On Guattari. The first ecosopher has arisen — but how to read his writings? There is not a single answer, everyone disagrees. To read Guattari without Deleuze seems like violence to the polyphonous fury of their mutually-authored works; yet to read Deleuze and Guattari seems like according primacy to the philosopher, to the authority of philosophy over psychoanalysis — asserting the traditional prerogative of philosophy over science, with the usual absent-minded condescension, a perverse kind of triumphant naivete. Our new ecosopher shrinks into the background of the literary uproar he is unleashing.

The strange power of Guattari’s writings is such that his works are less collections than whirlwinds, less toolboxes than roaring vortexes one is apt to be drawn violently towards: to study Guattari is neither a coincidence nor an accident (for an English academic) but rather a symptom, even a political symptom. Perhaps simply an indication of the self-destructive desire inherent to global capitalism in which the dissemination  of essentially “anti-capitalist” literature is not simply allowed but in fact widely promoted — the faint glimmer of global Renaissance. But I think Guattari might remind us of something else.

Political struggle is more than a linguistic struggle, a struggle with texts and pure concepts. It is of course involved with these things, but even more than these signifying systems, political resistance connects with the a-signifying as well, an order of reality more primordial than human meaning, where the distinctions imposed upon reality by our signifying regimes are rendered irrelevant and secondary. Where the cosmos as a process of production becomes perceptible, where the inhuman asignifying order of reality emerges, we may perhaps catch a glimpse of the future dreamed by our first ecosopher.

To have to emphasize that the asignifying isn’t the insignificant, but the non-signifying, we realize that already, we have hit the white wall. Misunderstanding is a symptom both of the origin and the impossibility of meaning. The gap between us here is not simply an aspect of the mobile wall of obstacles Guattari has prepared for his students, but already of the even more intransigent obstacles of history, society, economy — in short, the entire political “problem” of desire. A history of desire is difficult yet not impossible, but it does not begin by asking what desire is, pretending some kind of perfect and external objective viewpoint.

It would approach desire materialistically — affirming a pure and limitless body without organs of desire upon which our individual passions are simply gradients, axes. An analysis of desire which depends not upon a minimalist metaphysics like Lacan’s or Heidegger’s, but a veritable schizo-physics, a machinic ontology of becoming. The basic postulates of such a metaphysic are, firstly, that “desire” is immersed in and ultimately composed of flows (of energy, matter) and channels (involved in combining, conjoining, disjoining fluxes); secondly, that “machines” are cutting these flows, writing, falling back upon the body without organs of desire itself. 

And in fact, we do not require recourse to metaphors, metaphysics; in effect a meaningless and self-indulgent transcendence. The truth is that the idea of desiring-machines is a fundamental one, a natural (but not simple) concept which renders possible a truly materialistic analysis of human desire — in short a new kind of science which resembles psychoanalysis only slightly, a rigorous mode of analysis capable of making radical leaps beyond all of the philosophy of desire preceding it. (It is clear Deleuze was at least equally lucky in discovering Guattari.)

From the back cover of Guattari’s L’Inconscient machinique (1979):

The transformation of psychoanalysis into an essential component of the social order does not justify the renunciation of every analysis of the unconscious; no more than the deadends of revolutionary movements imply the generalized desertion of politics.

Finishing with the tyranny of the cogito, accepting that material, biological, social assemblages are capable of “engineering” (machiner) their own kind and creating heterogenous complex universes: such are the conditions which would make it possible to understand how the most intimate desire can communicate with the social field.

In order to give the reader a little bit more of a taste, I have excerpted from pages 180-182.

No logical or topological category, no axiomatic can subsume all the different types of machinic consistency. Because abstract machines are non-decomposable on an intensional plane, they cannot be inserted into an extensional class. Since no abstract machine can rise above history or be the “subject” of history and machinic multiplicities traverse the strata of different “provisionally dominant” realities on a diachronic and synchronic plane at the same time, it cannot be said of the general movement of their line of deterritorialization that it demonstrates a universal and homogenous tendency, for it is interrupted at every level by reterritorializations upon which microcosmic generations of deterritorialization are grafted once again. The cartography of abstract machinisms makes history by dismantling dominant realities and significations: they constitute the navel, the point of emergence and creationism of the machinic phylum.

            Here again we find the problematic of the alternative between subject-groups/subjugated groups which can never be taken as an absolute opposition. The relations of alienation between fields of competence always suppose a certain margin which pragmatics has to locate and exploit: in other words, within any situation whatsoever, a diagrammatic politics can always be “calculated,” which refuses any idea of fatalism, whichever name it may take on: divine, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic, a politics which thus implies, in the first place, an active refusal of any conception of the unconscious as a genetic stage or structural destiny. A group requires an ongoing localization of the investments of desire capable of thwarting bureaucratic reifications, leaderships, etc. “Working on” the group’s map would consist in proceeding to the new uses and transformations of the group’s body without organs. One could only do his or her part in such a pragmatics: it can do nothing but challenge every status of the hegemony of linguistics, psychoanalysis, social psychology, and the entirety of the human, social, juridical, economic sciences, etc…Studying the unconscious, for example in the case of Little Hans, would consist in establishing, by taking account of the entirety of his semiotic productions, in which tree or rhizome type his libido has come to invest. At such a moment, it is a question of how the neighbors’ branch is trimmed, following which maneuvers the Oedipal tree is reduced, what roles Professor Freud’s branch and his activity of detteritorialization have played, why the libido has been constrained to find shelter in the semiotization of a becoming horse, etc…Thus phobia would no longer be considered as a psychopathological result, but as the libidinal pragmatics of a child who has not been able to find other micropolitical solutions so as to escape from the familialist and psychoanalytic transformations.

 

A situation tends to bring about the specific conditions of its overcoming. Thus advances in transportation and telecommunication technologies are slowly bringing about not only the collapse of the classical temporal and spatial interval as such, the annihilation of the discrete; but also a simultaneous collapse of classical distribution or dissemination as such, a self-destruction of the sign through optimal transmissivity, and hence finally the death of the voice along with the signal, the annihilation of the continuous. –Twin paradoxes which define and isolate our historical moment: to build channels without yet having anything meaningful to transmit, and to transmit without having any channels or destinations, or any hope of being received. A question disrupts the essence of the situation, its reality; but a greater noise can always drown it out. It may not even be heard the first time. But after long enough, there is another question, or another questioner, and then another to question him, and so on. Repetition and revolution. –Modernity is hatred of the modern. The state itself becomes noise, and hence is drowned in noise. Finally, there is only glare, pure positivity, a non-spectacle: a signal without a sign. What is it to be in excess of the state?

“..for the relationship between people and government is the most pervasive ideal relationship upon which commerce between teacher and pupil, lord and servants, father and family, general and soldier, master and apprentice have unconsciously been modeled.”—Friedrich Nietzsche. 

For centuries, the history of philosophy has explored the general opposition set up between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, especially concerning their respective “origins.” Generally speaking, it has been assumed that Western and Eastern philosophies differ over the metaphysical question of the constitution of the (conditions of possibility of the) universe, ending with the antinomy of a decision concerning Being/Nothingness (Plato vs. Lao-Tzu, both of whom subordinate becoming either to the movement of the idea or the non-activity of the Dao). In the same sense, Aristotle’s political ontology has been argued to end up in another binary opposition with that of Confucius: it is asserted that the former makes the state primary to the family, whereas for the latter this formula must be inverted. Instead, these reflections will attempt to illustrate that the opposition of these philosophical decisions should be shown to be inadequately founded and that a more clarified reading can show that this opposition is both untenable and capable of exemplifying that the problem has not yet been sufficiently determined.

In order to construct a contextual problematic, i.e. one determined by other conditions already present in both philosophies, we should resituate the problem elsewhere before addressing the opposition between family and state. For example, one of the primary conditions for Aristotle in the Politics is that of equality. In book V especially, the problem of equality most especially addresses the ways in which the rich and the poor can be considered to be unequal or disproportionate. These distinctions gain their importance because they define the different ways in which democracies and oligarchies quantify the quality in equality. It could be easy to oppose Confucius to this characterization:

 Zigong said: “What do you think of the saying:’ Poor but not inferior; rich but not superior’?” The  Master replied: “Not bad, but not as good as: ‘Poor but enjoying the way; rich but loving ritual  propriety.’”E2

What Zigong says to the master appears to be the solution to the Aristotelian riddle or problematic concerning the status of the rich and the poor: it is not that they should be considered equal, but that they should not be considered unequal. By inverting the perspective on the relation, Zigong seems to have resolved the oppositions in an almost Hegelian way. But the master answers something that actually resonates with a more fundamental requirement of Aristotle, one that is even more primary than the family (for both philosophers): namely, the question of the perpetuation of noble actions or ritual propriety (li).    

Although it could be argued that the perspective of the state dominates the Politics, it is extremely symptomatic that Aristotle obsesses over characterizing the virtues and vices pertaining to individuals, even if it is only through generalized forms, especially in relation to virtuous persons (whom Confucius would call junzi, or “exemplary persons”). It is in this sense that Aristotle also founds his political ontology on the various types of individuals, differentiating them according to vice and virtue, and, more commonly according to the problematic of equality, according to wealth. When Confucius quotes: “Exemplary persons help out the needy; they do not make the rich richerE3,” Aristotle tries to take this one step further (even if it demonstrates his own prejudices of supporting the middle way). In order to regulate inequality of wealth, Aristotle advocates self-moderation for the rich: “The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more; that is to say, they must be kept down, but not ill-treated.”E4 Although the last part of this statement seems contrary to the Confucian path, it should be noted that both philosophers would subordinate this question of class and wealth to something more primary than the state, which is the perpetuation of noble actions or ritual propriety (ends) which are actualized through the ideal of the family (means).

While it could be argued that Aristotle makes the state primordial in the sense that he argues it precedes the individual like the whole precedes its parts, it can be demonstrated that Aristotle makes the family primary in order to perpetuate a higher goal, namely that of noble actions or precisely li. He writes:

 It is clear then that a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the  prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a  state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of  families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing  life.

When Aristotle reminds us that the end of the state is the good life, he is not making a claim disconnected from the factical conditions of our existence (that we have to be raised, i.e. cultivated), but he is also not simply saying that the family is an end in itself, somehow cut off from ritual propriety. Instead, he emphasizes: “Our conclusion, then, is that political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of living together” (1281a3-4). It is here in this paradoxical twist where the family is negated and yet raised to a higher level that the political ontology of Confucius and Aristotle merge into a vision where the family only takes precedence due to its capacity for fostering virtue.
 

Although I have shown that Aristotle and Confucius agree more on the question of family than may be generally thought, I have hoped to be able to extend this to a more interesting conclusion, which is the fact that the more apparent opposition between Aristotle and Confucius actually lies elsewhere. It could be reduce it to the content of their arguments concerning morality, or some other criterion, or instead we could assert that the opposition actually lies in the differences in the form of the presentation and the audience held in mind. For the true opposition actually concerns the fact that Aristotle was thinking of a general (young aristocratic) audience and had no specific concept of a unitary culture motivating his conceptual investigations, whereas Confucius’ entire project is to specify the particular criteria for virtue in a particular, unitary culture (or at least one capable of being unified). It is in this sense that Aristotle’s emphasis on the generality of the state prevails in his discourse whereas the specifics to the dynamism of the family becomes Confucius’ central concern.

 In chapter 9 of book III of the Politics, Aristotle discusses the general relation between justice and the state. In the course of examining the relation of equality and inequality, Aristotle proposes that the state “exists for the sake of a good life, and not the sake of life only” (1279b31-32). Notice that the good is already predicated of the state in this statement, and it is because of this bias that Aristotle will conclude: “if life only were the object, slaves and brute animals might form a state, but they cannot, for they have no share in happiness in a life based on choice” (1279b33-34). Although happiness as an end for the virtuous life is one of Aristotle’s primary concerns, the emphasis on the choices that the political situation makes possible seems to conceal the fundamental lack of choices for the individual as well as the a priori nature of any state whatsoever. This assertion stems from Aristotle’s misunderstanding that the political arrangement of a state (whether constitutional or otherwise) has very little to do with the will or mood of the multitude, even if, in the last analysis, they are given priority in power because of their total quantity of property (cf. 1282a37-40).

 In other words, since Aristotle theorized earlier that the state precedes any individual which would constitute it (just as the whole precedes the parts), it seems to be false that the state would only consist of individuals for whom life was founded on a choice. Moreover, when Aristotle claims that the state is a community of families whose goal is self-perfection and self-sufficiency, he seems to undercut the primordial character of the state that would subordinate families for its own ends (i.e. his previous position). More fundamentally, he also seems to negate his earlier statement that political life had anything to do with a choice. He writes: “Such a community can only be established among those who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence there arise in cities family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship, for to choose to live together is friendship” (1280b36-38 my emphasis). It then follows that our political environment is contingent and that friendship is only a choice in terms of choosing to live virtuously; only then could we call “living together” a choice, insofar as we choose not to live or strive against one another.

 The concept of friendship, which is analyzed in depth in the Nicomachean Ethics, in relation to political choice can be better illustrated in reference to the pre-eminent individual (1284a10-15). The pre-eminent individual is a person whose excellence, especially in political affairs, overshadows that of anyone else. In fact, Aristotle admits that they are “God among men” and that “legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in capacity; and that for men of pre-eminent excellence there is not law—they are themselves a law.” In this sense, they are above the law simply by being at the very center of it. Men of this caliber may find it difficult to find friends because of a lack of equals suitable for them, but the important point is that the example of the man above the law logically leads to the counterexample, i.e. that of the ostracized man, the outlaw, those beneath the law (1284a34-36). 

What is characteristic of these singular positions in society is the fact that they have nothing to do with a political choice, at least in the straightforward sense in which Aristotle presents his argument. If we were to agree that these positions could be characterized by choice, we would be forced to look at the more fundamental phenomena at work in the unconscious of the society as a whole. In other words, ostracizing someone from political life and incarnating them in the very fabric of the law constitute the extreme forms under which the balance of justice and friendship in the state come to take on their most dissymmetrical distributions of equality and inequality. But it is also here that justice as friendship, as the (anonymous) perpetuation of noble deeds in the absence of a telos, can illustrate the very inconsistency of the social bond (Badiou).

There are various moments in the Republic, especially in book II which we will focus on here, where justice is elusively illustrated according to those to whom justice is attributed, i.e. proceeding from types which partake in or lay claim to justice and showing by example not only the essence of justice but how it is in itself good. Now, obviously all of this is evident from the text and does not require repeating except to remind the reader, in a sense, the directionality of the arguments through which Socrates proceeds. It would also be obvious to point out how Socrates dialectically presupposes the subordination of the individual to the polis or State, which is manifested through his own “sacrifice” to Athens memorialized in the Crito and the Apology. What I would like to do here is instead to bear this in mind and stop upon a crucial passage in the text that concerns the “natural aptitudes” fitting for a guardian of the state in order to first analyze an example of this procedure from types and then, from there, to make some remarks about the general role of “philosophy” in the Republic along with the manifestation of an implicit argument of the text: namely, that philosophy is necessary for the cultivation of justice.

Let us situate ourselves, for our paths are narrow and fragmentary. After discussing the different duties which are required for the industriousness of a State, Socrates brings up the crucial question about the guardians of the state. It could be interpreted that these guardians would represent the elite elders governing the city, yet these passages do stress the physical requirements along with the necessity of fearlessness and bravery in battle (II 375). Warriors, Socrates argues, need swiftness, braveness, and spirit. Yet they must be gentle, they must be able to treat those like them with fairness. If you remember from the text earlier, Socrates makes the argument that the just man does not wish to exceed others like him. In the same sense, guardians must have a complex mixture of behaviors and instincts: they must combine fearlessness and gentleness. The example given of an animal that combines these traits is found in that of the dog.

In fact, Socrates asks, “Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and watching?” But, to complexify the argument, Socrates also argues that the dog is very much like a philosopher because “he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing” (II 376b). Before returning to this statement, we can almost sketch a syllogism with major and minor premises:

Major premise: Every noble youth is like a well-bred dog.

Minor premise: Every well-bred dog is like a philosopher.

Conclusion: Every noble youth is like a philosopher.

The cornerstone to this argument is the very nature of justice, for Socrates remarks “he who is likely to be gentle to his friends and acquaintances must by nature be a lover of wisdom.” And, not to jump ahead of ourselves, the reason why the following pages are concerned with censorship are precisely because Socrates is addressing a crucial question of breeding: how do we breed the noble youth into a well-bred dog, i.e. how do we instill justice into the youth, i.e. how do we breed the philosopher? For we are reminded after the claim that: “he who is to be a really good and noble guardian of the State will require to unite in himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness and strength.”

In other words, what makes the noble youth like a well-bred dog is the presence of philosophy instilled into the essence of his very being. This installation is what allows for the cultivation of justice precisely because justice is defined within the limits of the known and the unknown, i.e. of the like and the unlike. This leads to some startling conclusions: Greek philosophy and ethics are founded on the subordination of the Other, the Stranger, to the Same, which is to say that Greek justice is logocentrically normative or, in another sense, is too worried about the neighbor, the nearest, such that the furthest, in Nietzsche’s political sense, are precisely ignored or non-represented in terms of the situation. Where does this argument stem from?

To come full circle, the dog’s virtue is precisely in his recognition of the face of the Other in relation to that of the Same. As a crucial result, philosophy and justice come to reinforce each other on this basic principle: that the love of knowledge is the exaltation of the Same, and for philosophy to express its domination, the unlike must be rendered unto justice, which is to say that it must be made into the Same. Consequently, the Other and the Stranger are always on the other side of justice, justice always seems to slope off asymptotically upon verging with the unlike. As Laruelle would remind us, though, we are all Strangers in-the-last-instance, which means that the criterion of Sameness and Difference will not help us here if we are to think a completely human notion of justice. On the other hand, Deleuze has convincingly argued that justice does not exist, and where it does exist it must have been constructed, and hence it must have always already been jurisprudence, i.e. it must evolve according to a situation. This is why it becomes disingenuous for Socrates to not only promote the praise of the gods but also to change their very nature through the censorship of literature. Obviously, Socrates’ justice is constructed in such a way that its jurisprudence shows the inherent injustice in the system, for the freedom to know and question are denied to the common folk: what is left is the freedom to obey. Hence the freedom to know must be pre-established: one must be bred for it…

Does objectivity, whose harshness and universal power is revealed in war, provide the unique and primordial form in which Being, when it is distinguished from image, dream and subjective abstraction, imposes itself on consciousness? Is the apprehension of an object equivalent to the very moment in which the bonds with truth are woven?

Levinas

I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant disarray, and yet with the imperceptible but intense suddenness of the outside, as an irresistible or unforeseen resolve which would come to us from beyond the confines of decision.

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Levinas begins the preface to Totality and Infinity by asking whether war is not the most serious objection to the lucidity — the sanity — of ethics. For war robs our institutions and obligations of their eternity; it is the concrete suspension of the ethical. In war morality vanishes. The violence of war does not only affect us as the most real, the most palpable fact, but as the very truth of the real. Thus it is not just one of the ordeals morality lives. War renders morality derisory, rescinding its imperatives for the interim. Politics, winning at any cost, is enjoined as the very exercise of reason itself — opposing itself to morality as philosophy to naivete.

Fragments of Heraclitus are unnecessary to show that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought. Reality rends the words that dissimulate it. War is produced as the pure experience of being, cracking the veils which covered its nudity. The ontological event of war is mobilization, a casting-into-motion of beings once anchored in identity. The trial by force is the test of the real. Yet the violence of war does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating people, but in interrupting their continuity — forcing them to play roles in which they can no longer recognize themselves.

People are made to betray not only commitments but their own substance, and made to carry out actions that destroy every possibility for action. “Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them.” War produces and establishes an order from which nothing and no one can keep their distance. Nothing remains outside. War does not manifest exteriority, the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same. The vision of being glimpsed in war is “totality,” a vision-in-one which dominates Western philosophy.

Individuals become bearers of forces commanding them unbeknownst to themselves. The meaning of individuals, invisible outside the whole, is derived from the totality. The implicit univocity of each present is sacrificed endlessly to a future appealed to bring forth the objective meaning. The ultimate meaning alone counts, and only the last act transforms beings into themselves. Thus we are what we will appear to be in the already plastic forms of the epic.

In this context, oracular discourse would seem to accept the ontology of totality issued from war; but in fact the real import of prophetic eschatology lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality, but rather consists in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond totality, beyond history. It is not a relationship with a being beyond the past, beyond the present, nor with the void surrounding the totality where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes — thus promoting the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. Rather it is a relationship with a surplus ever exterior to the totality. It is as though the objective totality does not fill out the true measure of being.

It is as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality, and yet as primordial as totality. The eschatological, the “beyond” of history, draws beings out from the jurisdiction of history, of the future, and arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility. Submitting history as a whole to judgment, exterior to the wars that mark its end, it restores to each instant its full signification in that instant: all the causes are ready to be heard.

The eschatological notion of judgment is contrary to the judgment of history in which Hegel imagined its rationalization, and implies that beings have an identity “before” eternity, before history is accomplished, before the fullness of time — in other words, while there is still time. It implies that beings exist in relationship but on the basis of themselves and not on the basis of the totality. The idea of being overflowing history makes possible an existence both involved and personal, beings that can speak rather than lending lips to an anonymous utterance of history. “Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech.” The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak.

The first “vision” is eschatology reveals the possibility of a breach in the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context, in short, the very possibility of eschatology as distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religion. The experience of morality consummates this vision, rather than simply proceeding from it. Ethics is an optics, but yields a vision without image, bereft of the “synoptic,” totalizing virtues of vision. It is a relation, or intentionality, of a wholly different type. Of peace there can only be an eschatology, Levinas claims. Yet this should not be taken to mean that when affirmed objectively it is believed by faith instead of being known by knowledge. It means that peace does not take place in the objective history disclosed by war, as the end of that war, or as the end of history.

But does not the eschatology of peace, beyond the evidence and experience of the philosopher — coinciding with war and totality — live on subjective opinions and illusion? Unless, Levinas writes, philosophical evidence refers from itself to a situation which can no longer be stated in terms of “totality”; unless the non-knowing with which the philosophical knowing begins coincides not with pure nothingness, but only a nothingness of objects.

Without substituting eschatology for philosophy, without philosophically “demonstrating” eschatological “truths,” it is possible to proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks apart, a situation conditioning the totality itself. This situation is the gleam or glare of exteriority — or of transcendence in the face of the other. Rigorously developed, this concept of transcendence is expressed by the term infinity. What remains exterior to thought within thought is thought within the idea of infinity. It is conditions every opinion and every truth. It is the mind before it lends itself to the distinction between what it discovers by itself and what it receives from opinion. The relation with infinity cannot be stated in terms of experience; it overflows the thought that thinks it. Its infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing, which accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word.

The eschatological vision does not oppose to the experience of totality the protestation of person in the name of his personal egoism or even his salvation; such proclamations of morality based on the pure subjectivism of the I are refuted by war and the totality it reveals — the objective necessities. Rather a subjectivity born from the eschatological vision is opposed to the objectivism of war. The idea of infinity delivers subjectivity from the judgment of history to declare it ready for judgment at every moment — called to participate in this judgment. War does not break up against an impotent, detached subjectivism, but against the infinite, more objective than objectivity. Do particular beings yield their truth in a Whole in which their exteriority vanishes? Or, on the contrary, is the ultimate event of being enacted in the outburst of this exteriority?

Infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other; the particular, the personal, magnetize the field in which production is enacted. It both brings about and brings to light: effectuation and revelation at once, ambiguously. The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity reflecting the case of an entity encountering nothing on the outside which limits it, overflowing all limits, and thus infinite. The production of the infinite entity is inseparable from the idea of infinity, for it is precisely the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity. Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of its idea in me.

The outside, or Other, is accorded an incomparable eminence in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In his penetrating account, metaphysics desires an elsewhere. It persists within an alibi, in which we assert true life as absent. But then our idea of the other would seem to hinge upon the imperceptible — that is, upon an Other which is not other like the bread I eat, or the land in which I dwell. It is not a question of this “I,” and that “other,” but of an absolutely other. In its most recognizable (historical) form it appears as a passionate movement or turn towards an Other, which goes forth from the world of the familiar. Metaphysics turns from an at-home to an exteriority.

Metaphysics yearns to become outside-of-oneself, its desire tends towards the absolutely other — something entirely different than a need: “The customary analysis of desire can not explain away its singular pretension. As commonly interpreted need would be at the basis of desire; desire would characterize a being indigent and incomplete or fallen from its past grandeur. It would coincide with the consciousness of what has been lost; it would be essentially a nostalgia, a longing for return. But thus it would not even suspect what the veritably other is.” (T&I 33) What is the mode of desire whose essence is exteriority?

But what could be a subject of such a desire or such a thinking, whose force would consist in destroying the possibility of subordinating desire to a modality, or of rupturing the very image of thought — overturning its model and smashing its reproductions? The desire for the absolutely other is absolute, Levinas argues, since we are mortal and the Desired invisible; this desire implies our relationship with what is not given, and of which there is no idea. Vision “adequates” an idea with a thing, comprehending what it encompasses.

Beyond the knowledge which measures being, beyond brightness and depth, there is an inordinate desire for the most high: “Desire is desire for the absolutely other.” Unlike a hunger or thirst, metaphysics desires the other beyond satisfaction, and so understands the exteriority or remoteness of the other; metaphysics opens up the very dimension of height itself. The alterity glimpsed in this desire is thus not adequate to an idea, but nonetheless has a meaning — the alterity of the Other, and of the Most-High.

Not the height of heaven but the Invisible; there is no doubting human misery but to be a man is to know the dominion which things and the wicked exercise over us — our animality. “Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in peril.” To know, to be conscious, is also to have time, space to breathe, to avoid, to forestall the “instant of inhumanity”; for Levinas, it is this very postponing of the hour of treason which implies the disinterestedness of goodness, the desire for the absolutely other, the dimension of metaphysics, or “nobility.”

[Photograph by Will Godfrey]

In an essay Hoffmeister suggests was written in 1808 or 1809, Hegel — certainly not without some irony — identifies an important ethical connection between abstract thought and power:

Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) — not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself above that of which it is not capable, but on account of the inward inferiority of the matter.

[G. W. F. Hegel, Who Thinks Abstractly?]

Abstract thinking sets the thinker apart from good society, for their general opinion considers it too easy, too small, too obvious, even in poor taste. As Hegel understands it, abstraction is that faculty through which we spontaneously discover nothing in the subject but an abstracted notion of his concrete behavior. The inner life, the event of being, the very actuality of the will, is subsumed beneath an objective product. Ontology precludes apology.

Judgment indeed confirms the event in its original and fundamental movement, but every human quality in us is erased by the absolute imposition of a simple meaning — the reduction of living to some finite series of directions: past-tense, third-person verbs. Thus abstract thought — which we will now recognize as something common, even inferior or “ignoble,” at least in its operation and chosen material — functions effectively as providing (social) justification for punishing, terrorizing and humiliating others: “This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.” (ibid) Our capacity for abstract thought is what allows the army officer to beat a soldier like a dog, like an object, without any trace of empathy.

However, somewhat paradoxically, it can also be seen as that faculty whereby we become capable of transcending simple explanations for complex phenomena, and for recognizing the corruption of morality indicated by the folly of such ‘abstract’ justifications: “This woman saw that the murderer’s head was struck by the sunshine and thus was still worthy of it. She raised it from the punishment of the scaffold into the sunny grace of God, and instead of accomplishing the reconciliation with violets and sentimental vanity, saw him accepted in grace in the higher sun.” [ibid] Abstract thought may be considered then as similar to a faculty of metaphor, a kind of improvised or dancing thought which reaches the real only indirectly, as though it had to be transmitted by an “untrustworthy” third.

Who this third objectively “is” tends to vary radically, but the formal structure of this relationship remains unchanged. But it is important to realize that Hegel describes the action of abstract thought in quite different terms for those different conditions in which it operates. For example, in religion or in the law, it is an abstract thought which allows us to see only in the murderer’s hands the still-running blood of his victim: all murderers have murdered, and deserve the “proper” punishment. Abstract thinking underlies the capacity for memory and therefore learning — it contains and elevates the faculty responsible for preserving the past in the present, for seeing the future in the present and for [remembering] the past in the future. It is neither purely interior or purely universal. Abstract thought involves an uncanny combination of logic and forgetting, and moves beyond the merely sensible, bringing a penetrating insight to bear onto reality along with a thoughtful resignation to a certain kind of undecidability.

For example, in the army, the soldier is the generic component of the war machine, the docile, “canaille” abstract element able to be beaten to a jelly and reformed into a functional component of the assemblage. Hegel observes, without explaining his cryptic remark, that this situation could drive an officer into making a “pact with the devil”… Some light may be shed upon this curious relationship between abstract thought and human social behavior by considering the distinction Hegel makes between feeling and thinking. He argues in the Encyclopaedia Logic that feeling is inferior, in spiritual terms, to thinking proper, and that Thinking, again in the non-trivial sense — of Pure Thought — is the only way what is in-itself may be grasped:
“Feeling as such is the general form of what is sensible; we have it in common with the animals. This form can indeed take hold of the concrete content, but the content does not belong to this form; feeling is the lowest form that the spiritual can assume. It is only in thinking, and as thinking, that this content, God himself, is in its truth. In this sense, therefore, thought is not just mere thought; on the contrary, it is what is highest and, considered strictly, it is the one and only way in which what is eternal, and what is in and for itself can be grasped.” [Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic s. 19]

It is only by knowing what we do and are — and their inter-relation — that we distinguish ourselves from animals (even the most ‘self-aware’ or ‘sensitive’ animals.) Thought bids farewell to the last element of the sensible, and so is alone able to experience the highest truth. To pierce the supersensible is to be occupied with it, to “sojourn in it” like a newly discovered continent.

Hegel does not mean for us to abandon objective judgment or deny the coherence of rational institutions; on the contrary, we have found the power of an objective judgment consists in submitting to an abstract law, a universal, which reduces the human will to an objective signification. Hegel is acutely aware that these judgments actually do exist, reflected by the public order and even in the equality which such universality assures. Yet Hegel himself opposes the blind tyranny of the impersonal, the inhuman indifference of the pure universal.

Is it possible that Hegel isolates this extremely critical moment wherein man affirms himself against the universal as irreducible, as a singularity exterior to the system of society — what we should recognize is a properly religious moment? Is there a moment in the dialectic where philosophy finds a completely new point of departure, a pure immediacy which overturns the order of signification in producing recognition as such? This will undoubtedly be a moment strangely familiar to readers of Emmanuel Levinas wherein, as he puts its, “the recognition of the individual concerns him in his singularity, an order of joy which is neither cessation nor antithesis of pain, nor flight before it…” (Totality and Infinity, 242)

The relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms, transcendent to one another, where alterity does not determine the other in a formal sense… It is produced in multiple singularities and not in a being exterior to this number who would count the multiples. The inequality is in this impossibility of the exterior point of view, which alone could abolish it. The relationship that is established–the relationship of teaching, of mastery, of transitivity–is language, and is produced only in the speaker who, consequently, himself faces. Language is not added to the impersonal thought dominating the same and the other; impersonal thought is produced in the movement that proceeds from the same to the other, and consequently in the interpersonal and not only impersonal language. An order common to the interlocutors is established by the positive act of the one giving the world, his possession, to the other, or by the positive act of the one justifying himself in his freedom before the other, that is, by apology.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity 251, “Beyond the Face”

Levinas argues forcefully that the truth of our being is compromised when we submit to tyranny. It is neither suicide nor resignation to declare this truth, but rather love itself, revolted by the violence of reason. There is a plane of reality that must be indicated, whose very existence at once presupposes and transcends the revelation of the other, wherein the I bears itself beyond death.

Yet in this movement, where subjectivity itself is posited as a function, the I also recovers from its return to itself. This plane is certainly love: the other who faces us arouses an infinite desire, and reveals a mode of subjectivity which is the meaning of language, or justice, and which is the very actuality of love, living for others. The mere existence of this plane implies both separation and transcendence — a revolt against the violence of a “reason” that would reduce interpersonal discourse to silence.

Subjectivity cannot accept silence — but it can cease its apology. This is not suicide but love. Resignation to a universal reason compromises our very being. Even if it is “rational,” it remains a form of submission to tyranny. Levinas writes that existence in history consists in placing my consciousness outside of myself, in “destroying my responsibility.” (T&I 252) Nonetheless, my individuality is very different from an animal partiality — even when supplemented by a “reason” issuing from organic-inorganic assemblages of contradictory “animal” impulses. When the self has its consciousness outside of itself, a kind of inhumanity resides in the consciousness of violence within oneself. A singularity is already at the level of reason — one is a personal discourse, an apology, issuing from itself to the others:

“I am in truth by being produced in history under the judgment it bears upon me, but under the judgment that it bears upon me in my presence–that is, while letting me speak… The difference between ‘to appear in history’ (without a right to speak) and to appear to the Other while attending one’s own apparition distinguishes again my political being from my religious being.” (Levinas, Totality & Infinity 253)

Impersonal reason does not leave us magically outside the state or spare us from violence. Our freedom reads shame in the eyes which look at me; our freedom is an apology, meaning only that it refers already from itself to another’s judgment it solicits. As a result of this apology, my being does not equal its appearance in our awareness, and is not called to appear to itself in reality. Yet it also does not equal what it has been for others, in the terms of an impersonal “universal” reason: “If I am reduced to my role in history I am unrecognized as I was deceptive when I appeared in my own consciousness.” (252) My historical existence is the movement whereby my consciousness is placed outside of “myself,” and this difference is not only theoretical: our awareness of the tyranny of the State makes it actual, even if this consciousness is “rationally grounded.” The violence death introduces into my being does not make truth imposible. The violence of death appears to reduce to silence a subjectivity without which truth could not be produced; unless the subject renounces itself without violence. This is not suicide, not resignation, but the meaning of revolt against the tyranny of impersonal reason. Love presupposes and transcends the epiphany of the other. Not apology, but submission to tyranny compromises the truth of my being.

Common to both capitalism and democracy is competition as the basic principle of social organization. Politics in a purely competitive key has a majoritarian ring — it is monistic, totalizing, self-absorbed — whereas philosophy from the competitive perspective — and we may wonder whether there have yet been any others — are egologies. The complementary model, or sharing, has been more frequently preached than practiced. Yet it is the meaning of language: the demand for social justice is expression par excellence, the very thirst for peace. Both violence and love aim for the other in their vulnerability, but only in non-violence can truth reconcile us together.

Like a smooth or empty space, peacefulness operates without principle, without direction, without form. Yet even as a formal relation to another, it connotes a kind of difficult freedom, a consciousness which refuses to compete, which questions not its abilities but rather itself as such. A force grasps hold of us, an explosion which limits without thereby enslaving us — a relationship which forms the lineaments of a new kind of relationship between human beings, as well as between human beings and themselves.

Yet non-violence would never really be an emptiness, a pure void or absolute gap — even if war enjoys the practical status of something like an ultimate cosmic principle. While the future may appear bleak, I believe we can find a way to think, act and speak together, singularly as well as plurally, and to do so more peacefully — that is to say: more freely, more honestly, more creatively, more joyously.

The difficulty of freedom is also the problem of war: it lies entirely within the fact that the future demands our service as individuals. There is no middle-ground. We become responsible for slavery, which faces us at every turn as the “primal” injustice. The material conditions of others, the ravages wreaked upon human beings by historical “consequence,” present us with a non-transferrable ethical demand, one which is active in a concrete and fundamental sense in every dimension of life. Inhumanity is a silent anonymity, the obliteration of language, freedom and society all at once — a negative indication of the primacy of our responsibility.

Peace can only begin with myself. The passivity such a mode of human existence implies indicates a kind of subjectivity completely different than the one we have inherited from Greek philosophy. Yet passivity indicates not a lack of reason, but rather the submission to a dimension of absolute externality: a responsibility which is unlimited, which is not a debt, which is not restricted by the extent of an active commitment.

The hostages’ responsibility for their captor.

Preface

It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity 24

I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Sepulture, “Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their body?’ is also the question whether art now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society.

Adorno, “Commitment”

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 422

Our age has borne witness to the most rapid expansion of military and state power in human history. Weapons have grown highly sophisticated in a complex lockstep with global economic and political transformations. The meaning of this enormous growth in power, and the implications for our increasing technological sophistication, is anything but clear and unambiguous. The political mythology surrounding war and peace has also grown in sophistication. Nonetheless, the tool inevitably varies with the specific relationship — that is, the conditions under which it becomes possible, and the situations which it makes possible. This internal capacity for variation and variance is closer to the essence of war than the complex matrix of state and global power relations.

Any tool can become a war machine — at least potentially, and if its object becomes war. Yet war is still not the essence of the war machine, but rather the set of conditions under which the machine becomes appropriated by state power — or even the global order in which states now become only parts. In Deleuze and Guatarri’s account, a war machine is always external to the powers of the state, even though the state may have means for capturing and transforming its power into violence for its own ends. Nonetheless, war machines bring novel connections to bear upon centers of command, static assemblages of power, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.” (ATP 423) The war machine refers to a reality essentially independent from the structures which constitute the state. In it we find the lineaments of a new and general relationship between human beings, between an individual and themselves, which is not subordinate to the state or its means — even when that individual is used as a means by the state.

In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas argues peace cannot be identified with a war that ends for lack of combatants. That integration of the same and the other which would avoid cruelty refuses ignorance of the other; I speak to him. He concludes the work with an argument that the kinds of subjects produced by the state, with its “virile virtues,” find themselves situated at the “antipodes” from subjects living in the “infinite time of fecundity,” that is, a time in which we are capable of another fate. (T&I 306) Morality opposes politics in history only when it moves beyond admiring the beauty of existence to proclaiming itself unconditional and universal, as a relation with a surplus always exterior to the totality. The assumption of finite time — death as end — allows the hero to believe he may gain salvation in an eternal life. Yet Levinas wonders whether in such a continuous time whether identity itself would not have to be affirmed obsessively: “…as though in the identity that remains in the midst of the most extravagant avatars ‘tedium, fruit of the mournful incuriousity that takes on the proportions of immortality’ did not triumph.” (T&I 307) The isolated mode of subjectivity produced by the state confronts death out of courage, whatever the cause may be for which they die — a pure courage that the end may, after all, be merely another victorious transition.

(more soon)

Introduction: Rationality and Affect

The lofty prize
Of science lies
Concealed today as ever!
He has no thought
To him it’s brought
To own without endeavor!

Goethe, Faust (1st part, 2567-2572)

Intelligence is a moral category. The separation of feeling and understanding, that makes it possible to absolve and beatify the blockhead, hypostasizes the dismemberment of man into functions. Praise of the simpleton has an undertone of anxiety lest the severed parts reunite and put an end to the derangement. ‘If you have understanding and a heart,’ a verse of Holderlin’s runs, ‘show only one. Both they will damn, if you show both together.’

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia 197 (“Wishful Thinking”)

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche expresses his desire for independent thinkers to reflect on the origins, and speculate on the future of science and art. On the one hand, he draws attention to the conditions for their invention: in order for scientific thinking and art to have begun at all, a wide variety of physiological and psychological faculties (whose effects are quite different without the framework imposed by artistic or scientific rigor) must become strong enough to overpower their “opposing” functions. For example, in order for science to begin, the impulse to doubt must overcome the impulse to believe, just as the impulse to wait must overcome the impulse to simply make something up and move on, and so forth. On the other hand, Nietzsche reminds us that the divergence between the aesthetic and scientific experience tends to fracture humanity’s spirit, pushing it both further from and closer to reaching itself than ever. At the very moment determinate thought emerges as a unity, science finds itself foreign to itself, incompletely digested. Its great distance and inhuman coldness oppose it to both practical wisdom and to art.

One passage in particular — “On the doctrine of poisons” — exemplifies Nietzsche’s correlation of the future possibilities of science and art with the conditions required for their original development:

Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being. And even now the time seems remote when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to form a higher organic system in relation to which scholars, physicians, artists and legislators — as we know them at present — would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times.
[Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” Book 3, Section 113]

Nietzsche’s vision of a higher organic system uniting science, art and wisdom in concert seems distant indeed. Today’s science appears, by contrast, nothing more than a peculiarly modern cruelty, and at the least grossly indifferent, uncomfortably alien to the humanity it serves. Nonetheless, the future dawn which Nietzsche glimpsed in spite of his time also has given birth in ours to a family of curious hybrids, a flock of syntheses of formerly-disparate functions. Why, then, despite these mutations, does a genuine organic system bridging science, art, and practical wisdom seem as far away as ever? The reason, at its ugly root, is that a melancholy science — the “positivist” law of gravity — has so far tended to reign supreme. “The common consent to the positive is a gravitational force that pulls all downwards,” writes Adorno. [Minima Moralia 118, “Downwards, ever downwards.”] Divergent thoughts are minimized, a superficial convergence deified.

The break between the humanities and the natural sciences repeats itself within every discipline, even perhaps within every experiment. It is itself a minor repetition of the ancient war between art and science. Today practitioners of both art and science discover their specialization narrowing, as though all following some imperceptible signal to think smaller. Any particular branch of science today, any given artistic field, discover its task suddenly to be both overspecialized and excessively abstract. A kind of anti-production masquerading as production is made of intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, any actual “work” in these fields having been long ago been reduced to a narrow repetition.

What is left over (with a few important exceptions) hardly deserves the name of either “art” or “science,” against whose memory these images are like the disturbing shadows of dead gods. What remains, in other words, are an art and an science equally devoid of thought or feeling. In fact, this is a symptom of a more general social condition wherein all dimensions of life are reduced to a purely formal space — a generic task in a total machine.

In a paradoxical way, this process of reduction also yields a kind of emancipation. Despite appearances, all of this evident degeneration is still a positive expression of life: terrified, sickening life, but life nonetheless, whose forced behavior and faux automatism belie the subtle elegance of its co-ordinated movement and expression — not to mention the inner, experimental movements of the mind.

This, in short, is the story of how the real spiritual conditions of science — of the scientist — were concealed. For beneath a calm veneer of scientific rationality, we discover, unsurprisingly, an engaged and energetic spirit. Without this energy, and without this facade, science could not exist. Nevertheless, this intermingling of the “passionate” and “dispassionate” reaches a critical moment within the modern era of science. Mathematics supplants poetry as the language of disclosing being. The most subtle, rare and beautiful symmetries can now be explored, even rigorously constructed. However, we can also discern new, and possibly dangerous hybrids.

Perhaps the most unfortunate and idiosyncratic tendency today is an unreflective combination of empiricism and transcendentalism, yielding, depending on the believer’s base disposition, a vain idealism or vulgar materialism. These function, in general, as impediments to thinking. The predominant tendency is to package them uncomfortably alongside a facile moral relativism and callous economic determinism. It could be added that this symptomatic reductive tendency is unsettlingly widespread today, regardless of the author’s political orientation or whether the author’s department ostensibly devotes itself to “cognitive science” or “cultural studies.”

That there have been many misunderstandings from both shores regarding their schism can make the necessary dialogue appear difficult, and war virtually inevitable. But in our eyes, the friendship between art and science, and again between the sciences of man and the sciences of nature, remains of ultimate importance. Behind the ancient war of philosophy and poetry, there is a brotherhood — a cosmic fraternity. Socially oblivious, reductive materialism on the one hand, and all-too-clever “postmodern” posturing on the other, are superficial symptoms of the severance of this real connection. The only permanent solution to this pregnant impasse is also the most difficult: patience, respect, compassion, and open dialogue are the tools for the transformation of enemies into allies.

Rigorous expression is the essence of this emancipatory reunification. What we want to understand is the following: how has this process of subdivision and divergence failed so often to produce thoughts and subjects opposed to the separation between disciplines — a separation exacted finally as a nullification of both emotion and judgment? My proposal consists essentially in a return to Nietzsche. He demonstrates that a genuine crossing between the two shores is not impossible. It requires more than narrow, mechanical interaction. It requires, precisely, slow reading and discernment. We stand in desperate need of a genuine, thoughtful reunification — perhaps too desperate. My goal is to question the desire for an unlimited unity of wisdom. I wish to ask instead what concepts are equal to the task of resurrecting art and revitalizing science.

Art and science can and must move forward together. Poetry and mathematics need not deny one another’s reality. The motivation is clear enough — perhaps too clear! While we cannot abide this artificial reduction of science to two simple, unconnected spaces of thought, we also cannot abide the direct reduction of either space to the other. We must resist interpretation, and begin to listen. The notion of ‘rigor’ embodies the transversal movement of scientific or artistic or practical thinking, not a robust and formal conjunction but a delicate, fragile synthesis. Translation is the key to this transformation. We have dire need for alliances across the unfortunate schism between poetry and mathematics, the humanities and the natural sciences — today more than ever before. To reflect upon this boundary is already to transform it.

Vivisection

Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure. This is planned, used for undertakings, crammed with visits to every conceivable site or spectacle, or just with the fastest possible locomotion. The shadow of all this falls on intellectual work. It is done with a bad conscience, as if it had been poached from some urgent — even if only imaginary — occupation. To justify itself in its own eyes it puts on a show of hectic activity performed under great pressure and shortage of time, which excludes all reflection, and therefore itself.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (from p. 138, “Vandals”)

A major theme of Adorno’s masterpiece, Minima Moralia, is the symptomatically frenzied lifestyle of the modern professional intellectual, with its evident, and apparently calculated, exclusion of speculation. How is it that we stop thinking, in order to justify our jobs as thinkers? Adorno argues that a profession which demands solitude and reflection cannot comfortably co-exist with a lifestyle totally dominated by the sphere of exchange. Books by the pound, but never looking around. Intellectual work done in such an unreflective way produces a bad conscience. Thus are the most dangerous kinds of contradictions allowed to preserve themselves. Merely an innocent, or at least harmless corruption? We might add there also neatly corresponds to this lifestyle an all-too-familiar maniacal fixity, itself co-extensive with the mechanical self-organization of production. Divided and conquered.

Work usurps thought, in the end overtaking life itself: everything must look like a job, even our life itself must resemble a project. Hyper-specialization. The not-so-hidden downside of this is that everything which does not conform is condemned to be systematically isolated and extracted. Thus the false resemblance of life and work functions to conceal whatever is still, or not yet, directly regulated by the sphere of exchange — the ever-burgeoning body-without-organs of capital. Consequently Adorno believes his trepidation about professional intellectuals reflects a much deeper problem:

“The unconscious innervations which, beyond thought processes, attune individual existence to historical rhythms, sense the approaching collectivization of the world. Yet since integral society does not so much take up individuals positively within itself as crush them to an amorphous and malleable mass, each individual dreads the process of absorption, which is felt as inevitable.” (MM 139)

A world-historical struggle is unfolding to which our private, internal experiences bear profound and characteristic witness, precisely because this struggle affects everyone as well as every dimension of human life. The ever-recommencing “integration” of society affects us unconsciously as a terrifying threat of subsumption. Paradoxically, in resisting the danger of a negative reunification, we reproduce the threat itself. A critical sociology can “read” the near-universal adoption of hectic, frenzied modes of life, already commonplace, even cliche, even at the dawn of the 20th century, as unconscious attempts on the part of individuals to construct a “counter-irritant” — Adorno’s term for an active and urgently subjective transformation in response to the growing threat of totalitarianism. Far too often, we resist the transformation we unconsciously fear by submitting to the system in advance for fear we might submit “all too late.”

This is the universal delirium about which everyone is completely silent. Terror is not only a form of social intimidation, but also has a profound philosophical and psychological meaning. For terror is that operator of passage, that parasite by which we submit to our nightmares. It propagates, in isolated silences, like a viral unconscious agent. It distorts threats and advantages; it distributes weakness, lack, resentment; it “protects” us from a specific threat only by drawing attention to something even more terrifying — an unlimited threat. The specifically modern experience of terror has been shaped by the death of God, the explosive revelation of the subject’s secret finitude. Without the absolute limit of the limitless, nothing again can indeed appear from without to harm us again. Absolute domination becomes imperceptible: like a nightmare we carry within us, a coup from the inside. We create nightmares to protect us; we become the terrifying parasite. Michel Foucault is acutely aware of this dimension of the contemporary experience. In his “Preface to Transgression,” he declares:

“By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. In this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the impossible (the experience being both that which we experience and that which constitutes the experience.) The death of God is not merely an “event” that gives shape to contemporary experience as we now know it: it continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline.
Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression” from “Language, Counter-Memory-Practice,” p.32

The contemporary experience is only superficially empty; but in fact it consists in erasing external bounds to power and replacing them with internal constrictions. This exacts its price on the very experience of living; life is poisoned and quickly grows sick. Before the need for terror, cruelty stands as the only solution, a determination and rigor which pierces the real. Cruelty is the price for knowledge.

A decision protects our experience by limiting its intensity. Without limit, without form, experience itself becomes unsayable, imperceptible, and finally even unthinkable. What founds our new faith is not fear but courage, even in the event of our inevitable capture. But what of the impossibly distant, tantalizing hope for real emancipation?

We have now determined why the philosophers stopped thinking, and perhaps how life becomes unlife: how life became sick, and haunted by unfulfillable desires. How people became obsessed with work and appearances, and from whence came the terror and uncannily symptomatic frenzy characteristic of modernity. The masses are individually terrified of being swallowed up by an infinite force promising only oblivion, and so combine to become this force.

Hope is a cruel device, a spur: not only do actions intended to minimize a threat ironically end up bringing it about, but faith makes us insist upon our slavery without even being asked first. We fight for domination harder than for freedom — believing we are fighting for freedom. In adopting a frenzied lifestyle, we manage even to outdo the danger itself. We use the hours apparently left to freedom to coach ourselves in becoming a member of the herd. Adorno declares: “The further the individual and society diverge in later periods through the competition of interests, and the more the individual is thrown back on himself, the more doggedly he clings to the notion of the moral nature of wealth.” (Adorno, Minima Moralia 119, “Model of virtue.”) Wealth is not essentially moral, but it does tend to corrupt morality. Against this omnipresent and negative universality, the identity of virtue and money, determinate production itself must be reclaimed as the essential procedure of both art and science. Furthermore, needs and desires must also be re-conceived as positive forces, not as principles “lacking” an object.

Psychoanalysis, in particular, must be urgently reclaimed and rethought as a tool for protecting, revitalizing and amplifying desire. No longer ought we attempt simply to normalize desire. For we thereby only succeed in crushing it once and for all.

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis

Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the “specialist” emerges somewhere — his zeal, his seriousness, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 336 (“Faced with a scholarly book”)

The comfort that flows from great works of art lies less in what they express than in the fact that they have managed to struggle out of existence. Hope is soonest found among the comfortless.

Adorno, MM 223 (“In nuce”)

We turn again to the most basic question of method, the problem of style. A style may be identified with a minimal integrity of experience, or rigor. The “laws” of form are something like pure movements, intensities, qualities — moving through, against, and above history. Style consists in a saturation of smooth spaces, the delicate articulation of a discovery, a deft and graceful construction by combination and elimination. It discovers an original and clever device, a diamond-spur: “Bite, my hook, into the belly of all black affliction!” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Honey Offering”) Style is the only response which exceeds expression itself, unfolding the form of the question.

A style emerges as such in the affirmation of positive distances, spaces, openings. Alternation, repetition, break. A style is always military, but it is also always sexual; it is the abstraction which allows an essential perception — that all is in flux. Style affirms a genuine divergence. Even though through it all questions are articulated, style answers only to the questions how and how much. Style appears, at first, as a supplement to an unquestioned — and even unconscious — answer. A movement is timeless, without history. And whether we drink it down as a stultifying antidote or sip it as a hypnotic love potion, a grandiloquent gesture never fails to enrapt.

Style is the essence of power, the minimal condition of command, the medium of the law itself. It is pure terror and absolute joy. Only through the reduction to a small set of generic commands or operations — a common language — could rigor itself come to impose its rule upon men. Only through such an inversion, too, does taste registers its own, impossible pleasure in a new style. This may indeed be the uncanny sense in which Adorno declares all works of art to be uncommitted crimes. We would add that great crimes are often cover-ups for greater crimes. Behind the hollow, booming, and explosive laughter of violent humanity, we can still discern the terror of a frantic prisoner. (And even in the innermost recesses of humanism, there rages a Fascist who wishes to turn the entire world into a prison.) We should not be surprised that Zarathustra’s words again ring out loudest here: “One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Of Love of One’s Neighbor”) The neighbor, as solace, comforts the fear of loneliness, the nightmare of our own minds. (Yet from the greatest distance, do we not suddenly discover the neighbor as the first medium of relation and the first true operator of determination? –that is to say, bifurcated, both the first guest and the first parasite?)

Towards a healthier narcissism, a more joyous paranoia: after all, what are the ethics of style but the “anti-laws” of transformative aesthetics, that is to say — internal, residual, continuous movements? The first power is that of making evaluations: mapping the sensitivities of resistances, encoding a certain relationship between expression and experience. The essence of domination, the conquering spirit, is thus experienced as a moment of the problem of style. Is “free expression” a singular point or an operator of passage? The elemental form of the signal is a break, a gap, a mark diverting a celerity. The parasite invents eloquence, grammar prose: style is a passage which transforms by resisting transformation. The real itself is but an inflection of this basic operation, an atom of relationality.

What is the crux of the ethico-political problem of style? Resistance to variation: there is no pure form of the law, only this abstract imperative. A given style must be allowed — that is, we ought to want it simply to be allowed — to answer for itself, in its own voice and on its own terms. To simply cease interpretation, to refrain from crisis-crossing with grids and axes, is not enough — or already too much. For we must also actively resist the threat of over-interpretation. This is, in many ways, the most difficult thing for a mind to do, the true measure of its agility.

Style is a kind of resistance which is also the resistance to thought itself, even the resistance to resistance, a kind of spiritual or internal movement we should not immediately attempt to reduce to moral or aesthetic terms. Rather: can we not finally, at this very moment, discover the law itself as a supplement, determined by the minimal gap between thinking and feeling? Poetry thus at last appears entirely a question of economy, of “spacing”: a rigorous lunacy expressed through a stuttering eloquence. Scientific experimentation is in essence no different — through individually meaningless intensive variations, a procedure is derived. Style poses the problem, the question as such, by introducing a minimal shift, increasing the speed, difference, complexity, or simply the distance to be crossed — all solely so that it may be that much more joyously traversed.

Terror and Lucidity

I do not systematically cultivate horror. The word “cruelty” must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element… From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

Antonin Artaud (from the first of the “Letters on Cruelty,” dated Sept 13, 1932)

Ambiguity is transformed not by reflection or speculation, but by determination. Poetry clarifies by imposing style, repeatedly cutting through layers of metaphor — a stratification which disarticulates, a war machine bursting holes through knowledge. Its reasons are arbitrary and accidental; but, in another sense, so is rationality itself. Lucidity opens resistances with greater resistance. It consists in a kind of holding-back which reveals. The divergence between art and science renegotiates its difference as clarity.

Nevertheless the question will always remain whether we have try sounded the depths — or whether a bloated, hollow sound rings out from within. Let us consider a certain effect of the clarified production of expression. In evoking the horrific and the grotesque, expression pierces a pure recurrence which silences expression. It is not so strange that horror is the characteristic mode in which stylistics functions as a critique of lucidity itself. Silence and darkness here are the primordial equivocation. My question is simple: how is it that we find healing in a deception?

Only (and this is what stylistics resists understanding about itself) by drugging an already poisoned subject. (This is sometimes called today, in better moods, “religion” or “psychoanalysis.”) Aristotle once called it catharsis; today its offspring have burst parasitically onto the surface of every possible expressive medium, providing the driving force behind the creation of these new fields of expression. The development of style is at once a major step towards and away from great health. Cruelty is the condition for the development of judgment, but also for its corruption. Style produces the capacity for both critical and clinical decisions — both, accordingly, a question of timing.

The faculty style develops is judgment, an agile and rigorous spirit which constitutes the integrity of both artistic work and scientific experiment. Style is the medium of power, possession, and praise: twisting language for its own ends, it transforms the world by transforming our spirits. In fact, cruelty is a positive and even “moral” force: the very force in morality itself. The event is undecidable, thought is split into pieces: the world is impossible to either “simply” unify or separate. Styles are evaluative genres. A code must be imposed, planes marked and delineated. We should not be surprised a certain degree of cruelty is critical in awakening the artist’s taste, as well as the scientist’s curiosity.

The Void and its Repetition

Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral.

Nietzsche, Daybreak 97 (“To become moral is not in itself moral”)

Horror consists in its always remaining the same — the persistence of ‘pre-history’ — but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces. The same duality defines violence as Marx demonstrated in material production: ‘There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general pre-conditions of all production are nothing more than… abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.’ In other words, to abstract out historically unchanged elements is not to observe neutral scientific objectivity, but to spread, even when correct, a smoke-screen behind which whatever is tangible and therefore assailable is lost to sight. Precisely this the apologists will not admit.

Adorno, Minima Moralia (“Don’t exaggerate”)

Horror is glimpsed in the similarity of the dissimilar: it transfigures the cosmos itself, grotesquely and constantly realizing its formlessness in innumerable new forms, and at its limit exceeding form itself. Science as extraction of universals enters a dimension of pure horror; science as placing into variation touches upon a joyous celerity whose cruelty is more terrifying than any nightmare.

Art also exposes this hard divergence: beneath the static nausea of horror, we feel the immersive atmosphere of dreams, and the deep voice of midnight: a primordial, formless, obsessional terror which is not merely a symptom of paranoia, but the profound meaning of identity. It is, to be more precise, an extraction of the essence or internal movement of production itself — what, after Marx, we should call the transhistorical abstract machine, perhaps even the amoral or non-subjective diagram of history. Cruelty, as an organizing principle, reaches a critical point of divergence precisely under the limiting conditions of style. It thus comes into its own, as courage, and invents the art of distinction.

The future is sculpted from the void which communicates the boundaries of events. Following in the wake of this untimely intervention, thought diverges from itself. This much-confused moment, which is not a moment, appears within the lifting of the prohibition which had pretended to limit — and to give form to — desire. This sudden and irreversible change is both birth and extinction, twilight and daybreak.

The creation of the law.

Not knowledge but determination, inexorable and indefatigable. Morality becomes distinct only when its foundation is cruelty.

It is easy to mistake harshness for simple bad taste. But I do not curse that which I do not love, nor rebuke for not loving sufficiently. On the contrary. I declare, loudly, how joyous the earth is, but also how joyous it could be; how light, but — but can you hear me yet? — how much lighter!

Escape

They shout at stones, as a man might argue with a doorpost. They have understood so little of the gods.

Heraclitus, Fragments

The morality which assesses itself according to degrees of sacrifice is morality at the half-savage stage. Reason here gains only a hard and bloody victory within the soul, powerful counter-drives have to be subdued; without such cruelties as the sacrifices demanded by cannibal gods this victory will not be won.

Nietzsche, Daybreak 221 (“Morality of sacrifice.”)

Why is everyone annoyed when a philosopher claims he is not a skeptic? Nietzsche suggests in Beyond Good and Evil this is because one would “like to ask, to ask so much” of them, that listeners become skeptical of their own desire for truth. According to him, this is also the reason that among “timid listeners,” such a philosopher is considered so dangerous: “It is as if at his rejection of skepticism, they heard some evil, menacing rumbling in the distance, as if a new explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline, a pessimism bonae voluntatis [of good will] that does not merely say No, want No, but — horrible thought! does No.” [Beyond Good and Evil 208, from “We Scholars”] The skeptic acts like a policeman or priest, who is terrified by the subterranean “No!” and scorns it since he finds it terrifying. So he cries at it to be silent, even though in its whisper he must also faintly discern the new dawn.

Man shouts at stones and pleads with vortexes. But that the whirlwind, and sublime cruelty of stratification, terrifies the delicate — in other words, those terrified all too easily — is not, in itself, a moral affair. “His conscience trained to quiver at every No, indeed even at a Yes that is decisive and hard, and to feel as if it had been bitten. Yes and No — that goes against his morality; conversely, he likes to treat his virtue to a feast of noble abstinence, say, by repeating Montaigne’s ‘What do I know?’ or Socrates’ ‘I know that I know nothing.’” [ibid.] Thus the hard-boiled skeptic consoles his agony: through obfuscation, denial, doubt, he avoids the truth of his own condition by what he will claim is “objectivity.” The entire question of spirituality requires clinical re-evaluation.

Nietzsche loves to remind us that skepticism is both spiritual and physiological, a dangerous hybrid, whose sickliness and nervous exhaustion reflect a deep lack of balance, the absence of a center of gravity. Skeptics are playing a role wherein they are helpless victims, innocent, ignorant — but wiser than everyone else. Their doubt, as exemplified by Descartes, is as sick and paranoid as their secret belief. “But what becomes sickest and degenerates most in such hybrids is the will: they no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing — they doubt the ‘freedom of the will’ even in their dreams.” [ibid] Skepticism cripples our ability to decide and even to desire, by paralyzing our capacity for judgment. A bad conscience, a morality sick of its own will, is especially vulnerable to this kind of sickness — especially in its more charming guises:

What I wanted to say is this: the partial loss of utility, decline, and degeneration, the loss of meaning, and purposiveness, in short, death, also belong to the conditions of a real progressus, which always appears in the form of a will and a way to a greater power and always establishes itself at the expense of a huge number of smaller powers. The size of a “step forward” can even be estimated by a measure of everything that had to be sacrificed to it. Humanity as mass sacrificed for the benefit of a single stronger species of man — that would be a step forward . .

I emphasize this major point of view about historical methodology all the more since it basically runs counter to the very instinct which presently rules and to contemporary taste, which would rather still go along with the absolute contingency, even the mechanical meaninglessness, of all events rather than with the theory of a will to power playing itself out in everything that happens. The democratic idiosyncrasy of being hostile to everything which rules and wants to rule, the modern hatred of rulers [Misarchismus] (to make up a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed itself into and dressed itself up as something spiritual, of the highest spirituality, to such an extent that nowadays step by step it is already infiltrating the strictest, apparently most objective scientific research, and is allowed to infiltrate it. Indeed, it seems to me already to have attained mastery over all of physiology and the understanding of life, to their detriment, as is obvious, because it has conjured away from them their fundamental concept, that of real activity. By contrast, under the pressure of this idiosyncrasy we push “adaptation” into the foreground, that is, a second-order activity, a mere re-activity; in fact, people have defined life itself as an always purposeful inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But that simply misjudges the essence of life, its will to power. That overlooks the first priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, over-reaching, re-interpreting, re-directing, and shaping powers, after whose effects the “adaptation” then follows. Thus, the governing role of the highest functions in an organism itself, the ones in which the will for living appear active and creative, are denied.. ..

[Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (Essay 2, Section 12)]

We have far too long glossed over the profound meaning of both parasitism and narcissism: by defining life as purposeful adaptation to the external world, what happens to power? What happens to the will? But we should have already guessed. And if it still must be said: they are both extinguished. Fear is not the origin of science, but courage. Cruelty, not paranoia, is the beginning of judgment. Daybreak is not long now — closer than ever before.

Our courage yearns for the stern joy of high places, for the hardness of solitude, distant horizons and silence — but most of all for that rosy clarity which may yet crown the day when humanity no longer needs martyrs to save it from itself.

Conclusion: The Politics of Madness

I employ the word ‘cruelty’ in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness, in the sense of that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue; good is desired, it is the consequence of an act; evil is permanent. When the hidden god creates, he obeys the cruel necessity of creation which has been imposed on himself by himself, and he cannot not create, hence not admit into the center of the self-willed whirlwind a kernel of evil ever more condensed, and ever more consumed. And theater in the sense of continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity. A play in which there would not be this will, this blind appetite for life capable of overriding everything, visible in each gesture and each act and in the transcendent aspect of the story, would be a useless and unfulfilled play.

Artaud (from the second letter of the “Letters on Cruelty”)

There stands a great artist: the pleasure he anticipated in the envy of his defeated rivals allowed his powers no rest until he had become great — how many bitter moments has his becoming great not cost the souls of others!

Nietzsche, Daybreak 31 (“Refined cruelty as virtue.”)

Science owes an unacknowledged, incomprehensible and ancient debt to poetry: mathematics, its spiritual condition and “universal language.” Rigorous and determinate expression is both the essence of stylistics and its characteristic cruelty — the evocation of a positive obscurity, a veil which elevates only by deceiving. Even though a style may indeed be judged in terms of its inherent expressivity, its characteristic mode of resisting expression can also be read, psychologically, as a symptomatic field. A determinate, fruitful ambiguity.

The experience of expressive freedom is not discovered in the declaration of equality of interest, but on the contrary, in leadership itself: the experience of decision-making — in other words, evaluating, making rules, giving orders. The law is thus the greatest of adventures, the final and thus most aesthetic of pursuits. Crime is simply not a moral matter in itself; it is law which gives crime its privilege. It is difficult to exaggerate how frequently freedom is overturned, made arbitrary, simply by a further permutation of spiritual taste. A matter of style, that is, of space.

The criminal is nothing more than out of place — a stronger type in gloomy and unfortunate conditions. A more fruitful, less ambiguous composition was possible. The gaps in our knowledge about our abilities, our talents, point towards a better and more effectively organized system — in short towards a future re-organization. Today our most urgent task is to de-stratify prejudice, and thereby correct a long miseducation. In particular, thought must disabuse itself of several dangerous notions about truth. Truth is not interpretation; it names the movement of creation, the impetus of a decision beyond thought and even beyond feeling. “Truth” expresses the lost origin of the highest law, the empty repetition at the basis of every language, the perfect gap — that characteristic symptom of our painful isolation from each other and ourselves.

In reality, then, truth is simply the source and emission of sound: a deception whereby the one whose commands’ deafen cause us to take our place. But, to say it once more, the point is not to integrate everything, to force all else to submit; rather, on the contrary, the goal is to liberate creativity through developing restraint. Do not only reconcile differences peaceably, but go further, and resist cooperating with hatred and fear. Cultivate excellence, courage and judgment. Struggle not only for the pedagogy of the “oppressed,” but also for your own.

That the stronger force has systematically driven out the weaker — or brought them to heel — gives reflection faith that a leap forward is possible. For what is a history but the sum of shifts in a differential system of power? Spreading out before our gaze, the rosy dawn of a bright future — a future, perhaps, where difference can at last be entirely and joyously affirmed — draws ever clearer and closer. Michel Serres addresses the full depth of our problematic when he writes, in his extraordinarily insightful work The Parasite:

“Knowledge is paid for. Of course, it is positive, favorable and asymmetrical; otherwise everything would be blank; there would be no science. But something must be put on another level. Tartuffe, they say, makes the error of loving Elmire — that is an error, a trap, an investment, an experimental rigor. Nothing would have happened without this love, this heat, this fire, that comes by and suddenly flares up. Without this light, we would perhaps have seen nothing.
[Michel Serres, The Parasite 210, “Midnight Suppers”]

Our question is that of refreshing desire within the over-arching framework of late capitalism. My answer, in one language: intensely reclaiming love in its positive spiritual movement. And in another: transforming hatred, resentment and fear into courage, creativity and love. The age is again ripe for an abandonment of cowardice, an emboldening.

- Joseph Weissman, April 2008

Works Cited

Antonin Artaud

• Anthology
• First and Second of the “Letters on Cruelty”

Michel Foucault

• “Preface to Transgression” from Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

Michel Serres

• “Midnight Suppers” from The Parasite

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Daybreak
• Genealogy of Morals
• The Gay Science
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Beyond Good and Evil

In the disparity between the awareness of unreason and the awareness of madness, we have, at the end of the eighteenth century, the point of departure for a decisive movement: that by which the experience of unreason will continue, with Holderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, to proceed ever deeper towards the roots of time — unreason thus becoming, par excellence, the world’s contratempo — and the knowledge of madness seeking on the contrary to situate it ever more precisely within the development of nature and history. It is after this period that the time of unreason and the time of madness receive two opposing vectors: one being unconditioned returned and absolute submersion; the other, on the contrary, developing according to the chronicle of a history.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization 212 (“The Great Fear”)

If there is something in literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice, to epos or to poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links the play of form to the substance of graphic expression.

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 59

There is no antagonism here between a true world and an apparent one: there is only one world, and that world is false, cruel, contradictory, misleading and seductive, deprived of meaning… such a world is the true world. We need deceit in order to conquer this reality or “truth,” that is, in order to live. The fact that deceit is necessary in order to live still has to with the terrible and problematic nature of existence… This faculty by which he rapes reality with deceit, this essentially artistic faculty in man, is something he has in common with everything that exists…

Nietzsche

Preface

How do we situate the metaphysics of language? The stratification and fragmentation of the signal goes so far beyond the empirical consciousness bound to its immediacy that the difficulty of the project is comparable only to its necessity. The original direction or deflection of the word, the passing-over of the word into image, and the collapse of meaning, follow a schema with which we are familiar. It is precisely here that it is most important not to interpret directly.

The point is not about suffering, but determination. Knowledge begins in delirium. The universe begins with a conjunction, an operator of connection. Everything moving is already a machine, plugged into a world of celerities, issuing regular pulses, gradually transforming itself and its surroundings. Thus the degree of transformation is also the degree of risk to the hidden operators. “ Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom — and there is no longer any land.” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science) The problem is not only that names are caught up in ascending and descending chains, an infinite series of minimal differences; the problem never was identifying the limit, and at any rate, this is precisely where our organs overtake us. Creativity is nothing more than acceleration. Have we forgotten so quickly?

Our real problem can be provisionally summarized as follows. How to situate language itself in terms of metaphysics? A phase-map is not enough. The origin of language is indiscernible from a continuous transformation, not a signal but a teaching-learning that the Greeks had innocently called mathemata. A mark and not a symbol, a map and not a trace. Saturated, simple, deep. For the unforeseen origin of the code occurs precisely on the boundary of the unacknowledgable, the imperceptible rupture at the heart of every science. The parasite thus invents learning as well: it all begins with a difference in intensity, a tiny divergence accelerating into a raging vortex. Learning is becoming imperceptible. We are therefore with Artaud, when he writes of becoming-unspecified: “The soul could be reborn; however, it is not reborn. For although eased somewhat, it feels it is still dreaming, it hasn’t yet transformed itself into that dream with which it cannot yet fully be identified.” (from “Who, in the heart…”)

Expression is not a house, but houses are a collection of languages, a tightly-coupled network of machines, a mixed and integrated dynamism. Life hides, suffused, within life. There are only clusters of folded singularities, sub- and super-organisms. We are each a field of membranes, a bewitched line of free transformation; and in the middle there are only pure intensities. “There it is, the spasm, with heaven concurring, towards which a spiritual coalition unfurls, AND IT COMES FROM ME.” (Artaud, “Transparent Abelard”) A silent explosion: we had expected there to be the erased echo of an ellipsis. We discover positivity itself. Why did we try to construct a false memory for this moment — ignoring the trauma of the other, producing only some forgotten miracle or some terrifying mystery — some razor-sharp coast-line protecting us, penetrating us from every orifice?

But in the middle, in the warmth of hospitality, there are no judgments. The heater is buzzing — and every machine will already have been a machine of machines — and heat is another operator, the organizer of organisms, it does not matter and we cannot tell anyway whether it is a series of deliberate judgments or a whim. Expression is not exhausted in counting, but only in becoming non-expression. An augmented fifth The first, the very first distinction is metaphysical: intuition from instinct. This is why language is like justice, because it overflows itself, opening onto a formless and pure infinity. We attend to the future only by placing ourselves into variation, by following flows of forces, by playing the variant. The third inversion. An imperceptible shift. Allegro. The improvisation is not an echo chamber, but a tiny parasite, itself well protected from the spasmodic reverberations — the operator of transformation itself. Lento. The parasite risks itself in proportion to the intensity of the transformation. Another dimension intrudes, as though from everywhere, a new parasite chases out the old, and upon this unholy procession itself, a metrical rhythm is imposed. A holy covenant: what happened?

Is it a pure differential, an eloquent divergence, or a line of abolition issuing from deep affirmation? Or something else entirely — a new kind of discourse bursting free, turning escape routes into lines of flight? Expression is the unfolding of this mystery. A machine which produces breaks in other machines, a parasite infesting every open hold. The light is, perhaps, too bright — but at least there are no longer any shadows.

No harsh outlines, only glare.

A pummeled landscape. Pulsations, ruptures, a whole series of war machines erupt along lines of free potential. The question is about refreshing desire in the midst of the formal structure of general parasitism. Healthy organs are silent, docile. Behind an old metaphysic, we rediscover an even older politics. “Who has the most convincing eloquence so far? The drum roll; and as long as the kings command that, they remain the best orators and rabble rousers.” (The Gay Science 175) Codes are hymns, the original tool of power, and they work, there is no question about that. Their value is repaid many times over, even if an infinite debt thereby incurred. But it would be naive to praise or blame the coding processes as such, to attach a moral value to this debt or this surplus value as such. We do not blame a whirlwind for twirling, or a computer for following its program, or a predator for eating its prey. A scientific study of language must begin by mapping the real economic and political units generating the plane of consistency upon which language is itself but a single dimension. Our criteria must be immanent to the scale, to the phase, to the transition.

At first, we think we must learn compassion for our parasites; but then we realize that the parasite has discovered peace, he has already invented the word of reason, the dialogue which transforms the enemy into an ally. Or, as Serres writes in The Parasite: “There is no war.”

Arguing that “the masses are not yet ready” reminds us not of the RAF and captured revolutionaries in isolation, in special prison sections, in artificial brainwash collectives, and in prison, only of the arguments of the colonial pigs in Africa and Asia for over 70 years. Black people, illiterates, slaves, the colonized, tortured, suppressed, starving, the peoples suffering under colonialism, were not yet ready to take their bureaucracy, their school system, their future as human beings into their own hands. This is the argument of folks who are worried about their own positions of power, aiming at ruling a people, not at emancipation and liberation struggle.

Ulrike Meinhof

The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-words.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 101

Deleuze and Guattari admit that the notion of “minority” is very complex, with references and correlations in all dimensions of human and non-human existence. The opposition is not simply quantitative: “Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate [it].” (ATP 105) Thus the majority need not be in numerical majority; for majority supposes only the assumption of a “state of power and domination, not the other way around” — the standard measure, when it is assumed to be the standard, thereby becomes major. Minorities, on the other hand, are not determined by constants — they are not systems but subsystems, outsystems — seeds of potential, creative and created, crystals of becoming.

These considerations are deployed together in one of the most significant points in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of linguistics, which is this: that grammar is a system of power primarily, not a prototype but a protocol, directly connected to an economy and a politics more primarily than to a network of syntagms and semantemes. Thus even though grammar cannot be presented as an invariant linguistic substructure, it nevertheless possesses singular structural features — political ones — namely, functioning as the medium of transmitting commands, “order-words.” Thus language is shaped directly by political and economic forces; it is a prerequisite for the individuals’ submission to social laws. “No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions.” (101)

A language is a war machine bursting with positive lines of flight, inherent lines of free variation. Grammar’s unifying and homogenizing function, far from being the result of purely philosophical or structural considerations, is rather an immediately political phenomena. We are never going to find — and ought to stop looking for — a homogeneous system still unaffected by regulated, immanent, continuous processes of variation: “The unity of language is fundamentally political.” (101) Deleuze and Guattari outline two general treatments of language corresponding to the major/minor distinction. We can (1) attempt to extract constant relations from variables, or we can (2) place the relationships themselves in constant variation. The point here is that certain linguistic categories only make sense when we are doing the first (extracting constants) — for example: speech/language, synchrony/diachrony, distinctive/non-distinctive. Only the second treatment offers a contrast to linearized segmentation and the presence of “constants” — style, prose, the pragmatic function of language — for “their very characteristics give them the power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous variation…” (103-104). Minor languages “proliferate shifting effects,” possess a taste for “overload” — they restrict constants, extend variations, deploy continua which sweep away every component. This so-called “poverty” of minor languages, Deleuze and Guatarri write, “is not a lack but a void or ellipsis allowing one to sidestep a constant instead of tackling it head on, or to approach it from above or below instead of positioning oneself within it.” (104)

They emphasize several times that “major” and “minor” do not indicate two languages but rather two usages or functions of language. Language itself is a battleground without clear boundaries, but rather lines of variation, transitional zones, limitrophes. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that the notion of a dialect itself is entirely relative, since we would need to know with what major language it relates and exercises its function. Minor languages themselves define dialects, precisely through their own possibility for variation. “Should we identify major and minor languages on the basis of regional situations and bilingualism or multilingualism including at least one dominant language and one dominated language, or a world situation giving certain languages an imperial power over others (for example, the role of American English today)?” Let us consider several clear reasons it would be unthinking to do so. A minor language is not immune to the treatment of language which draws homogeneous systems. Furthermore, it is difficult — especially politically — to see how users of minor language can operate without giving it a constancy and homogeneity making it at least locally major. Yet Deleuze and Guattari remind us of the opposite, and perhaps much more compelling argument: that the more a language acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by the continuous variations which transpose it into a minor language. If American English is dominant, a major language on the global scale, it is also by necessity worked over, intensified, amplified, and transmuted by every minority in the world. Again, the distinction between major and minor is not really between two kinds of language, but two kinds of use of language.

Capital is nothing without energy, without a working which it desires to measure in terms of itself — and often wishes to imagine itself coincident with (and even more original than) this working — so much so that capital is often said to “represent” the flow of energy into the machine. On this reading, the economy is a largely imperceptible field of forces which, like a magnetic field, disappears instantaneously when the flow of energy stops. But capital is not quite this virtual flow (e.g., of electricity,) nor its abstract numerical representation — and furthermore, capital is not even the surplus energy guaranteed by distribution, or “real” profits (the actual satisfaction of desire.) Rather, capital appears in the spontaneous transfer of segments between flows of energy.

To be sure, desire makes an appearance here, too. When aspects or “internal relations” of capital grow rigid or supple, forming fields and blocks, they begin to produce breaks in the flow; this process is like an infinite division, a decoding without boundaries. Divide by zero. At some moment within history, the virtual body of capital produces an indirect appearance in the form of money, but its true appearing occurs in the gesture of acquisition, only coinciding with itself as a kind of indigestion which takes hold of the body from without.

What remains is perhaps the husk; capital “realized” is nothing but an englobing retention of matter. “Things” multiply ceaselessly: an obsessional matrix of part-objects, a machine built around “breaks” or “fissures,” places where a flow of energy breaks apart, explodes, ruptures, starts leaking from the seams. When do we discover that these apparent blockages are “really” just a species of more slowly-moving flows of energy? How does this imperceptible differential shift occur, this minimal break between the part and the flow? Is it finally “all” a question of spacings, different speeds, elliptical cycles? If indeed, we walk the thin line of supposing that neither can we presume absolute chaos, nor a fundamental harmony.

These abstract simple oppositions will only land us into trouble. For it all begins with minimal or imperceptible differences, a declination which becomes a revolution. The political-economic must not simply remain an “inconclusive” paradox, a broken whirlwind at whose core the face of god shines, his invisible hands’ spinning the market’s glittering wheel (upon which we, playthings of chaotic fortune, are endlessly crucified.) These kinds of morality plays amounts only to a transcendental illusion of “metaphysical” capitalists (a particularly virulent species of market fundamentalists) of whom Boethius would perhaps have been proud.

For capital indeed represents a kind of pure war machine, in its own way not unlike passional or prophetic discourse — a regime of total deterritorialization bent on a lethal line of flight. This line of escape from capital — from the “daily market junk” — this potential or actual subjectivity, is calculatedly negated, and we too take our part in the choir condemning it, this strange line guaranteed and yet “barred” by the system itself. Yet what is this “differential” system of capitalistic relationship but the constant movement of a line of transformation — far from barring subjective development — functioning as a radical dissolution of all barriers, a pure undecoded flow, the very en-structuration of the appearing of “real” war machines: an absolute regime of unadulterated de-subjectification, pure depersonalization?

To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life.

That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.

Gandhi

To Gandhi’s way of thinking, self-purification is the straight and narrow path towards realizing God, the only possible means human beings have to allow them become truly and actively non-violent. Purification is not constrained to one or two kinds of activities; religion is inseparable from all human activities, as their essence or content. In order to approach truth, human beings must becomes purified; if they purify themselves, the world around them will become purified as well.

The pathway of purification therefore also leads to non-violence in all ways of life: only once we become pure of heart can we identify ourselves with any living being — even those who hate us. We can love the lowest; we can even find the strength to love our enemies:

Not until we have reduced ourselves to nothingness can we conquer the evil in us. God demands nothing less than complete self-surrender as the price for the only real freedom that is worth having. And when a man thus loses himself he immediately finds himself in the service of all that lives. It becomes his delight and his recreation. He is a new man, never’ weary of spending himself in the service of God’s creation. (MM, 30)

We may begin to grow curious at the absolute positivity Gandhi deduces from self-negation. How can surrender produce freedom? Yet Gandhi claims surrender is the price for the only freedom which is worth having. We must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves (transposed, does this imply God must be infinitely distant from us in order to discover him as truth itself? That in a way, God must die in order to be revived within us, through our spiritual self-purification?)

A little light may be shed on this mystery if we consider how Gandhi himself conceives of the relation between his own writing and truth:

There can be no room for untruth in my writings, because it is my unshakable belief that there is no religion other than truth and because I am capable of rejecting aught obtained at the cost of truth. My writings cannot but be free from hatred towards any individual because it is my firm belief that it is love that sustains the earth. There only is life where there is love. Life without love is death. Love is the reverse of the coin of which the obverse is truth. It is my firm faith.., that we can conquer the whole world by truth and love. (MM, 21)

Indeed, it seems the ascetic ideal remains an intractable paradox even for its most devoted followers. How is it that we loosen the grip of our bestial desires? Only by coming under the influence of an even more gripping asceticism… This is why purification is only acquired through the loosening of external shackles. We should ask: is this purity an illusion, the trace of the Other accidentally “discovered” in society still merely — symbolic? Even imaginary?

Where is that other spiritual development — the purity which is acquired through the loosening of internal shackles? But perhaps this is that most difficult dictum of all, the true ascetic triumph over monstrosity — love for the one who hates, love for the enemy… Forgiveness over punishment, non-violence over retaliation. To claim that this, however, is a route to God himself? Only if God himself is conceived of as completely purified, the purest of all beings — and so hence beyond being, infinitely separated from us — the same (absolute) distance between life and death.

If we listen closely to the breath of the spirit as well as to the word of being, an entirely new kind of history may become possible.

Disclosing a lethal truth (into) power, organization trembles before the disorganized generativity of decentralized multiplicity.

Are we transmitting history backwards through time? Are languages transforming themselves through us?

Is it by nature that we are socially-oriented creatures? Or does “humanity” on the contrary mark with precision a moment of originary disarticulation of (biological) organization — is a “human” a swarm?

The machine precedes the apparatus and the model just as noise precedes the relation, swarms precede the face, and an absolute nothingness precedes the other. The grinding of war machines, the art and engineering of multiplicity, networked disciplinary techniques — all these emerge long before the complex “legal” apparatus like tribes, states and religions.

How do we become world-oriented? How do we open onto manifold processes of becoming?

Segmented procedures carefully separate of bodies from capabilities — the social articulation of the “human,” the technologization of the body. Segment-rules inscribe society upon itself, through the operation of collective assemblages of enunciation.

Mass confinement of bodies and minds within the illusory ‘certainty’ of a segmented social process. A false naturalization of the organism upon which follows the miraculation of pure operativity — war, religion, capital, psychoanalysis, cybernetics. A natural history of celerity.

Multiplicity does not exist in a substantive but an operative sense. The “being” of a network (an ensemble of interdependent elements including their relationships) is a very nearly nonsensical question, for it unites the fertile middle ground between universals and particulars — intensity.

Does spirit, force, intensity, or “breath” in fact name a machinic phylum underlying reason, nature, even life itself — as the very process of production?

We must catch multiplicity operating in a field of intensities.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

Aristotle

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.

A true friend is one soul in two bodies…

ibid

There is an important sense in which Aristotle’s political and ethical project is well-studied in the Platonic method of questioning and re-evaluating conventional priorities and relationships between spiritual elements. Both projects re-discover in traditional virtues a philosophical power which they express in dialogues, encapsulating critical or diagnostic re-evaluations of specific mental and social priorities. The unspoken consonance (implication) here is interesting, and merits reflection: that the old social values and relations are themselves capable of producing new procedures, contain within themselves the power or potential to radically reformulate the ‘axiomatic’ rules and relations between material and psychic agencies.

Now, Aristotle can be seen as drawing a utilitarian or conservative ethics of happiness out of this non-identity of the form of the Good-in-itself (i.e., we need to find the optimal balance between the various aspects or agencies,) but there is another sense in which he can be seen as producing a radical empirical science of the ethical which seeks to expose within real human relations an already-potentially-existing optimal arrangement which, although it can be achieved by reconfiguring elements of the existing system, has the consequence of producing real, qualitative and revolutionary changes in terms of the particular embedded relations as well as the entire assemblage of social relationships.

Hence the science of ethics already is at the same time as it produces a procedural mechanics of happiness, a harmonics or dynamics of the social relation itself in actio — an unfolding partnership between friendship and justice which can and ought to be actively sought empirically, as well as (re)produced within the text itself, another kind of partnership. A double-unfolding of the movement of the ethical: while already divine love, the movement of interbeing itself, it is also a human partnership, solidarity and alliance, as well as an exclusive relation of responsibility which individuates us as interdependent ethical agents. Each aspect of the triple individuation of the ethical (friendship, justice, happiness) relates inextricably to the indeterminacy of the ethical. That is, for Aristotle, no action in isolation can be judged (that is, we can only judge assemblages, interdependent networks of forces, social machines.) This ‘quantum’ indeterminacy of the ethical speaks to the molecularity of human social relations, again underscoring the need for empirical study of the actual patterns of human relationships as they are lived and produced in a wide variety of social fields and under a diverse selection of structures.

This field work cannot be purely abstract or dialectical, nor can it remain purely substantive: it must be procedural, it must expose the movement from the actual — pure events, unspecified substances, chance encounters, fragmentary series — to the “full” virtual field of social relationships. Thus a given ethical logic founds the generic gestures of politics, the ‘prototypical’ science itself, the primary relation to that which prioritizes the social relation above “material” relations (justice.) An idea of ethics lays the first tentative steps towards a full science of the political, a real sensory anthropology of power and conscience (external/internal agency comparing and aligning function to behavior.) The experience of the ethical is an ungrounding, an un-”world”-ing, a depersonalization which places us beyond sovereignty, a descent into the noise beyond the law (which founds the law.)

Paradoxically, while the ethical is exceptional, learned, distilled, and must be actively “cultivated,” it also has an innate and universal aspect which reveals itself instantaneously and sublimely on an individual basis — and thus really only operates in terrifying moments of absolute despair. The self-different experience of the ethical — for example, in the simultaneous reality and impossibility of murder — discloses a horrifyingly personal kind of infinite or ultimate responsibility, revealed in the social relation (justice) itself. In other words, in society, there is always already an alliance with the other preceding violence. Ethics is two-fold: both the social relation itself as prototype (the Other, society, history, “God”) and an empirical study of social micro-politics (critique, “revolution.”)

At the heart of ethics there is a difference, a mark or brilliant trace of light, which is capable of untying the tightest bonds, but which is also already an absolute descent in pure horror, into the chaotic nothingness of impersonal being. This dark night of radical separation is in turn the impossible site of the dawn of humanity as society, the prioritization of the others and the social relation above and beyond the abysses of civic savagery…

Ethics is a cautious science of intermediation, always attempting to perform the impossible — an eth(n)ology of and within the text itself. Ethics in its full sense always produces an empirical science investigating wide varieties of functions and practices, a kind of non-ontological dialectical materialism, which knows well the price of dispensing with empirical investigations. Ethics is conscientious empiricism, a virtuous friendship between justice and happiness. The structure of ethics is recursive, but this is unavoidable — the writing of ethics always already produces an ethics of ethics. The non-linearity, alterity or divergence within ethics itself is a radical break with tradition on the basis of tradition. It is in this sense that ethics is the friendship (partnership) between the various ethical virtues or agencies themselves.

How do we recognize when a partnership is functioning well? If it is functioning well, how do we know if it is a better or worse kind of relationship? Can friendship be meaningfully analyzed in these terms? Perhaps a first clue in this direction is the partnership between the ethical life and friendship. The sense of ethical friendship is embodied in the concept philia, a wider idea than the English word “friend,” indicating the full transformation of heart through which a mutual attraction between two human beings is produced. For Aristotle, there are three kinds of partnerships:

(1) Partnerships between good people
(2) Partnerships based on utility
(3) Partnerships based on pleasure

Aristotle suggests that only in friendships based on character are we going to find a desire to benefit the other person (“simply”) for the sake of the other. It’s not really friendship, in an important sense, if there is an inequality of moral investment — if one party is engaged only because of an advantage to him or herself — or if there is an inequality of moral development. We find in friendship the same recursive paradox we did with ethics itself. Friendship is an immanent exposure of a hidden symmetrical fold or break in Being itself, encoded within the very relationships between human beings. Thus there are two potential routes for the diagnosis and restoration of true friendship.

In the first, we critique social relations based primarily on utility. In the second, we critique social relations based on pleasure. Both of these are ethical-critical procedures — which we recognize as an expression of the constitutive duality or recursivity within ethics, corresponding roughly to the methodology and structure of the ethical (i.e.: on the one hand, ethics as analysis of the good, and on the other, ethics as the general theory of virtue.)

But the method employed in an analysis of the ethics of friendship is itself an empirical study into the various species of friendships, as well as a general investigation into the proper essence of friendship. Only by putting into play both ethical moments — by uniting both virtue and the good into an equitable and just partnership — is the thought of ethics complete as a theory of right social action.

The ethical life is co-extensive with a proper mode of interdependence, of alliance with the other, which is justice; but pure friendships are always subject to degradation, owing to the twin temptations of utility and pleasure. Justice must be chosen for its own sake, not for its use or its pleasure (i.e., a law which we enjoy following would seem to be unnecessary.)

“We make war that we may live in peace.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics — 1177b (Book X, Chapter 7)

Let’s try to understand this work first through the method by which its project is assembled, the way the text functions.

In general Ta Ethika has three phases or stages of development: (a) a general, in-depth study of the “good” and the “good life”; (b) an analysis of moral virtue or excellence; and (c) an investigation into social ethics, or ethics within society.

These three moments are simultaneous — it is a deeply recursive text. Each ethical “moment” or “insight” relates inextricably to the other two. The third (justice) is, in an important sense, a medium (or “average”) between the other two (the study of the good and happiness; the analysis of virtue and excellence), which in a sense represent aspects or species of ethics. The themes of virtue, the good, and justice, are completely interwoven into one another, but also occur sequentially over the development of the work. Naturally, we find in the first book of the ethics an outline of the study of the good:

(1, 2) Goal-based ethics contrasted and complemented with character-centered ethics — presages discussion of the form of the good life, and virtue as a mean between two excessive or deficient goals or characters

(3) The essence and function of being human — a sort of “human-functional” argument for ethics (this is actually the most interesting one, and we will come back to it)

(4) Eudaimonia — “happiness” does not express the force Aristotle intends, it is both living and faring well — “bliss” may be closer, but it is also a lifestyle, the “best” kind of life there is, the “form” of the good life

(5) Critique of Plato’s theory of Forms: while the critique of the theory of the Forms seems to be presented last, it is in fact present from the very beginning of the discussion, even in the very logic Aristotle uses to introduce his analysis of morality along the two axes (goals — which move from potential to the real; character or virtue — whose structure is different — moves from the virtual to the actual.)

In other words, the two ‘species’ of ethics (the study of the good, the analysis of excellence) result from a primordial break with and within the idea of a universal good — whose force becomes transposed into the guiding concept of eudamonia, or “good life,” a negation of the universal good and the rediscovery of the good in life itself, in living well, in life “being good” to you.

The “good life” is all Aristotle thinks can be just — not a life of pleasure but not exactly the opposite either — a life of virtue, which only means: doing just and virtuous things, being a just and virtuous person. A single virtuous action in isolation can hardly be examined — this is declared very early on — so there is necessarily a certain degree of uncertainty, of imprecision, inherent in ethical analysis — the more you investigate particularities, the more difficult, even impossible it becomes to state generalities.

We now see why the third phase is necessary to resolve the divergence within ethics (as A understands it, between “character” and “goal.”) Only a science of justice or social virtue can repair the break or ‘first misunderstanding’ in ethics — the controversy over the abstract Form of the good — hence moral philosophy is a study which is already contained within an all-encompassing political science. Acts must be judged simultaneously from three perspectives: from the perspective of virtue or the mean (the “middle” position of the mind which can ethically determine the choice of actions and emotions,) but also from the perspective of the state (whose questions are different, and are questions of justice,) and finally also from the perspective of the individual (or life itself, the function of being-human.)

For Aristotle, reason humanizes us; in some sense, thought is our “function.” If we can conceive of a primary category of human function, it must be an activity of the soul which expresses reason. On this last point, Aristotle writes that if man is alive, and if the form of life which he is exercises the faculty and activity of a soul in association with a rational principle; and furthermore, if the function of a good man is to perform these activities well and rightly (i.e., in accordance with its own proper excellence) — from these points, he argues that it follows that the Good for man is exercising the faculties of his soul in conformity with excellence (or virtue.) Aristotle adds that we must act in conformity with the best and most perfect among these virtues, if there may be several.

This, then, is the path to achieving eudamonia — not merely living according to virtue, but being actively driven by them, and if there are many, only the best. The process is a mean or equilibrium between a condition of lack and of surplus. Ethics exists in a smooth space, on a continuum between blank nothingness and a black hole. Between a defective or ‘lacking’ quality and an excessive or ‘overflowing’ quality, there is a golden medium, a zone of equilibrium, not the center but the ‘in-between’ where the ‘just right’ quality glimmers. Not only do nothing to excess, but go further: find the mean. When Aristotle considers traditional Greek virtues, he finds them all to contain one sort of mean or another: courage (between cowardice and foolhardiness,) temperance (the virtue that controls emotion,) magnamity (which is an ‘in between’ of virtue itself, and places the virtues into their proper place.)

We come finally to the idea which would seem to complete and crown the work — the only virtue to have its own book — but which can be considered in some sense to be the primary virtue, without which all others are worthless. In this sense the notion of justice must also be present from the very beginning of ethics, as a “first” politics. This is because justice is absolute virtue, the comprehension of all the others. Particular justice cannot be rigorously distinguished from justice as a whole, but neither is it simply part of it; it is the same as justice (law) but has a different center or focus (fairness.) Aristotle offers a summary and clarification of this somewhat complex relationship: an unfair situation is always lawless; but not everything lawless is unfair.

Politics is large-scale ethics: a philosophy of human life will be incomplete without considering in its entirety the whole question of the management of a state. Ethics is, in a broad sense, an introduction to politics. Happiness is worthless without justice.

In the relation of the human being to language, a process is reflected that extends to the relation of the human being to beings in general: The scientific knowledge has become the standard knowledge! The other: thinking, spirit of language, history, culture is still there, yet dragged along into a certain indeterminateness.

It is decisive that the consciousness was lost as to where this other belongs and of what kind must the reflection be in order to still experience it essentially.

Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Language

One is substituted for another. The Other is already a replacement: stood in front of, signified for, stereotyped, “represented.” Always already excluded. Alterity is secrecy, criminal, “terrorist.” The other is an unsurface, continuously fragmenting, always already a mute revelation of presence-within-absence, an irruption of pure expressivity conveying without mediation the disunity constitutive of production. A signal which effaces itself, fracturing identity and imploding the non-position at the heart or essence of expression.

The degradation of the other in (through) writing, even through speaking itself and in what is before speaking, in the materiality of the saying and in the voice, already in the other’s cry of pain or even the internal distance wherein I myself become alien, become other before my own suffering and “involuntary” reactions — all these complicate an analysis into alterity, into the other nature of space. The politics of alterity, of absence, the comprehension of the place of the other, takes place outside of our dialogical place-together, outside the infinity of our interconnection. Politics operates not in but as a finite emptiness, a literal or material void which is applied to society like the one-sided edge of a surgical knife.

Like a whirlwind, the power of absence (the politicization of place) tends to decode expressive machines and dissolve solid relations of production. This is both a metaphysical and historical process of dissolution; “conditions” are never what they seem to be, there is always already political economy, conditions are always themselves conditioned by a constituent division from the outside, that is to say, by a political encounter which ontologically precedes their essence, and which therefore obviates the practice (if not the theory) of political ontology proper.

Because politics relates to that which is non-ontological as such. It can perhaps even be defined in this way. Hence a science of politics would relate in an essential — but uncanny and inexact — way to the practice of moral philosophy. Aristotle has of course already claimed as much as this in the “preface” of the Nicomachean Ethics; he identifies politics itself as the highest art, because it knows how to make decisions regarding what social practices and sciences, poetry, etc., ought to be taught, and specify how much should be learned by which classes in society. Thus for Aristotle the problem is metaphysical; our relation to science and art and philosophy and even politics itself are all politically conditioned. It is in this sense that we can say our orientation towards the other is the essential decision of politics and ethics in common, their radical inter-continuity.

Manipulating this relationship to nature, to alterity itself, transforming the relation to “place” and the social comprehension of the ethical space of human decision, is the characteristic or essence of the highest and most authoritative art: the science of politics.

Yet, the question remains whether we are being fooled by morality. In at least one important senses ethics operates on a completely different basis than politics; alterity is apprehended as infinity, overflowing itself, properly transcendental, the source of knowledge (if not already light itself) — a relation wholly without totality, a connection which can never be circumscribed.

Ethics and politics quarrel as the essential movement of philosophy itself, open to multiplicity and difference by virtue of its “halfway” position, a space of non-identity or absence operating between poetry and science.

The logic of absence and presence is no longer adequate for the analysis of space; this is only to remark that we stand in need of supplementary concepts, novel modes of conceptual production — not at all to “ground” presence and absence in some transcendental matrix, but precisely to unground this conservative logic, to disturb generality from its slumber, in order to produce new maps of political and ethical space of decision, new conceptual and pragmatic models — to ground the ungrounding of being.

Theory is actual, already a counter-representation or subversion — extrusion of secret tragedies, hidden comedies — . Critique is a brush with death, the imposition of unspace into space, the wreck of formlessness at the heart of form, the gathering of non-existence which precedes expression and produces society, even as the substrate of substance itself…

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

Karl Marx

Marx consciously stood Hegel on his head: the absolute Idea now becomes an ideological superstructure above economic relations. The spiritual is no longer the moving power, but only the function of given social conditions.

This process…characterizes the whole 19th century and determines the structure of the entire historical being [Dasein] in which we still stand today.

Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Language (172-3)

It is clear why Marx must and does question the concept of an “epoch,” even as he must already (but in another sense) take the being of ages for granted. The facticity or materiality of history is necessarily affirmed in advance, but so too is the immediate and ethically compelling interconnection between various struggles in the present. Nor is this convergence in and through social struggle as the two-sided question of the nature of the “age” merely incidental, perhaps arising because Marx recognizes so clearly the “archaeological” causes of social strife (normally so difficult to elucidate because they are so intimately related to division and dissolution at the heart of civil society itself.) The cause for struggle dissolves into substance and property, then the substances evaporate into air: the embodiment of energy-relations as human relations, in other words the effacement and enslavement of the human to ideas, technologies, practices — this “negative condition” is for Marx a springboard, an evident inequality and barbarism, which invites and indeed makes inevitable a revolutionary transformation of social practice; furthermore, in a wider historical sense, all this is an unwinding of tensions that continue to drive us as though hidden deep within the chaotic memories of human societies.

The confluence of these difficulties as the question of the nature of an “age” is important not only because of Marx’s epistemological or scientific revolution — which is critical in another sense — in other words, his recognition of the radical contingency pervading the history of human ideas and decisions. Rather, we will find Marx’s critical incision into metaphysics to be embodied in his refusal to accept the naturality of any age, in other words, to accept the absolute determination of the social by ideas, to deny “ideology”; on the contrary, we understand Marx to be positively and triumphantly asserting the urgent necessity for radical transformations in both theory and practice, and indeed for a critical movement beyond this provisional and artificial division between thought and the world.

Here is the beginning of the real “deconstruction.” This is a movement far beyond the heavy philosophical reflection that being has a history. Marx intuitively understood that religion (or classical metaphysics) will not dislocate itself from its (illusionary) past without a past, its radical decision on the absolute, on the truth of the truth. This illusion destroys any real conception of time. After all, how can one introduce any new concepts into the truth, how can a timeless truth in any way transform practice, how does this veil yield any insight into our age? “History” has a history, and the very concept of an “epoch” must be questioned as such, as a historically determined concept; however, we cannot and should not abandon the being or notion of an age, but rather explore the ways we can transform both. For Marx, neither matter nor ideas are absolutely determined, but fragmentary expressions, relative productions. Thus we find in Marx not only a political but even a properly metaphysical inversion of Hegel: the recognition that time itself is a chaos and not a unity. The languages of memory (histories, philosophies) in human society are self-composing, auto-divisional. (Again, the difference between history or genealogy and (classical) philosophy, i.e., ontology, is exactly a substantial science — yet, somewhere these alternating “essences” of the age (human and natural) are ’synthesized’ by historical-material thought into a ‘whole’ vision of time without lines or abstractions, a purely substantial immanence. After Marx, action and idea, being and historical revolution, can no longer be clearly distinguished: philosophy seeks in a purely immanent way to critique and diagnose, to introduce important changes in thinking, to promote radical transformations in social practice — these effects, which are also necessarily affective, are in other words indistinguishable from “thinking,” from having ideas.

In the classical sense, an “age” distills, in a succinct and all-encompassing way, a specific historical essence: not merely of a site or duration but a network of events and processes: people, materials, practices, technologies. The laboring of men and the grinding of machines, the chatter of senators and the whispers of revolutionaries. The silent but widely-dispersed “writing” of computer networks. The formation of these networks of production and communication, far from being taken for granted, are explicitly traced by Marx through a close historical analysis of social struggle, a history with which these productive and communicative networks are intimately intertwined.

The history of the conditioning of conditions: in each of the various revolutions which conditioned a given assemblage of political and economic problems, Marx never finds “the” key, never discovers pure continuity beneath the surface of events, or discerns a smooth movement of history as though it were engendered from the outside. It is precisely the case for Marx that History writes itself, it comprehends itself. The world is a heterogeneous expressivity, through which societies struggle against themselves in a manner both gradual and disruptive. Marx highlights always the discontinuity of the social relation to time: evolution is chronically fractured, a punctuated equilibrium, a shifting turbulence moving beyond and between ages. Instead of spirit, there is darkness (exploitation, slavery, despotism) and light (revolution, practice, critique.)

The movement of history is the movement of breath, the production of production, the expression in expression. The heterogeneous field of all the thoughts, gestures and labors of human beings collectively engenders society as such, as languages, or complex assemblages of absolute and relative struggles. The social is produced collectively as expressivity, a relation without relation, liberated from universality, grounding the essence of the human in the struggle for self-transformation, the modulation and revolution of individual-collective forms of expressive-production. Our being itself is a one-way circuit, fragmentary as such, expressed by social expression, animated through a repetition which is not a determination but a difference. For if we affirm determination, for example of history, we standardize the being of history as a certain image of events, thereby limiting the production of language to universal relationships, that is, to an essentially false principle of resemblance. Analogously, if we affirm determination, social production is restricted, it becomes machinic, anarchic, non-democratic; thus determination allows the enslavement of the metaphysical field of human existence to the shackles of similarity, to the principle of identity, to a philosophy of presence and Common Sense, in short, to the horizons of a false image of reality.

To treat a man in this way, to “determine” him, is cruelty itself, the operation of history, man fully transformed into apparatus. Our slavery is the first machine; Marx teaches us to practice its deconstruction — and not only to perform analyses and critiques. The being of history appears like a comet between historical epochs. Hence: time itself is only a symptom of self-transformation. The essence of history is not theories or stories, it is the revival of practice. A fundamental and generative turbulence underlies the essence of humanity, indeed of being as such. It is the case that our historical being as such is revealed through the revolutionary transformation of social practice.

Joe and I arrived in California on Wednesday for the conference on Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead concerning ontology and politics. On Thursday, Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham (both translators of Badiou) gave a wonderful paper on a rapprochement between Deleuze and Badiou (focusing on the Logic of Sense and Being and Event–seemingly a strange synthesis at first). One of the juicier comparisons was made when Justin reminded us that Deleuze’s nonsense–that which says its own sense–is isomorphic to Badiou’s understanding of the event, which is a set that belongs to itself, thus violating (or acceding to) Russel’s paradox. You can check out the site for more details here.

In any case, Joe will be presenting his paper entitled “Ontology beyond Politics” tomorrow morning. An older draft of the paper has been filed in the archives in pdf and can also be viewed in its original post on the site. Just to make it immediately available, I will include it in this post as well. Here’s the link to a pdf version:
Politics Beyond Ontology.

I am only here to support Joe: so let’s hope that he kicks some ass tomorrow morning, takes name, and of course, never forgets to simultaneously chew bubble gum (unless he’s all out of it).

Part One: Criticism and Untruth-Machines

A. Neurosis and Transcendence: the Algebra of Bad Conscience

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.  Marcel Proust

For Nietzsche, uncovering the peculiar logic of the unconscious, revealing the function of this or that unobserved striving, would only form part of the analysts’ role. A rich, analytic transformation of the real space of mental (political) activity is the full meaning of diagnostic criticism. Any real diagnosis contains a hard criticism of declining mental (social) habits. Criticism moves towards a healthier biopolitics. Diagnosis isolates cycles, reaction-patterns, irresponsible and neurotic aspects of mental and social processes.

This selective isolation, the method of genealogical deconstruction may seem purely negative and critical; and indeed, it amounts to a profound negation of conventional modes of thinking and feeling. But there is also always a powerfully positive sense of diagnosis: to indicate and affirm the pathways which return us to health, which unhinge our bodies from habit, which bring us to a new earth.

Diagnosis is a particular intervention in an unconscious or bio-social becoming. It aims to turn the tide of decay, of decline. For the unconscious is ruled by forces beyond the macro-social, forces which mediate and decompose the social. In short, we need to examine the integrated sociopolitical structure of even the tiniest movements of decay and growth. In order for this diagnostic-creative mode of discourse to exist we need a ‘higher’ politics capable of conceiving of this integrated social-psychic field of libidinally-knotted intensities.

The mathemes of Jacques Lacan might be raised in connection to this as raising some particularly interesting questions about the deep structure of the “unconscious” (as I understand it, the “unobserved” part of mental space, or aspect of cognitive processes.) To put it interrogatively: is the unconscious structured like a mathematical language? Are its rules of transforming space apprehensible by a kind of algebraic analysis? What is the point of calling this unconscious aspect of mental life “ethical” — what does psychoanalysis gain by this? (What else but a sanctification of their profession?) It has not really been so many years since voices like Foucault’s, and Felix Guattari’s, were raised against a whole new clergy of psychoanalyst-priests, against Oedipus and the IPA, against the stratifying Oedipal pseudo-diagnoses of pop sociology and psychoanalysis.

But they discovered that the problem goes deeper than psychology, it goes to the heart of philosophy itself. The sociodynamics of cultural and mental decline is a highly abstract problem, of the highest degree of complexity, calling in all our resources and insights, whether these resources are classified in the human or natural sciences. Indeed, the nature of this problem requires none other than a grand unification, a higher synthesis of physics and psychoanalysis, of literature and science.

As a small example of this complexity, consider how the question of mental illness and shizophrenia complicates the way Nietzsche is read and explained. That it does not compromise his literary and theoretical contributions should not have to be spelled out, but the question of the ‘integrity’ of his text is raised suspiciously often. It is as though we can safely ignore an insane man’s discourse, regardless of its truth value, its peculiar and personal meaning to us, just because he is insane. The question, then, is political, for insanity is not about obsession or grand theatrical gesture, it is about the falling away of gestural complicity, a breaking apart of the sociopolitical spectacle, a dissolving and revaluation of mental prejudices — which we tend to see mostly as a breaking down (the clinical ‘model.’) We are, in general, unaware that the process of breaking apart also bears the possibility of breaking through, of wholesale psychic and social transformation. But in fact, I believe we can explain scientific innovation in no other way.

B. Theory and the (Un-)Truth Machines

A theory is pseudo-machinic: it algebraically resolves a series of cognitive relations, that is, by applying analytic transformations. Where does it touch upon a true, originary source of change? Information builds up slowly from shadows, swarms out from chaotic abysses; transformation and theory come simultaneously upon the scene, as a self-organizing war machine, intertwined together from birth, One from the very beginning. The one pulls the other out from within itself; put another way, the Other trans-pierces the One. Thus the structure of the transformation is also the structure of theory.

In short, all theories are thought-machines, ungrounding, partial-object machines which resolve certain selected relationships by algebraic transformation of the problem-space. Theories are, then, metaphyiscal-political machines, seeming to contain within themselves a unified coexistence or succession of metaphysical or political prejudices, which resolve to form a new optics, a new arrangement of abstract and social space. The first major consequence is that there is really no meta-theory, or that what is called “meta-theory” is really just one extreme of theory.

For all theories are untruth machines, ‘thinking-machines’ that diagnose and recontextualize earlier theories. They are a pure decoding of the space of thought which establishes a new space of thought. Whether the theory is physical or psychoanalytic, biologicial or cosmological, the entire question is how they work, whether they reshape the sociopolitical space of thought and activity, or whether they reinforce conventional ideologies or habitual modes of behavior.

Science aims to destroy prejudice, it ties its own theoretical becoming onto a transformation of sociopolitical space. This is not a “duty” of the scientist, it is his nature, to intuit by machinic inference a real problem, and to map out pathways of return to healthy modes of social and psychic functioning. Geometry no less than geology seeks a real relation of thought to the earth, the institution of a mode of discipline, a stratification and mapping of the body of the earth. Against institutional discipline, theory is a machine which disciplines institutions, exposes their dissembling and hypocrisy, shames them by recalling their former nobility and grandeur. If critical theory were merely this calling out of parasitic social relations, it would serve only a reactionary value, pointing to a moment of decline and decay. Theory does much more: it serves as an analytic transformation of psychic space, a partial resolution of history, a provisional expansion of our cognitive horizon through ungrounding older systems (refuting older theories, transcending historical limitations, stinging habitual modes into new activity and piercing obsolete images of thought.)

C. Ethics and Paranoia

Morality, as metaphysical politics, begins with fear of depth, a fear of blindness. It is an ecclesiastical discourse which begins at death, looks into its own death, with the temperance of our own mor(t)ality. “But death is not its end”: behind the transcendent assertions of knowledge (and so also behind all seekers of knowledge,) there invariably lies a cold and incorporeal fear — a numbing, shadowy, subconscious, and very unusual species of fear. Metaphysics is the fear of loss, of the degeneration of stable order; its evil eye sees lack and insufficiency everywhere. Evidence: how quickly Empty spaces take on an active role, become “holes” used to burrow into bodies, seeking to find stable places to establish a void, to make a new home. Metaphysics organizes space along new absences (new axes)…

Language is the exemplary smooth space, structurally like the unconscious, that is, a self-organizing space of elemental interactivity, a site where all structures decay and are transcended. Things placed within measure themselves against one another, begin to correspond, finally establishing an autonomous field of coordination, establish periodic exchanges of energy, information, etc. Mathematics is language deprived of content, but this limitation is positive. It allows mathematics to touch upon pure expressivity, pure injunction, the magical distribution of new intensities throughout space.

Ontologies radiate organizational power from “hidden” or unobservable places.They lodge themselves unconsciously (like a moral limitation) in order to halt our thinking here, to accelerate it past there. The advantages are enormous; it is clear that having some ontological understanding is better than having none. But is our ontological structure the best of all possible such structures? Is it even possible to measure the ‘value’ of our metaphysical and political prejudices, to re-evaluate all values?

For according to a particular moral order (limitation,) the mystical sacrifice of a particular logical possibility (forbidden thoughts or actions) is itself taken to be already the reward of the discipline. “Human” is created only in order to be ruled over, to be placed into political-metaphysical categories, and should a “man” and the “law” grow out of alignment, the system violently attempts to right itself, to assert its omni-science, to bring things back into accordance with the law, in more perfect arrangement with respect to some relative (moral) ordering. This is important: the particular ordering-modes vary endlessly, but governance and realignment are invariant properties of a moral order. We do not have reason yet to use the word “morality” about our world. Our creators of laws are still too weak to comprehend what a real order, what real strategy would mean. For it would mean mobility — politics without choice, politics without lines — in the sense of a political impulse to open radical new modes of excursivity beyond philosophy, beyond science, beyond technique and rhetoric and false intensity.

In short, we need a post-organic model against the cybernetic-systems of Luhmann and the autopoetic models of Varela and Maturana. Politics is now more machinic than organic. It is precisely this boundary between human and machine that must be carefully investigated, the zone of convergence between flesh and the machine. We need to understand this human-machine boundary, where the tendrils of nerves and fibrous bundles of tissue interpenetrate an artificial machine of whatever material.For every force reflects and passes into its other. Parasitic contamination is the driving force of evolution; not the second force (degradagation of the relation) but the third (degeneration of the media, the relation of the relation.) These forces of decay are also forces of resolution and transcendence, of political and scientific breakthrough.

(to be continued…)

 

“You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man (Beyond Good and Evil, §188).

There is today perhaps no more firmly credited prejudice than this: that one knows what really constitutes the moral. Today is seems to do everyone good when they hear that society is on the way to adapting the individual to general requirements, and that the happiness and at the same time the sacrifice of the individual lies in feeling himself to be a useful member and instrument of the whole: except that one is at present very uncertain as to where this whole is to be sought, whether in an existing state or one still to be created, or in the nation, or in a brotherhood of peoples, or in new little economic communalities…What is wanted—whether this is admired or not—is nothing less than a fundamental remoulding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicting all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members. Everything that in any way corresponds to this body-and membership-building drive and its ancillary drives is felt to be good, this is the moral undercurrent of our age; individual empathy and social feeling here play into one another’s hands (Daybreak, §132).

If you spend yourself on power, on grandiose politics, on economics, world trade, parliaments, military interests—if you give away in this direction the quantity of understanding, seriousness, will and self-overcoming that you are, then this quantity isn’t available in the other direction. Culture and the state—let’s not fool ourselves about this—are antagonists: the “cultured state” is just a modern idea. One lives off the other, one prospers at the expense of the other. All the great ages of culture are ages of decline, politically speaking: what is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political (Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Are Missing,” §4).

The individual is a chaos necessary to every political and social order, a chaos enveloped in a structural social machine. This chaos should be distinguished from a random distribution of intensities or an undifferentiated aggregate but instead should be thought of as overdetermined. From our point of view (against a flow of power that remains obscure in origin) this is precisely the problem that must be addressed according to the collective nature of the individual, including the individual’s own place in the social order at large.

From another point of view, it is the individual that poses the problem to the state—hence the horrifying solution of micromanagement wherein the individual-as-problem is solved according to algorithms that divide these ‘solutions’ to their respective function in the social body. And when we say body in this sense, we take the ‘solution-individual’ to mean precisely the transformation of the individual into a tool—the instrumental individual—that nevertheless, functions as a cell assigned to certain duties in relation to different organs (conceived as institutions directing molar quantities of power) linked to the Organism-State (the constituted Whole that literally exceeds its parts through its miraculation as surplus value, projecting a dominant image of repres(sive)entation). The problem with this view is at least twofold: first, the problematic of the individual cannot be solved from a hierarchical political position (without violence, even considered in terms of psychic/collective repression); and secondly, there are, as Nietzsche shows, no criteria upon which to decide where the Whole lies, because the Whole is precisely the illusion of the State as an entity or organism, when in fact the individual calls into question (if its problem is diagonally posed) the (de)stratification that a certain social body undergoes (through entropy and (planned) states of equilibrium).

The problem may not even be that of creating new values. It seems more appropriate to say that what is required is more like an ethics, which we conceive as the methods by which values are genetically traceable in their becoming and questioned in relation to what values can do—what their real effects (potential or actual) are and what types of environmental stresses or affects (social and physico-biological) combine to produce these values (values inherently related to nihilism, both negative and affirmative).

There are, in fact, a number of different ways of approaching the ‘problem’ of the individual. As Gilles Deleuze reminds us in his essay “Nomad Thought,” Nietzsche’s philosophy has (especially in France where the two strands are dominant) ceaselessly been synthesized with Freudianism and Marxism (for better or worse) [1]. Deleuze argues that unlike Freudianism and Marxism (more their strands than the thinkers of Freud and Marx themselves), Nietzsche has opposed the ‘recoding’ of individuals into a framework beneficial to the state. For Freudianism, this involves trapping the individual into representations of the family (drama), and for Marxism, the ‘illness’ of the individual—caused by the state—is to be cured by the state (betraying behind the political (revolutionary) process the real goal of political (fascizing) normalization). Unlike these strands, Nietzsche’s type of philosophy encourages a ‘decoding’ of the individual in relation to society, one that is a ‘decoding’ in the absolute sense, for we have not been deterritorialized enough—or, as Nietzsche would say, decay (in both the individual and society) is an irreversible process that cannot be sidestepped but must be accelerated and augmented through a reevaluation of the coding (legal, contractual, institutional) process.

This train of thought can be traced through Nietzsche’s texts to approach the prospect of a Nietzschean politics through an engagement with the questions of state formations. Institutions and cultural guarantors (the state) must be injected with a little death instinct, i.e. political formations must always be mortal, or, in another sense, must guarantee the renunciation of their will to power (understood as the will to erect a stable being, reproduced through the molecular individuals that come to take on and be identified with the social roles and instrumental values through which the state guarantees itself). The questions this paper will raise particularly address the questions of the evolution of the State apparatus through its mode of capturing a populace and rendering it manageable; only through this genealogy wherein the advent of the state is enlightened can we begin to reorganize the problem of the individual along different dimensions that call into question the self-organizing principle of the state itself. Finally, if possible, the means by which this death instinct can be instilled into the state will be used as the criteria upon which we weigh how effective these conceptual investigations are in the last instance.

Chemistry of Culture: Physics of the State

From the start of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche not only raises the challenge to philosophy to become thoroughly historical and historicizing, but also challenges science to develop “a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone” (12). This chemistry and history would be directed especially toward the way in which reason and imagination function together to produce metaphysical images that overcode the natural world. In other words, Nietzsche argues that because we impose moral, aesthetic and religious demands on the world, we have recreated it in light of these demands—this happens insofar as “it is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things” (20).

This not only applies for these three specific overcodings. Even mathematics produces metaphysical illusions insofar as number imposes a false unity with arbitrary units of measure; however, it is only because these units are imposed with constancy that pure multiplicity can be subsumed under a number or set as a unity and still retain any utility. An example of an illusory unity is custom, defined as “the union of the pleasant and the useful” (52). This plurality exists as a unity insofar as custom is grounded in habit, which produces pleasant sensations because they integrate us within a collective. Custom takes on its power through the investments and productions of herd pleasure. It acts as a sort of arbitrary unifier—it forms a set of the multiple ways in which the social field produces a rhythm that corresponds with habits that legitimate themselves as useful. However, we can unfold or disentangle utility and any criteria relating to pleasure if we are able to create truly vital thought experiments that construct new ways of grouping together different values of the useful and pleasurable—maybe to the detriment of one or the other for the developing cultural forms that this sort of experimentation may produce. The question of the chemistry of social groups would consequently be concerned with the large molar aggregates of custom (representation) and the selection of the molecular flows of pleasure and utility that (de)compose custom and culture at large.

This is one path for this potential chemistry, but it is insufficient by itself because it presupposes a macropolitical view of situations and thus already relates our criteria to a pre-existing social body already pervaded with a dominant culture. On the micropolitical level, we could ask how to create along with this chemistry a physics of mortal and transient customs. Nietzsche sets this task for the free spirits to come so that they may continue the process of the auto-liberation of thought. As he reminds us, “The less men are bound by tradition, the greater is the fermentation of motivations within them, and the greater in consequence their outward restlessness, their mingling together with one another, the polyphony of their endeavours” (24). Nietzsche believes that to create this polyphony, we will have to move “beyond the self-enclosed original national cultures” (24). Nietzsche proposes a historicizing philosophy linked to the natural sciences that can analyze standards for a generic culture, along with the political situations that they entail, and that can act as a constructive milieu for thought. In fact, he challenges us to discover “knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century” (25). Ecumenical has (at least) two significant meanings here: general and universal on the one hand, mixed and motley on the other. With this we can tease out a physics along with this socio-historical chemistry. For if we couple Nietzsche’s proposal for a chemistry of aesthetic, religious and moral concepts and sensations with his injunction to discover the preconditions of culture from a universal point of view, then we start to connect a series of thoughts that point toward a social science that can address the question of generic and universal cultural construction that grounds itself in a physics of the interaction between molecular beliefs and desires (affects) and the corresponding cultural formations (custom) that result from the bindings of the former to a metaphysical image. The historicizing process, then, must deal with the evolution of habit and the institutions of the state that stratify custom within the social field.

Science, Language, Art: Subterranean Universality

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

There are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.

Modern Formations of the State: the Fate of European Nations

In January of 1872, less than a year after Germany officially becomes a nation, Nietzsche gives a series of five lectures at the University of Basel on the future of our educational/cultural institutions. Six years later in section 8 of Human All Too Human we find Nietzsche discussing the future of political institutions and the fate of European nations. One of the questions that Nietzsche asks in his analysis of socialism, nationalism and democracy is whether or not these political orientations are strong enough for an affirmative investment in the development of cultural forces­, investments that one day will lead to institutions that address the true needs of all of humanity (476). Nietzsche always comments on different state organizations in terms of their speeds of evolution and lifespan.

Since all institutions are mortal, the relations of power between the citizens among themselves address a problem of the measurement of forces behind the repetition of a set of customs that guarantees the dominance of a state through the rigid adherence to one particular mode of cultural development (474). Arguing against sudden revolutionary change, Nietzsche proposes a slow evolution through inquiries utilizing the political concept of force along with a cultural program for the “gradual transformation of the mind” (452). Nietzsche insists that to begin to create the foundation for a politics of universal address, “the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker” (452). In opposition to the passionate revolution of Rousseau, the task for free spirits will be one of moderation. Moderation is the becoming-decisive of thought and inquiry, and the free-spirit cultivates this quality by drawing potential energy to the promotion of spiritual objectives (464).

What may be even more complex for our examination is the fact that Nietzsche depicts socialism, nationalism and democracy to all have close affiliations and family resemblances. Socialism shows the dangers of the absolute state: it demands complete subservience of the individual through segmenting them as an organ of the community (473). It only appears in short reactionary bursts of terrorism because it has a short and violent lifespan. Nationalism is no better than socialism on this point, even if it has a mechanism to guarantee its duration. Nationalism imposes through education an unconscious reverence for the patria and its customs, and if it can instill a fiery conscience with honor, it can more easily ensure its reproduction in the following generation. The question of the benefits of nationalism and socialism must always be related back to the question of how strong these forms of government are internally and how much force they are capable of deploying for the affirmation of new goals, or as Nietzsche writes: “Whenever a great force exists­ even though it be the most dangerous ­mankind has to consider how to make of it an instrument for the attainment of its objectives” (446). If it is a question of justice, a socialist revolution will require a minor population ­the new generation ­to enter into a struggle with the dominant political state. Only after such a struggle can the two parties articulate a calculation of forces. Based on this measurement, the existing state will either be able to reincorporate the reactive forces into a new totality or will be forced to create a new compact to prevent mutual losses through violent struggle. Finally, this compact will be able to guarantee the rights for a new social order, rights that may have the potential to satisfy an axiom of justice [use Nietzsche's criticism here].

Democracy adds another element that disrupts the previous theorization. For both socialism and nationalism presuppose a dominant set of customs that “distinguish between government and people as though there were here two distinct spheres of power, a stronger and higher and a weaker and lower” (450). Democracy, however, puts forth the idea that the government is merely an organ of the people who embody the state’s power in their essence. It is important to realize that this essence constitutes the way in which the relationship between people and government reflects the organizations of other cultural relationships (teacher-pupil, general-soldier, etc.) (450). However, Nietzsche also thinks that “modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the state,” a decay that is in itself an affirmative process (472). Democracy eats away at the layers of the state and the stratified cultural relations that they entail. This decay allows for the free spirit to collect potential energy for the invention of different institutions that will provide for the prudence and self-interests of all men.

Nietzsche’s utopia would consist in a dissemination of labor throughout the population by means of measuring how much suffering a group of tasks would cause the sensibility of different types of people (462). This cannot be achieved realistically insofar as we lack the instruments to measure the differences of degree and the capacity that people have for enduring different forms of labor. But the idea is a beginning. It offers a vision of a compact that assures the rights of everyone through the development of a form of life that affirms in a radical way the transformative energy behind individual suffering. This minimizes the individual’s suffering and promotes a strong sense of self-worth along with the promotion of a contribution to society. It is with this type of society that individuals are able to exist on a level plane of power: each individual is capable of the same amount of value in his or her production of force, and so each individual is judged according to an immanent set of criteria that does not negate their individuality. This is the true foundation for justice, insofar as Nietzsche believes that only among equals can the sense of justice begin to develop.

Ungrounding Morality: Affirming the Joyous Denial

We should take Nietzsche seriously when he asserts that Daybreak is the work of the subterranean man, one who constantly undermines the foundations of our belief by illuminating the mixed origins from which those beliefs emerge (Preface 1). While Nietzsche indicates briefly that it is the scientist who best represents this figure, the subterranean thinker could stand in general for anyone who conducts thought experiments that examine and dismantle our faith in morality. The active decay of morality also forces us to overcome degenerate artists—like Wagner—who are always trying to persuade us to worship where we no longer believe (Preface 4). Beyond the philosophical pessimisms of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, Nietzsche aspires in Daybreak to construct a train of thought that affirms a sophisticated immorality through the cultivation of the ability to deny joyously an outworn set of customs.

Why is morality unproductive? First of all, Nietzsche asserts that the concept of morality entails nothing other than obedience to customs, and we obey these customs insofar as a higher authority commands us, not because we derive utility from them (9). In fact, every potential activity in an individual’s social life has moral implications and significations that push and pull them to more readily assimilate into a social collective. The emphasis here is on group cohesion, for the individual’s actions are to be performed in accordance with a set of customs. An individual that acts in accordance with cultural laws develops the mark of morality. This mark is necessary so that the community can guarantee its protection by ensuring the individual’s strict adherence to a regimented and segmented mode of life. If the individual fails to gain the mark of morality, he or she jeopardizes the entire community, for the supposed or real injustice of the individual is held to affect the social whole negatively. Primitive society does not only take responsibility for the individual’s punishment, it also lays claim to their guilt as well. Thus society has a deep interest in cementing a specific set of customs to ensure its security along with the individual. Nietzsche’s analyses develop strength here: if the individual is motivated to repeat customs that are not necessarily beneficial in themselves, how can we explain originality in any area of life without understanding how innovation of any kind seems to acquire a bad conscience (9)?

Above all, this seems like a problem that addresses the ways in which a society educates its constituents. A re-education of humanity would take away the concept of punishment by showing how it was punishment in the first place that “robbed of its innocence the whole purely chance character of events” (13). In fact, any “evil chance event” that befalls that community arouses a suspicion whether or not custom has been offended. Instead of promoting scientific interest into the natural phenomena of the world, this type of reaction sees value in reality only “insofar as it is capable of being a symbol” (33). Turning the world into a realm of symbolic coordinates is the beginning of nihilism because it degrades the value of this earthly world. It posits a higher and imaginary world that is in control of the events that befall a community; therefore, any good or evil that happens is interpreted as either a divine or diabolical intervention. Before understanding how punishment can be removed from culture, we must understand the long evolution of the ability to calculate external forces and measure them in relation to a society’s strength. Only through this detour can we understand a society’s will to security along with the critical concepts that can give value back to reality without the recourse to a divine order.

We have discussed the way that primitive society interprets and reacts to chance events along with the disciplinary actions taken on the individual. The customs of a society gain a strong protection from criticism because the individual can never guarantee the ability to perform a ritual correctly (21). Thus, even if the individual obeys the performance of custom, no blame can ever be attributed to the custom because it is above all the individual’s weakness that is forced to take the blame. This supposed incompetence of the individual further decreases the feeling of self-worth and self-confidence that the free spirit needs in order to distance him/herself from a set of customs. Nietzsche goes further and argues that our cultural education instills a sense for custom which makes the fact that we have customs in general a matter that can not be discussed without a negative reaction. It is the sense for custom along with the idea that customs can never be perfectly performed that causes the individual a great distress in facing one set of repetitive laws for living within a primitive community.

The individual’s distress or indisposition, too, is attributed to a divine origin. But the process here is more complex. In order to remove these negative feelings, the individual will at first make other people suffer in order to become conscious of the power that the former possesses (15). Nietzsche is very quick to generalize this type of action as cruelty, but we should not interpret this as a simply evil or sadistic action. As Nietzsche will say elsewhere, cruelty is the movement of culture upon bodies, and so we might ask ourselves what sort of unconscious cruelty we impose on other individuals and on ourselves in order to better assimilate ourselves into a group mentality. I think the most important point about cruelty here, though, is the way in which we train ourselves to incorporate a lot of the social repression that we experience through cruelty and turn it on ourselves in the form of psychic repression.

Indeed, this is the second stage of the individual’s mode of measuring force where every bad feeling or misfortune is interpreted as our own well deserved punishment, a little dose of personal karma (15). Against Job’s method, we interpret our misfortunes as a punishment; by doing so we invent a way for atoning for our personal guilt (with respect to the community) and the means to free ourselves from that which we imagine will result from any supposed or real evil deeds that we may commit. This is the second stage in enjoying suffering, one that gives the individual a large advantage insofar as he can sharpen his or her capability for the measurement of forces. And as Nietzsche so boldly suggests, is this not the ability that we are most subtle in? I’m referring to the feeling of power, the judgment of forces, internal and external, that has always remained a fascination for the individual and the society. In fact, Nietzsche argues that “the means discovered for creating this feeling almost constitute the history of culture” (23). We free spirits who can examine the history of culture recognize all too well the customs of cruelty that stunt us and divert us from trekking out on other paths. Or do we?—is this not only half the battle?

Zarathustra and the State: The Apparatus of Capture and Its Limits

In Book 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there is a speech on the state (”Of the New Idol”) that is surrounded by a speech on war and the warrior prior to it and also a speech “On the Flies of the Marketplace” following it. All three speeches in a way need to be read together (not only in order but also juxtaposed in other ways) to be fully understood. Having said that, I want to bracket these other two sections off (keeping them in mind) while focusing solely on Zarathustra’s short discourse on the state. The speech begins:

There are still peoples and herds somewhere, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states.

The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of peoples.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’

It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.

There are several things to notice here. First, Nietzsche conceives of the state as a development that comes about abruptly, through violence and the ’snares’ of an apparatus of capture. Imposed from the outside, the coherence of a people (considered to also be in flux) faces its ‘death’ through the domination of the destroyers that seize a population and order it through the imposition of forms and customs that force it to fragment under the weight of these new forces. On the other hand, the state’s ‘lie’ is a function of its attempt to erase or disguise its operation of seizure upon a populace by overcoding the identity of the state onto the social body: in other words, it falsifies the origin of the population by indebting it to the state that acts as the primal body or consistency of the group. And when Zarathustra mentions the “peoples or herds,” he is referring to the nomadic nature of primeval societies and the imposition of a sedentary state. The move from following the flows of animal packs to diverting flows of water into distributions of farmland are not only two ways of being but also two ways of organizing beings in the proximity of the vortex of capture.

Zarathustra goes on to claim that wherever the state exists, “the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law.” Since every culture has an immanent set of laws and customs concerning good and evil, there can be no understanding of the neighbor’s ‘language of good and evil.” However, the state lies in all languages of good and evil, and “whatever it says, it lies–and whatever it has, it has stolen.” Because of this, Zarathustra proposes that the sign of the state is ultimately its confusion of the language of good and evil.

Although it may seem obvious, it is interesting to highlight Nietzsche’s extremely negative views of the state here (compare, for example, sections 16 and 17 of the Second Essay from The Genealogy of Morals. Here, instead of being called “destroyers,” Nietzsche refers to the state as a “pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad” (Section 17, Essay 2). Though this seems negative and isomorphic to what Zarathustra says, it is important to note that Nietzsche claims that “Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are.” But again, on the other hand, Nietzsche uses the notion of this conqueror race to understand the development of the bad conscience, not through them, but through their expulsion of the “instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power).” This will be dealt with at greater length later.) In any case, these are different aspects of negativity of the apparatus of capture–in Genealogy, a macro view oriented towards understanding the development of a symptomatic type (bad conscience); in Zarathustra, a negative principle that, as we will see, calls out to great individuals to increase the function of capture.

Returning to the text, how are we to interpret that the state confuses the language of good and evil (or is the confusion). If the state is the evil eye and sin against custom and law, does that mean that it seizes upon the nomadic aggregates and forces them not only into a new milieu and a new relationship with the milieu, but also forces the nomad into a different structure of values, a new way of evaluating and experiencing the world? As Nietzsche says in The Genealogy of Morals:

I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that mas was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced–that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace. The situation that faced sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals or perish was the same as that which faced these semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure: suddenly all their instincts were disvalued and ’suspended.’ From now on they had to walk on their feet and ‘bear themselves’ whereas hitherto they had been borne by the water: a dreadful heaviness lay upon them. They felt unable to cope with the simplest undertakings; in this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ! I believe there has never been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort–and at the same time the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands! Only it was hardly or rarely possible to humor them: as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications (Section 16, Essay 2).

This is where, between the transversals of Zarathustra and the Genealogy, we can start to approach questions of the illness of bad conscience in relation to the subversion or undergoing of values (again, in this aspect, an affirmative process–even if it is associated with the suffering of the “feeling of misery on earth”–that commences the auto-subversion of morality that the Subterranean Man, in Daybreak, asserts is the project of joyous denial).

When the state claims to be the people, Zarathustra says “It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a lover over them: thus they served life.” The state lies, but its lying has to be promoted by real effects of capture. “It is destoyers who set snares for many [my emphasis] and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.” On the one hand, the use of force and deterrence, and on the other, the production of desire. This is why I said earlier that the sections on the warrior and the market surrounding this one are illuminated especially through this section. For the state needs both the warrior and the market to capture the many. As Zarathustra says:

Many too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!…Ah, it whispers its dismal lies to you too, you great souls!… Ah, it divines the abundant hearts that like to squander themselves!…Yes, it divines you too, you conquerors of the old God! You grew weary in battle and now your weariness serves the new idol!…It would like to range heroes and honourable men about it, this new idol! [my emphasis] It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences–this cold monster! It will give you everything you want if you worship it, this new idol: thus it buys for itself the lustre of your virtures and the glance of your proud eyes. It wants to use you to lure the many-too-many. Yes, a cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours! Yes, a death for many has here been devised that glorifies itself as life: truly, a heart-felt service to all preachers of death!

The state honors its priests and its warriors, its great men, for they are the strongest machines of capture. Though they do not come simultaneously, as Nietzsche loves to satirize through the historical scenario of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman state prior to its downfall. Many of Nietzsche’s sections on Christianity and religion can be illuminated by understanding them as genealogical thoughts tracing the capture of the religion by the state, and thus its dissemination (I’m thinking particularly of his sections on the three Jews, Peter, Paul, and Jesus, or section 68 on Paul, “The first Christian” in Daybreak). The warrior is also seduced by the state and, afterwards, turns into a soldier (celebrated by the state with its badges and ranks): “I see many soldiers: if only I could see many warriors! What they wear is called uniform: may what they conceal with it not be uniform too!” (”Of War and Warriors”). The soldier “hero” is to ensure not only the capture, but the maintenance of boundaries, protectors of the city walls, guardians of the social seizure. They are to guard the superfluous from an atavism of nomadism–they guarantee (ceaselessly) the count of the many.

Here the distinction between peoples, prior to capture by the state, and the many, post-capture, incorporated in the state, becomes apparent. The peoples hate the state, while the many are forced to undergo themselves in the capture of the social machine. “I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state whose universal slow suicide is called–life.” This is what Nietzsche might call “degeneration” or the product of nihilism in the negative sense. For Zarathustra, almost, the dissipation of the state–or the removal of oneself from the proximity of the state–is the best action to get away from this bad odor: “Only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin: does the song of the necessary man, the unique and irreplaceable melody, begin. There, where the state ceases–look there, my brothers. Do you not see it: the rainbow and the bridges to the Superman?” This passage, as cryptic as it appears, must, in my view, immediately be juxtaposed with a quote from the Genealogy:

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward–this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ’soul.’ The entire inner world…expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organizations protected itself against the old instincts of freedom–punishments belong among these bulwarks–brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself…But thus began the gravest and uncanniest illness, this from which humanity has not yet recovered, man’s suffering of man, of himself–the result of a forcible sundering from his animal past, as it were a leap and a plunge into new surroundings and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy, and terribleness had rested hitherto…Let us add at once that, on the other hand, the existence of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight–a spectacle too subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some ludicrous planet! From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus’ “great child,” be he called Zeus or chance; he gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.— (Section 16, Essay 2).

It is important to note that there is a striking continuity between the these two texts that I have quoted at length. The question we may ask is: how is Zarathustra and Nietzsche in the Genealogy strikingly different, though very continuous in content? Zarathustra, of course, speaks in a very specific style: compared to the style in the Genealogy (arguably one of Nietzsche’s most systematic works), Zarathustra sounds cryptic at times. The exhortations coming from Zarathustra paint the state in the worst way possible. Where is Nietzsche’s Archimedean point in this text? i.e. can we detect a literary rival that Zarathustra is addressing? In many of the speeches in section one, there is an obvious recurrence of biblical references and allusions to Jesus (and explicit references), but the voice I’m thinking of is Plato. Doesn’t Zarathustra, in the end, seem like a frantic anti-philosopher-king–instead of preaching to a tyrant, preaching against all tyrants and all states as tyrannical machines. Which then could give a new meaning to Zarathustra’s assemblage of texts as a whole: instead of dialogues, Zarathustra discourses are monologues, staged through a different performance, functioning through a subversive methodology that opposes the perfection of the republic and the philosopher-king, to a dispersion from the boundaries of the territory, or, if failing that, to digging beneath captured culture to at least tend the compost of decay whose going under fertilizes the soil for the growth of the overman.

Domestication of the Human: Kings and Conquerors Are Always Barbarians