experience the same space or the same time. What’s more, during the same interval, the life expectancy of these generations went from thirty to eighty years. The adverbial phrase ‘a long time’ no longer has the same meaning. But only today do our lives become brief.
Analyses of our hastes abound; thanks to the mobile phone, we no longer need to plan a schedule; a person can live at the other end of the Earth while continuing to be, thanks to the internet, our neighbour. But these true remarks lack a symmetry and a balance. Reversing our ancestors’ experience, long time reached us at the same time or just about as short time. At the moment when our technologies were plunging us alive into the lightning-fast, our sciences were immersing us into an inconceivable slowness. We easily adapted to the lightning-fast without seeing that we needed to, as a counterbalance, bring our knowledge, consciousness and perception into line with this slowness.
Our old age
Tremendously old, our organs and our bones; old, life and old, the Universe. Woven with entirely different durations, our existence changes natures. Sometimes fixist, our predecessors dated their ancestors back several thousand years. Inasmuch as the human species emerged six to seven million years ago, as life appeared three and a half billion years ago and the Universe fifteen, we laugh at the old precept, both poetic and moral: ‘what is a hundred years, what is a thousand, since they can be erased by a single moment?’ 18 But we laugh without understanding, for the intuition itself of this new duration escapes us.
Today we have to carry out a theoretical effort as well as an existential one: trying to live and understand the content and stake of this new ancientness. Let’s first look at our hands, our skin and those of our neighbours, whose texture dates back incredible epochs; we have murmured music, no doubt, for hundreds of thousands of years; let’s next contemplate hens, sparrows, oaks and reeds, companio ns that are sometimes even older than us by millions of years; let’s lastly consider the mountains, wind, sea and stars, by means of new clocks, to be a billion-year-old environment. Undergoing these sudden ageings being-in-the-world changes both being and worlds.
When changing scales, a thing often changes natures. We can conceive a span of several centuries; learning history trained us, from a young age, in this exercise. If need be, we can imagine, without too much trouble, several millennia through a simple extension of this training; we have seen the caves of Lascaux, the cave paintings of the Australian Aborigines, Lucy’s skeletal remains. Modernity now requires of us an entirely different extension of this temporal intuition. Conceiving the durations demanded by life or the formation of the Earth and the world, this seems difficult to us. I will try, at the end of this book, to outline this other time.
War and peace
This theoretical and existential stake goes hand in hand with another one, a political one. As long as we were only imaging centenary durations, even millenary ones, we could still think we were all different and hate each other intensely. For, at these small scales, languages and customs had already bifurcated; borders were bristling up on the face of the Earth. By the action of the sun and the climate, our initial black skin had long turned whitish, yellow or more scarlet, and the degrees of latitude had long shaped, according to the cultures, customs and laws, the truth sometimes. Recent, these variants had caused the exotic, the barbarous, and tribal wars to be born. Longitudes, languages and cultures had already created such differences that we could already no longer understand one another. As soon as memory scarcely surpasses written texts or even traces visibly left, the vendetta is nonstop.
As soon as, on the contrary, we estimate real time in its breadth, we yield to the evident fact that we separated not long ago: around one hundred millennia. If we don’t succeed in conceiving this duration, in filling it with a living chronic intuition, we will never be able to think humanity in its genuinely lived adventure, that is, as a species stemming from the east of the African continent, which a handful of a few families left, and we will never understand how cultures and languages descend from adventurers who were so few in number.
The small global family and the enormous African diversity
In comparison to Lucy’s three million years or the six to seven of other Chadian ancestors, this separation took place at a recent date. Direct heirs of these scattered travellers, all the peoples of the world who see themselves to be so different differ less genetically from each other than the populations of Africa today. The colour of the skin and other visible traits count less than these several scattered emigrations that invaded the planet. Conversely, calculating genetic distances permits us to know or confirm these early diasporas. From a never-ending flat curve, a lightning-fast vertical one suddenly shoots up; our adventure bifurcates at a few recent and rare points.
As long as history starts with rare writings, our truths set us into opposition; if it follows our common duration, in which these decisive dates appear, two genealogical trees, the Africans’ bushy tree and the narrow branch of the other peoples of the world, bring us together. World wars set brothers into opposition, and the conflicts shaking the African continent cause cousins to fight each other. Having history start with writing is something I willingly accept but on the single condition of extending our own selective, manual, engraved or printed writing to the natural one coded with four letters in the intimacy of our bodies, in our germ cells, by long combinations of our DNA. Our history starts with this writing.
The aforementioned old culture …
A theoretical effort, a simple intuition regarding numbers, can therefore have consequences for social ideologies and peace. As soon as, in a calculation by thousands of years, we replace four or five with a hundred, from being strangers we become friends. Changing numbers, the family is brought together again. For this reason at least, we have to reform the teaching of history and, to do so, think time and space as quickly as possible on a scale compatible with the human adventure, the many species, life, the world and the Universe.
Our new old age teaches a wisdom. The old man of antiquity, whose wrinkles and hair are preserved in sculptures of white marble, the old man the Christians named and still call priest, an origin word designating he who reaches a great age, that old-timer lastly revered by every culture, these figures of wisdom remained individual. Their testimony was limited to memories acquired over several years, and their tranquillity calmed us in the face of short lives and mortal imminence. Scientists sometimes, they found in books the broader memory of history, I mean the old one, the one that starts with written texts.
From now on let’s all become immense old men according to the writing given, imprinted and decipherable in the secrecy of our bodies and before whose beauty unimaginable ancestors have buried their dead, have drawn, painted, sang and trembled with emotion for hundreds of thousands of years. Humanity as such, in its entirety, you, me, those near and those far, surpasses the patriarchs. Humanity attains the age of wisdom. Not in rare individuals venerated for this, but in community, as a species, within the secrecy of each and everyone’s bodies. You old philosophers, bearded prophets, Greek sages, Hindu ascetics, Tibetan monks, Brahminical gurus, sachems of the prairies, Christian priests, you all become children.
... Becomes childish
At the end of Hominescence, I asked why our cultures weren’t sufficient to contain our violence. They even seem to fan it by displaying our differences. Discover why: because they never got beyond the possible experience of an individual and the collective age of a merciless childhood. Civilizations that are too young, never calmed, always showing their excrement in the potty like little children or the superiority of their biceps like teenagers in the schoolyard. Oh paradox: these ever so juvenile judges laid claim to the wisdom of those who had amassed lots of time! In front of the young folks arguing philosophy, Plato staged, at the beginning of his Republic and the Timaeus, an old man, Greek in the first one and Egyptian in the second, as though he wanted to double green reason with a mature wisdom and recent philosophy with a kind of outdated or at least archaic sacred. Like the patriarchs of the Bible, these ancestors seem today to be young greenhorns, victims of short memories, despite all their boasting. Of course, they do say they remember a few diluvian floods, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes: from a past without thickness. Think four thousand years in the best case! They only see the surface, not the deep tectonic plates.
Our wisdom now places Lucy before Pliny the Elder, the scattered bones in the valleys of Chad before Homer the Blind and Noa h the Winegrower, and our African father and mother before Eden’s Adam and Eve, before every ancestor venerated by every culture; this wisdom reads the genetic code before the Code of Hammurabi. There, it’s a question of humankind and not a chatty and malicious whitish man contemptuous of the scarlet barbarian. Next and again deeper, it’s a matter of life itself; we arrogant Westerners have only recently caught up with cultures that claim with good reason that an animal or flower species preceded their ancestors: did they have better clocks than ours? I sometimes read Darwin in certain traditions said to be fetishistic and on the steps of Aztec pyramids.
Return to space and time
That was for four, five or a hundred thousand, three or seven million, various quantities or numbers; that was for the results of a change of scale and of a conversion of our intuitions, cognitive consequences that allow us to hope for the construction of a new common culture.
Of course, regarding space and time, we have long been in the habit of making major efforts, theoretical and existential. Ever since Plato freed us from his cave, we had learnt to change dimensions, as many times as necessary, in order to account for things that are more real than perceptual appearances. Better, we were no longer contented with a single space, that of Euclid, or a single time, that of Newton. For we conceived spaces without measure, or other ones, projective, abstract no doubt, but that also allowed us to understand certain perceptible circumstances, of sight, touch, facility, tension and bodily movements. We sewed and knitted in a topological space; our sharp eyesight was practised in another, more projective, space, while our masons and architects still built at old Euclid’s place. We therefore imagined a thousand spaces. Likewise, we had learnt the multiplicity of times: the reversible or circular one, the irreversible ones of entropy or of evolution, the time of contingency and of chaos, unpredictable, and that of percolation, which varies according to thresholds. A thousand efforts that allow us to better grasp the flesh and mind, things and life, our destiny sometimes and history.
Reunion, accord 19
But here, the effort seems to me to be at once simpler and more difficult, more decisive as well for humanity. Simpler, for it doesn’t have to do with the nature of time or space, highly delicate problems, but with their measurement and their scope, a quite easy thing. Simple certainly but difficult in fact because, as I’ll repeat once again, a change of scale often results in subtle transformations in the very nature of things when they are put at various levels. Constructing a reduced model only requires paper or cardboard; building full-size needs steel. So going from local and singular cultures fragmented across the continents to the progressive scattering of a small human group into global space transforms our vision of the world and of duration. The mosaic of space gives way to a temporal crossfade. Are we starting to believe again, without any myths or mystifications, in the primitive unicity of languages? Globalization began about a hundred thousand years ago. At the middle scales of the usual history, there are only differences; at the scale of the real human adventure, the universal is the rule.
Hence the decisive character of the new Grand Narrative for the future history of humanity at the very moment when humanity is renewing contact, still lacunary of course, under the impact of the new technologies. We separated at the stated dates, and here we are today finding one another again. Who could be surprised that at the moment of this reunion the memory, in sum fairly recent, of our separation comes back to us? At the beginning, I told of our paradox of playing at the speed of light and at ubiquity when we learnt the extreme old age and tremendous slowness of our destiny. Retracing the links that united the meagre family of adventurers who ventured outside our African cradle, our networks thus aid in the establishment of this new culture that’s, yes, universal, as ancient in millions of years as it is recent and lightning-fast in electronic speed and next to which the Renaissance merely stammered out its Greco-Latino-European incapacity to define humanism, a culture henceforth common to our species. And now that you conceive this finally completed, general and on the whole true history, think of the smallness of the numbers the old one wanted to be imagined!
There is always already prescription
Of course, perpetual peace doesn’t immediately ensue from the fact that we descended from common parents since twins, even more than strangers, find reasons to strangle one another. We are not ignorant of the mimetic origin of human violence. But we can as little ignore the pretexts it seeks in difference. The learned discover these pretexts in texts, I mean in memories, traces left by history, history taken in the sense of yesterday. As we go back up the stream of this time, these marks become scarce, to the point that we have to dig deep into the earth and have to have an ultrasharp expertise with these excavations to recognize them. They precede, they exceed the written texts and visible traces, as pre-texts, in the literal sense.
So I invite the reader to meditate on the legal term ‘prescription’, whose obvious meaning expresses the exhaustion or extinguishment, after some given period of time, of all legal proceedings concerning a crime or offence. This use of prescription requires us to decide which is stronger, time or law: does time extinguish law, or does the latter withstand the wearing away of the former? Using prescription seems to violate law if and only if law prevails over time. Conversely, if time prevails, prescription becomes the foundation of law, for without it violence, always resumed, would enter into the eternal return of the vendetta. If you don’t, at some point, extinguish the proceedings concerning the crime, the victim’s heirs, to the umpteenth generation, will kill the heirs of the murderer as well so that no one will any longer be able to tell the dead and the murderers apart or even the reason for this interminable and insane dialectic. This discussion, revived on the occasion of imprescriptible crimes against humanity, but nevertheless a traditional one, doesn’t take into account what this term itself literally signifies.
Prescription means: writing at the head, or as a title, or as what always precedes what the text written after is about. Regarding the English and Latin ‘addiction’, a legal and drug term, I had, in The Five Senses, already encountered this precedence of certain unsaid gestures over written or even spoken language. Here, when we are discussing which prevails, time or law, we forget that the time we are talking about remains in history, therefore in the written, as subordinated to the written. In this case, prescription presupposes that some written law encounters something written before it, literally pre-written or prescribed. This limits time to highly narrow limits.
And since we are practising thinking time beyond the borders drawn by ancient cultures, for example the very laws that are the most ancient, we find ourselves forced to t ransgress their edges by asking ourselves the question: what testimony do we have from before the written? Answer: rare remainders that testify to a time such that written law appears to be strangely recent. So I am seeking less something written that would precede every possible piece of writing than what radically precedes the written. What then is there before it? A colossally long prescription. In other words, prescription precedes law; it even precedes all writing: the word itself says so. Whatever pretext you may give for your war, there is always an immensely longer prescription before this war and before every text. This prescription signifies that from the point of view of time our differences vanish, for we all descend from the same lineages.
But, once again, the written returns, for the preceding sentence itself is read in a real text that’s prior to every text inscribed by any law, pre-written therefore in comparison to everything we have written from the dawn of history, therefore well and truly prescribed, but in the DNA of our brothers and cousins. The genetic code, to which scientists of every language have given a name similar to that of the written code or law, precedes our real and possible writings so that time prevails, and by far, over law, and this given, lasting and transmissible code prevails over those we compose by hand in clumsy letters subject to wearing away; always anterior, this prescription founds law and founds it in nature; if peace prevails over war, it owes it to this natural code.