Biography of the Eye

by François Laruelle

“Biographie de l’oeil,” La Decision philosophique 9 (1989): 93-104.

for Adolfo Fernandez Zoila

“Man is this night, this empty nothingness that contains everything in its undivided simplicity…he is this night that one sees if one looks a man in the eyes.” Hegel

Supplement to Hegel’s judgment concerning man

A philosopher has never looked a man directly in the eyes. The philosopher is the man who turns his eyes away to look man in the eyes: he is a man with a distorted gaze. The philosopher misrecognizes the immediate for he himself is not immediate.

To look in the eyes: a maxim of philosophical curiosity, of its oblique indiscretion.
The philosopher is the man with an oblique gaze who lacks the straightforwardness of man.

To look in the eyes: this multiple sounds like a singular, like the penetration into the unique depths of the soul, if it isn’t simply a possibility of untruthfulness or contradiction between the eyes, quickly effaced.

The philosopher looks at man from outside: in the eyes, and he can only see the void and the night, a haze that thickens into nothingness or dissipates in the light of day.

The philosopher looks man in the eyes to dissolve the World into man and man into nothingness. The philosopher does not see man in man and sees the nothingness of the World.

Eyes can be felt, burnt, punctured, caressed, but they are only eyes—eyes that see—if one can look into them. Like beasts that become attached to their cubs by filling them with their own breath, the philosopher believes to attach himself to man by throwing his own gaze onto the depths of man’s eyes. Thus he makes a new philosopher of him.

Rules of philosophical vision: 1. Man is a being who must be looked in the depths of the eyes; 2. Only another man can access the depths of man; 3. Being thus looked in the eyes makes him man, i.e. philosopher.

Looking in the eyes is the inversion of transcendence, its reversal and redoubling. Two gazes tie together into one and become reversible—abyssal desire where man spills over and is lost in the other, where both are brought together without ever attaining the ultimate reduction.

Penetrating the other through the eyes goes beyond indiscretion if it can touch his desire and unsettle his nothingness.

For the philosopher, the eye is convertible in the eye, reversible with another eye. The eye is a man for the eye, man is eye for man.

Man is an abyss for man, i.e. for the philosopher who looks at man.
The eye that is seen in the eye is infinite speculation. The eye is a speculative abyss for the eye, it is what the philosopher sees if he looks a man in the depths of his eyes.

The philosopher is this man to the eyes in a face-to-face, i.e. slowly turned away, this night and this nothingness that look at each other in the other; it is the philosopher that one sees in the eye who is mirrored in the other eye.

Lesson of the night

Man does not look in the eyes, but sees-in-One. A man is this night that looks into the night, with the exception of the All.

There is no eye that is not One (eye). The eye that contains the eye as an other is no more One (eye) than the Other-of-the-Other is One (Other).

The eyes do not contain everything. Or they contain everything with the exception of vision, hence the supplementary eyes of the philosopher. Or the eye contains itself in its undivided simplicity, with the exception of the All.

“To look in the eyes” is either the reflexive tautology of philosophical speculation, or the identity of the non-speculation that man brings with him.

If Being is the distorted eye and sees no more than the Other’s shadow in their vicinity, the One is the eye that sees the Other in person.

What man as seeing-in-man sees when he looks in man is this undivided simplicity, with the exception of the All.

Man is this undivided simplicity, this mystical night before nothingness, that looks in himself and contains nothing but himself and manifests himself as nothingness when he looks a man in the eyes.

Only man—neither God nor animals—can be looked in the depths of the eyes and more still from the depths of the eyes.

Man who looks in himself sees the night in-him, nothingness and the all outside-him.

The night in man is forever il-luminated and the nothingness forever a-nihilated.

To look in the eyes is either impossible because of obliqueness or means that the eye looks in the eye like the One in the One.

The gaze cast onto the depths of the eyes is the reflection of the seen-in-One.

Vision is foundational when it abandons perception and sees-in-the-night.

Man as what is seen in-him or in-One is the real content of every theory of vision.

For the philosopher, man is the reflection of the nothingness of the World or the All. For man, the World or the All is the reflection of the night of man.

Man’s undivided simplicity is the only one that does not contain everything and which sees that it does not contain everything because it sees the All in a nothingness outside itself.

The vision-in-One sees the eye-in-One. But the eye-in-One is either simply the One-in-One or is the vision of the eye in the nothingness beyond the One.

Philosophers have divided the undivided simplicity of nothingness and the all, but human eyes have never divided the unique night.

Man is this undivided simplicity that sees the night when he looks in the indivisible night; nothingness when he looks in the indivisible nothingness; the all when he looks in the indivisible all.

The vision-in-the-night is the identity of vision and night, of the eyes and the depths of the eyes, of the window and the crossing of the window.

Man is a lesson of the night.

Vengeance and the community of gazes

The philosopher advances under the protection of the horizon there where man is to be discovered in his undivided simplicity. The philosopher watches over the gaze of man and waits for it.

The philosopher looks man in the eyes to grasp the nakedness of his depths and finds nothing but his own desire.

In the cavern of the eye, as in its approach, fulgurates that which illuminates the night and enshrouds the day.

The philosophical eye wishes to see the nothing in the eye of man rather than see nothing. The philosopher wishes to look the nothingness of man in the eye rather than be a nothingness of vision.

The philosopher cannot orient himself in the black night of the eye because he does not even know that this night is prior to the eye.

The eye was “in” the eye, and the World did not see. Vision was “in” the eye, and the eye did not see.

Philosophy is this speculation or this theory-of-vision that does not see the vision-in-One.

To look in the eyes is at best an objectification sans object, a reflection sans mirror—the pure medium of speculative optics.

Speculation requires man as this void where it is mirrored and through which it gives consistency to its own nothingness.

Man is this mid-place of day and night, mid-place of nothingness and all that one sees if one looks Oedipus in his third eye.

Man is this night, this nothingness that the philosopher hallucinates when he looks man in the eyes. I call hallucinating—a common feminine noun—every thought or vision which believes to see the real when it only sees the all; which believes to see the One when it sees Being. It is a hallucinating of the type: I think, therefore I am…

One cannot look a man in the eyes as one looks through a window. Man is the only being to look at a window.

The speculative eye is the already divided One, Being whose essence is double vision, the vision-in-One reflected facing its instrument and turned into an optics.

Philosophy remains an optics. Transcendental no doubt, but specular, intuitivity being its unsurpassable structure: the eye is first external empirical sense; then it is divided and doubled, the introduction of the other gaze constituting an optical or a priori specular field; then the gazes tie together, form a chiasmus, and constitute a transcendental speculative field. But the multiplication of the eye en abîme does not abolish it, for the eye is the intuition that now gives the other eye; the gaze that opens upon the other gaze—is the nucleus of every transcendental aesthetic. From external sense, it becomes external and internal sense, its reflexive and speculative power increases, but it is not really abolished by philosophy, which is instead its development. It definitively belongs to philosophy to be an intuition and an intuition of empirical intuition or transcendental vision—never a pure thought, never an internal transcendental experience prior to every optics and prior to the disjunction of the eye that founds optics.

The philosopher is a double blind: naïve consciousness is open to experience and blind to sense; philosophical consciousness is blind to experience and open to sense. Philosophy is this system of thought that tries to compose a single vision or provide vision with two blindnesses.

Man sees in-blind in the truth itself.

Man is this blind that contains undivided simplicity in himself with the exception of the All. He is this night that perceives this blind if he looks a man in the eyes.

Man is this medium between night and nothingness. Less than this medium: nothingness which is nothing but nothingness; night which is nothing but night. More than their medium: this identity (of) nothingness, (of) the night, which is neither night nor nothingness.

The philosopher: “we the seeing.” Man: “we the blind,” we see everything from the depths of things. We see prior to the eye.

The night is human down to the depths of the eyes. The philosopher is human down to the surfaces of the eyes.

“To look in the eyes” also means: “The Same is the eye and the eye”—the matrix of speculation.

Philosophy is the division of the eye—its doubling and redoubling. It is the division of the night that dwells in the One-depths of the eye in an internal night and an external night; a night through the absence of light, a night through the excess of light.

Philosophies—speculative dialectic or not—are particular distributions, economies regulated by the exchange of gazes between men and a general forgetting of the vision-in-One as the real cause that determines the exchange of gazes in the last instance.

Every philosophical speculation is communication, and communication is always speculative. Their maxims: 1. to see through myself by seeing in the place of the other; 2. eye-for-an-eye.

“Eye-for-an-eye”: formula of the metaphysics of vengeance and metaphysical vengeance, from which only the vision-in-One can save us. It can receive two senses: as eye for itself or the speculative subjective; as Eye-for-the-Other, as hostage-of-the-Other-eye. In both cases, vengeance is not warded off.

Eye-for-an-eye: exchange and reversibility of gazes that oscillate between vengeance and desire; vengeance and desire that oscillate between reversibility and exchange.

The division of the eye-for-an-eye regulates the inhuman economy of transcendence. To look in the eyes: the speculative community of gazes founds humanity on nothingness and vengeance—on speculation.

…man—this night that contains everything in himself and thus does not contain this night—man who contains everything in himself and thus does not contain man—this nothingness that contains everything in itself and thus does not contain this nothingness—man who contains everything in himself and thus does not contain man—this simplicity that contains everything in itself and thus does not contain this simplicity—man…

For us non-seeing non-philosophers

…man is indifferently this speculative eye this phenomenological eye their resolved contradiction for us philosophers identically what the speculative eye sees when it looks in the phenomenological eye identically the seeing the becoming of the seeing in the seeing that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking a non-seeing in the eyes indifferently this empty night this full night their resolved contradiction identically what the empty night sees when it looks in the full night identically the night the becoming of the night in the night that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking a contradiction in the eyes indifferently this white nothingness this black nothingness their resolved contradiction identically what the white nothingness sees when it looks in the black nothingness identically the nothingness the becoming of the nothingness in the nothingness that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking Being in the eyes indifferently this complex indivision this simple indivision their resolved contradiction identically what this simple indivision sees when it looks in this complex indivision identically the indivision the becoming of the indivision in the indivision that one sees non-speculatively by speculatively looking the One in the eyes man is this night that contains everything with the exception of the night this nothingness that contains everything with the exception of nothingness this simplicity that contains everything with the exception of simplicity this everything that contains everything with the exception of everything he is this indivision of everything the exception of every exception that one sees if we non-seeing non-philosophers look a man in the eyes…

The night is a human

The night is this humanity, the empty nothingness is this subjectivity, the undivided simplicity is this interiority, which are all contained in themselves with the exception of the All. It is facing this humanity that man sees the Other man in the eyes of humanity.

The night is this interiority, the empty nothingness is this humanity, the undivided simplicity is this subjectivity, which are all contained in themselves with the exception of the All. It is facing this subjectivity that man sees the Other man in the eyes of subjectivity.

The night is this human, this woman in the eyes of nothingness, this nothingness that one perceives if one looks a woman in the eyes.

The night is this human that contains everything in its undivided simplicity with the exception of the All. It is this night that one perceives if one looks the undivided night in itself.

The simplicity is this human that contains everything in its undivided nothingness with the exception of the All. It is this simplicity that one perceives if one looks the undivided nothingness in itself.

Woman is this human who contains everything in her undivided gaze with the exception of the All. It is this woman that one perceives if one looks a gaze in itself.

The night is this human that sees nothingness and the all facing its own depths in the occasion of the eye, that sees the eye facing its own depths in the occasion of nothingness and the all; that determines nothingness and the all in their undivided simplicity.

This night is this human that looks man in the eyes, the nothingness is this human that looks woman in the eyes. Man is this night sans horizon that only contains its undivided simplicity; this nothingness sans light that only contains its undivided interiority; this simple sans simplicity that contains nothing but its undivided humanity.

The night is this human that does not speculate about man. Who am I, who am? I am neither this reason nor this intelligibility; neither this question nor this speculation. I am this night, this transcendental woman who sees in man who I am, what I am with the exception of All.

The night is this human sans horizon. The horizon has never known the eye, it is a wall raised against the eye. The eye lets the night traverse the horizon. The night is this humanity which is nothing but night.

The night which is in the night and the Other night

The Other man is not another man; the Other woman is not another woman; the Other night is not another night. It is what one sees if one looks another man, another woman, another night—in the eyes.

The Eye-in-One is not the flesh, it sees the Other himself. The eye is the oracle of the Other.

To look a man in the eyes is to see him twice. Once as he is seen in-himself or in-One; once as one sees the Other: identically “in-man” and “in transparency.”

It is still the eye that one sees in the depths of the Other eye; still the night in the depths of the Other night. But the Other night is what the night sees when it looks in the Other man. THE night is this human that sees the Other night when it looks in itself.

The night which is in the night sees the undivided night which is in the Other man. The night which is in the state of the night sees in it the night which is in the state of the Other. The eyes which are in the eyes see the unique nothingness which is in the Other man.

The Other man is this whole night, this whole nothingness that contains itself in their undivided simplicity; and this whole Other night, this Other nothingness that contains itself completely with the exception of their undivided simplicity.

The Other man is this point-blank night, this gaze that has not seen any gaze, this simplicity which has not given any division that one perceives when one looks a man in the eyes. The Other man is what one sees without looking in the gaze of the Other man.

The Other man is this night identical (to) nothingness, this nothingness identical (to) this simplicity, this simplicity identical (to) the night, which identically contain themselves with the exception of the Other. This is what one sees if one looks another man in his identity.

The Other night is this human night forever non-posed in the night. The Other nothingness is this human nothingness forever non-opened upon nothingness. The Other simplicity is this human simplicity forever non-closed upon simplicity. It is what one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

The Other woman is this simple night that is not enveloped in the night, this simple nothingness that is not doubled by nothingness, this simplicity that is not bound with simplicity. It is what one sees if one looks another woman in her simplicity.

The Other woman is this transcendental field of the night, devoid of dawn and dusk; this opening of nothingness, devoid of the horizon of being; this indivision of the simple, devoid of retreat. It is what one sees if one looks another man in the indivision of his void.

The Other woman is this night non-illuminating (of) itself, this nothingness non-annihilating (of) itself, this simplicity non-simplifying (of) itself that contains this All non-totalizing (of) itself. It is what one sees if one looks another woman in her eyes non-seeing (of) herself.

The night is this human that contains the Other-night through its undivided simplicity with the exception of the Other. It is this Other-night that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

The night is this human that contains the Other-all through its undivided simplicity with the exception of the Other. It is this Other-all that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

The night is this human that contains the Other-nothingness through is undivided simplicity with the exception of the Other. It is this Other-nothingness that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

Man is this human night that contains the Other-night, this human nothingness that contains the Other-nothingness, this human-simplicity that contains the Other-simplicity—with the exception of themselves. It is this Other-night, this Other-nothingness, this Other-simplicity that one sees if one looks the Other man in the eyes.

Translated by Taylor Adkins 3/2009.

Irrealism. Modernity can be seen as a kind of victory for realism, but this victory was always already betrayed by capitalism, disseminated to death. Despite all appearances, the masks and pseudonymity of the postmodern era indicate not an abandonment of the war against cynicism and superstition, but rather a renewed undertaking of this same battle with a greater degree of caution, pragmatism and assiduity than the modern age could have imagined necessary.

Will to think. Philosophy at its very best is saddening, a cautious disenchantment: a deciphering of the hidden resentment with which we have crafted our values, the nihilism behind the idealities humanity has raised above itself. Yet how could philosophy ever have taken hold and prospered without a certain artistry in masking its true purpose from us; how could it not begin by seducing us to another reality — seducing us to reject this life and this reality? Consider that the will to think must partially close the “field” of thought, in this way allowing it to acquire definite shape and form: the force of thought severs thought from becoming, reducing the chaos of becoming into an organized noise. In this sense, the force of thought disjoins not only a given thought from what it can do but transforms the very categories of thought in order to render existence inert, harmless and ready for transmission. The innate becoming reactive of thinking is what philosophy opposes in all ages and throughout all its disguises.

Psyche. We are always furthest away from ourselves: there is a “necessary unconsciousness” of the underlying machinery of thought; it cannot be integrated into consciousness without violence and tragedy. The healthy constitution of the workshop of the unconscious is the entire problem of psychoanalysis; yet is not psychoanalysis then, at least insofar as it depends on extruding a repressed trauma to work its cure, founded upon the paradox (or illusion) of knowing what we cannot know — the unconscious meaning of the symptom — in short, knowing what we should not be able to know? It is indeed this strange ethical status of psychoanalysts which makes their “cure” possible — i.e., by pretending to an esoteric insight, a “necessarily unattainable” knowledge of the nature of the soul, the pathway to a cure for certain neurotics is possible. For everyone else, psychoanalysis as constituted cannot help but botch the cure at the start, driving it to return again and again to an overpowering and miraculous violence by which the unconscious may be interpreted, and so already transformed, “healed.” Our certain ignorance is ignored for the sake of the cure, since at any rate therapy will provide the hooks one requires to enact the transformation; in this way one ultimately abandons the truth of the symptom. Without shame one may now impose an identical interpretation upon every case, since we should not know the truth.

Torn. There is a tragic flaw in every first principle; behind each first principle there is a force which may be interpreted. Thinking is not mediation (or axiomatization for that matter) but always a becoming, and a becoming “active” only insofar as it is taken to its limit. Thinking is itself rendered legible in turn only by uncovering the force of thought, which is not the driving force within the thought; rather almost the opposite: the force of thinking is that which subjugates thought, that force which extracts thinking as though from the raw “material” of subjectivity.

Event Horizon, Geoffrey Chandler (http://iasos.com/artists/chandler/)

Events are decentered and non-relational, and always a kind of creation (the event is the very introduction of novelty into existence.) As the substance of history events amount to  chasms splitting the world in two, and sometimes sweeping it away, or even shattering it to pieces. The event insofar as it is always already the production of revolution, is the very becoming of becoming.

Now, an ontologist naturally grasps the event precisely through its diaphanous non-identity, in its differential externality, and especially as a kind of infinite multiplicity. The event is understood then as a kind of hyper-being, a without-being which enters into being through –what, precisely? The void — which is to say, it must create itself through a bizarre repetition, but whence? An infinite dissemination is demanded. And what of the turbulence of the Event, its volcanic or cyclonic roaring?

Emancipation can be understood as the liberation of forces necessary to produce the will to resistance. This event is indeed “eternally recurring”: strained ears may catch the distant footfalls of daybreak, and the dangerous voice of a love without a history and without hierarchies — which is, after all, not a signifier to be interpreted, not a “meaning,” but an asignifying rupture, already an act of creation.

Silence, that shadow of language in which everything is nevertheless said, is today almost always but a lapse, the momentary oversight of an animal which acts as though in speech it found its very reality, its absolute and primary function. The distinction between language and noise dwindles, and yet is taken all the more seriously. Too often our silence seems but a desire to escape noise; it is so rarely to evade our enslavement.

And so one but barely and insubstantially glimpses that Silence which is both resistance and elevation, even a kind of victory against a terrible foe, which is not without its spoils. To discover language is in fact to be without a language, a radical immediacy which at once shatters every moral or political claim, and every shred of symbolism; and at this point many things are possible, indeed, too many things: a violent regression to the prelinguistic, a wispy and premature transcendence to the postlinguistic, or finally the immanent resistance and spontaneity of the counterlinguistic.

The necessity of silence in the transformation of the soul cannot be overstated. That indeterminate silence in which sublime meditation, the uncanny intermediation of thinking, takes place — is a warlike silence. For language as such does not think but merely tyrannizes, blindly suturing truth to meaning, a neuroticized “schizophrenia” whose experiments lead inevitably into a cavernous abyss.

The health and growth of a language is precisely the death-instinct of language “for-itself,” which is to say that language, in this limited respect like philosophy, is profoundly dangerous for unhealthy cultures. A culture without the power to reinvigorate and transform its language is already a slave to it (the same thing is true, in fact, of production more generally.) The health of a language requires a continuous recreation and enrichment reaching precisely the point of a critique of language (for without this no creation is possible.) What is demanded with respect to categories and axiomatic ontologies is precisely a kind of “schizophrenization” or, more precisely, the unconscious aggregation of radically disparate forces which underlie a sublime silence (which turns towards thinking and tends towards novel creations.) The reproduction of language is a kind of explosion of machines, whose repression is quite intentional and even the basis of conscious awareness (consciousness is a being-strangled by the Sign.)

Silence may then be grasped in its positive sense as an inexpressible chaos, as a fearful and indeterminate abyss in which an infinity of heterogeneous forces are dangerously and inextricably intertwined. Yet it may also be grasped as some truly “heretical” Unexpressed, the enthusiastic proclamation of energy itself as pure potentiality — a blank canvas, upon which thought dares to create. Language is always both at once, in a constitutive and radical ambiguity. While currently constituted as a tyrannical conjunction of signs, nonetheless the possibility of transformation remains embedded within it. Discouraging as the current conditions may seem it is nevertheless not unreasonable to predict, with Derrida, the death of not only such a conception of language but also (albeit at the distance of some centuries) its practice.

World War I, Wasily Kandinsky

A man like Kant can explain the beautiful in terms of a pure disinterested pleasure — such a knotted definition is not in itself surprising, nor is the kind of cynicism about the potential and limitations of life which is quite effectively communicated thereby. What is curious is that he in fact means to enhance the importance of artistic creation by converting the unsettling power of the artist into a kind of channel to a familiar universality. Is the beautiful not, then, grasped – but grasped in precisely at its most narrow and isolated state, through a transcendental enframing, even as an annihilation of life itself: as a kind of dazzling infinition which nonetheless does not interact with our conscious interest but with our immaterial, intangible “soul”?

There is even almost a kind of foundational axiom of psychoanalysis embedded in Kant’s definition (of course a paradox): there is no pleasure except in losing the possibility for pleasure — the glare of infinite Being when one has finally completely lost one’s identity, and dissolved oneself into the universal (father-mother)… The deep pessimism expressed in this kind of escape, this resentment of life which is by no means peculiar to Kant, is nevertheless quite clearly the pulsing thread underlying his patchwork labor in his “critiques” of the mournful becoming of things. We find in psychoanalysis as well such a stoic willingness to defend the infinite ‘metaphysical’ essence which refuses to escapes its container: and always he leaves open the possibility that human beings are indeed the receptacles of divine messages, channels of pure truth. Frames…

The various critiques in effect each pass through God: the divine body in each case codified, colonized, and contained according to a schema or matrix. Ancient diagrammatics: but religious prophecy and classical philosophy — which is perhaps to say a body without organs and its degenerate, parasitic outgrowths — allow such a convergence only through the quelling of a kind of very earthly subterranean enmity between the drives amounting to a kind of repressed hatred. For now they are neither and only pretending, which lodges us squarely in the endless hypocritical abyss of the subject: and finally this desire (and repeated failure) to escape, to dissolve and to disappear turns inwards and becomes a kind of holy resentment, a “stoic” pessimism. The way out is completely blocked, or rather the only path of escape is precisely through this divine sieve we thereby create: and is there not always a bizarre consciousness of self-division which takes place, a realization we are merely ‘acting,’ which suddenly seems almost to divide the Cosmos itself in order to produce the way out such vanity desperately and incessantly seeks? In short, perhaps Kant meant to be — an artist…?

Will. The question of the will is not whether to emphasize cycles or fluxes (identities or events, structures or processes, concepts and percepts or acts and effects); still less how to conduct a grand unifying synthesis of the two — events and processes as differing stages or aspects of what is ultimately some overly ideal dialectical Unity; the question is rather, first and foremost, to determine how we can possibly proceed (vis a vis the unconscious) given the radical discontinuity between the two accounts of thought and existence. A theory of the will (a diagnostics of the sick will and a genealogy of the healthy, that is to say the real analysis of the unconscious) must affirm the divergence of a purely ‘immanent’ theory of flows and a purely ‘ideal’ theory of machines. Yet the very difficulty in convincingly theorizing the will is precisely the fact that these two modes of interpretation beg one another and are ultimately cut from the same cloth; a successful account of the will cannot disguise the deadlocks which have hitherto almost completely blocked the progress of understanding the unconscious. (It was owing to the sterile dogmatism wherein both accounts decayed for centuries, each thinking itself “complete,” that their kinship and even mutual implication had been able to go so long unnoticed.)

Resemblances. The event has an excess over existence, as a surplus; must this intimate some radical intervention of Truth or more simply, an intangible and virtual dimension of immanence — that the event happens to return, perhaps without limit, breaking with the continuity of resemblances, linking up with a pre-individual and differential flux?

Ground. Becoming can also be understood as a terrible guest: a noisy, ill-mannered, and parasitic inhabitant of beings. Both noise and parasites (and bad manners for that matter) indicate pathways to grasping becoming — these transversal or transevental vectors each affirm a dangerous divergence from the smooth severity of the host or background. Becoming fractures (a) being into a prism: it is precisely the assemblages of parasitic flows of matter and of life which collectively constitute “becoming,” the eruption and eviction of Being; and yet, in another sense, the singular, material and sufficient cause of existence.

Degeneration. Growth (whether cosmic or vital) is never simply a question of similarity, it is not a matter of the general but rather precisely of the repeated: not of convergent series but “degenerate” planes and lines which expand only through a rigorous fragmentation, a limitless mechanism of tortuous recurrence. What is ontologically primary are these infested and “aware” surfaces, the resurgence of certain parasitic elements within the event, the systematic degeneration on the part of the surface of being, the positive knowledge of our incapability to maintain the stability of the surface against the rising ground.

This creature Life, beyond all evaluations, remains an uninterpretable difference — a kind of difference which is primary with respect to a differential identity, a difference which directly induces individuation, and thereby also seduces us to imitation, to the law of identity, and the shackles of representation. Difference for itself becomes the enemy and not a single word is possible on the value of life; how can we interpret this chaosmogenetic reality, arrive at by subtraction this very truth which endlessly ruptures with the signifying systems we use to interpret the world to another? It seems to verge on a kind of heresy, a prediction of apocalypse with respect to philosophy as such: can a mathematization, an axiomatization of the real take place?

The enormous suffering which has gone into everything beautiful is a misery which not only fails to become sensible in the light of Being, but which forcibly undermines the notion that all descends from pure forms (existence from Idea; God as pure and liberating Force of truth) rather than through the violent admixture and interpenetration of wildly heterogeneous forces and bodies (existence from cruelty; God as the tortuously circular Process of differentiation.) A metaphysics from the absolute will to tragedy is an anti-moral, materialist, atheist metaphysic: the singular vision of the real in which our decisions could be dangerous (need I mention also the only one in which knowledge necessarily involves suffering and self-deception?)

Thinking is precisely this adventure which connects its desires not to an identical reality or a primary nullity, but precisely to the an-identical, the differentiality of existence. Not a kind of compromise between two poles of the idea but a war with the arbitrary division of the idea into isolated components, the body of Life into organs without bodies. “We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” Nietzsche (Daybreak, II.103)

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Bomberg, The Mud Bath

Twins. Capitalism is nihilism, an endless betrayal of production in favor of an infinite — imaginary — debt or Void, which implies the transcendental equivalence of all processes, their essential or characteristic meaninglessness. Indeed the hostility towards life evinced in the machinations of capitalism are strictly correlate to the heterogeneous means by which nihilism achieves its destructive victory: through a generalized deterritorialization which can barely halt before its radically external, schizophrenic limit.

Firestorm. Heidegger reminds us that despite our apparent control over the machines we create, that in fact we do not even control the desire within us which causes us to create, to use them, or to extend our control over the world through the conception and production of new machines. To this problem, indeed, there is no solution, and very likely there will never be any solutions. The mystery, the secret truth of desire, lies within the machine.

I mean to say that the world is full of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of these things. But perhaps this is the powerful magic of life: it is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Joel Isaacson, James Joyce (1998)

War on Information. Idealism begins with the proposition that life is futurity, yet attempts to halt before the inevitable futility this produces, the cancerous desires which follow, not from “particular” notions, but precisely from the incorporation of Truth into life, that is, the incorporation of a point of ideality into the social diagrammatics of thought. A bad conscience, alienation, a nullity or ‘nihilism,’ is the necessary counterpart to this process of internalization of the infinite (or at least a “point at infinity”) into the collective machines through which the world is enunciated. Existence as the stability of identity is the absolutely firm foundation upon which all idealism has hitherto constructed its watchtowers and fortresses.

The struggle of nihilism is not simply that of the rejection of transcendence, but rather the real production of new “reality” through the incorporation of truth. To the degree that the truth bears such an incorporation, there is a degree of nihilism in all thought, a war on Information, a degree of rupture and continuous elusion of identity. Thinking is therefore inextricable from a micro-politics of subversion, from the actions and passions of war machines; the question is one of strategy and not of ideology. Without this struggle of desiring-machines, this war of learning and desiring, all beliefs, all thinking would lack interest.

Truth defaced. Both the origins of truth and untruth may always be followed back to a human face — an other whose thoughts and expressions were found useful, for a longer or shorter span of history. Yet the origins of mathematics and philosophy, the evolution of the scientific instinct and will to truth, could hardly be explained in the same way; rather the problem of the origin of the will to truth could be approached in a general way only through a genealogical analysis in which the origins of morality are primary; this kind of thinking is oldest, older than language (whose history must be considered in an ultimate sense sense quite secondary to the history of morality.) The origin of the drive for ‘reality’ must be sought through the actions and passions of human bodies, through that uncanny relationship between desire and its Outside.

In conversation three of Ethics and Infinity, Levinas recounts the philosophical and existential implications of the il y a, the ‘there is’ or what he calls the “phenomenon of impersonal being” (48). The “there is” is many things at the same time: it is a belief, a feeling, an experience and even an affect (the source of the Judaic affect proper to one of philosophy’s “turns” in the 20th century) on one side and an ontological claim, an objective state of affairs, and even the (proto-)origin of Being and Nothingness on the other.

If the “there is” is not a simple mixture of Being and Nothingness, it is at least the source of their mixing and unmixing. Beyond the fact that there are objective and subjective aspects to the full impact of this attempt to conceptualize the “there is,” what should be noted is the way in which the “there is” animates the theological and ethical orientation of Levinas’ discourse of the social relation with the Other. What follows endeavors to construct the beginnings of an ‘analytic’ of the “there is” in order to better understood how it plays a fundamental role for Levinas in his conception of ethics as first philosophy.

The conversation about the “there is” begins with a contrast between the conceptions of Appolinaire and Heideggerian ontology: it designates neither the abundance or joy of being nor the ‘es gibt’ of Being to Dasein. Going beyond the limitation of givenness to Dasein, a conception which could very easily found a humanist Heideggerianism, Levinas stresses that there is no “generosity” in the “there is” because the latter constitutes an impersonal dimension of being, a silence that is simultaneously a noise: “neither nothingness nor being” (48).

One of the most fascinating statements concerning the “there is” occurs very early in the conversation and posits its primacy in relation to the conditions of existence: “[The “there is”] is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that “there is” is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation—there is” (48). What can we unpack from this passage?

To begin with, what should first be identified in this concise passage is the presence of the “there is” as a feeling, an affect, but also a faith based on an ontological claim. The scene of being is open and not foreclosed means: existence necessarily is. This statement is undeniable in two senses: first as objective claim or matter of fact, then as the basis for a belief or matter of faith. Levinas is trying to describe an ontological state of affairs that is not reducible to any particular thing but is the pre-individual, impersonal, and universal permeation of existents by existence. Yet the belief in this ontological claim almost seems to turn Being into the always-already given, and thus to save it from any real disaster that would threaten the sustainability of this givenness. In other words, it seems to be a faith in the fact that things will always exist, and that even if the existence of particular things is contingent, existence itself is necessarily absolute.

It would be wrong to see this ontological belief as an argument based on a personal God. If there is a God in Levinas, it comes through the Other’s face or leads beyond Being. What I mean to say is that the thought of the “there is” is meant to be the horror that the persistence of impersonal existence wreaks upon the individual. This impersonal aspect bears affinities with Heidegger’s thrownness, in that existence only comes to the things that are thrown into the totality of the “there is,” as though gladiators into an arena to wage the war that existence demands of itself. This is the Heraclitean/Nietzschean image of Being as the cosmic struggle where things are always ontologically at war through their own becoming and struggle of forces. If ontology’s prerequisite is the war of existence/being, what leads beyond this struggle and allows an access to the requirement of ethics as first, indeed as first philosophy that henceforth subordinates ontology to it?

The impersonality of being, its rumbling, exists beyond the requirement of the World and its sustainability. This is a faith that requires a reinvestigation of the meaning of disaster. Following Blanchot, Levinas recognizes disaster as that which “signifies neither death nor an accident, but as a piece of being which would be detached from its fixity of being, from its reference to a star, from all cosmological existence, as dis-aster” (50). This evocation of a persistence of the possibility of existence, supra-cosmological or existing beyond the conditions of the cosmos (and even life and its sustainability?) is the opening beyond the totality of being, the totality of the “there is” that contains our own being, and thus an elevation to the heights of the absolutely other, there where the infinity of the social relation, of a new understanding of holiness as the ethical beyond being and ontological war, an escape beyond the cumbersome of the totality of existents and existence (which is characterized in Levinas’ sayings like: “The social is beyond ontology” and “It is not a matter of escaping from solitude, but rather of escaping from being” (58-59).

How do we escape from being and or move beyond it? As Levinas suggests, the overcoming of ontology begins with a question or even problem of mastery, even, one might say, of a certain position in relation to the totality of things as a system to be mastered (man as the custodian of the things of the universe) and to the infinite as social relation exceeding being, and thus non-totalizable: this is the infinite ethical opening of the Other beyond being. Yet this opening does not leave the totality of Being untouched in relation to my existence as a subject or ego in the intersubjective relation: “For the ego that exists is encumbered by all these existents it dominates. For me the famous Heideggerian “Care” took the form of the cumbersomeness of existence” (52). As Levinas interprets it, Heideggerian care is too caught up with ontology and things, its position doesn’t justify that of man as Other: “to escape the ‘there is’ one must not be posed but deposed; to make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed kings” (52). This new idea about the subject’s relation to the Other emphasizes the Latin of the word sub-ject: the subject is literally thrown under the Other’s height or at the Other’s feet due to the asymmetry that Levinas believes to separate the subject from the Other. The Other calls upon me from the height of God through the face, and my ethical responsibility is to respond to that calling from on high, to throw myself under the yoke of the ethical relationship. This new emphasis on Heideggerian care now indicates the opposite of what Levinas found in Being and Time: instead of being the cumbersomeness of existence, it represents the moment of clarity where the Other lifts the weight of the sovereign self by calling into question the absolute self-enclosed separation of my ego, i.e. calling into question my ipseity.

The position of the subject in the ethical relation is that of an ability to respond, a responsibility in relation to the height of the Other, precisely the call or appeal of the Other that demands a response. The selfsameness or ipseity of the ego is called into question by the ethical relation insofar as the face of the Other requires a response that does not leave the speaker intact as subject, insofar as my “I” is called into question by the Other’s alterity. The height of the Other, as absolutely Other and thus as presence of God through the face, is the reinterpretation of the social as first based on a religious, i.e. ethical foundation rather than one that is ontological, i.e. political. But this is a religion that annuls itself as an ethics, an ethics that is responsibility to the Other, even to the point of being the hostage of the Other in the face-to-face, but that does not call for the worship of the Other, except insofar as it founds the social beyond the political in a bond that remains to be fulfilled, precisely the infinite bound of duty that can never be exhausted by the subject due to the fact that its content itself is infinite, i.e. the demand of the Other. This is why Levinas states that, more so than the Other allowing me to escape solitude, the Other allows me to escape from the totality of beings as ultimate determination of (my) existence itself.

As Levinas specifies in relation to the ethical significance of the face in his Totality and Infinity, signification is guaranteed only by the face of the Other, and it is only insofar as this face appears and directs me that the meaning of the ethical relationship, which is constitutive of my freedom as Other and for the Other, that my own selfsameness and ipseity is called into question (206). It is the signification of the Other’s face and speech that disrupts and disturbs the separateness of the ego in the social relation. As Levinas makes clear, the face of the other and the instantiation of the socio-ethical relation is a fundamental encounter and event that breaks down the confines and limits of my existence and subjectivity. This overcoming of the self and the sublation of the ego’s interests is the first step towards the Aufhebung of the politico-ontological vanity of the subject towards the true creation of peace and social harmony, which is for Levinas beyond Being and politics in the ethical and religious root of the socius: “Politics tends towards reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it ensures happiness. And political law concludes and sanctions the struggle for recognition. Religion is Desire and not struggle for recognition. It is the surplus possible in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, responsibility, and sacrifice, which are the condition for equality itself” (64). Whereas politics strives for equality, religion is the ground upon which it strives. Although this could read as though Levinas were condoning a sort of fundamentalist return to the domination of society by an eminent religious state, it should be noted that Levinas’ concept of the holy does not entail the re-injection of religious sentiment into social life; on the contrary, the idea of the holy for Levinas is to be found in a de-secularization of the world, or, in other words, the holy is opposed to the sacred insofar as the latter emanates from a false, illusionary transcendence whereas real holiness constituted by a community of Others invokes the ethical responsibilities of the socius that Levinas nevertheless still prefers to call “religious.” We shall see why and why this conception entails a revision of the theories of justice in a community.

It is precisely because the face is the turning point for the entrance into social and ethical life that Levinas can begin Totality and Infinity from the standpoint of the self-subsistent ego that is separated both from a charitable God and a social milieu. Levinas begins this work by positing a completely self-reliant ego that knows neither the presence of God nor has any need of that presence. In truth, Levinas does not at all presuppose the religiously devoted ego as the subject of his study, for, in a sense, that would make the exercise of the text all too easy, presupposing what it would be necessary to demonstrate. In fact, Levinas has to start from the completely self-involved subject in order to make his arguments about the Other, language, and ethics make sense. He presupposes nothing or presupposes that which would be most resistant to his new theory of ethics and society: precisely the atheistic subject who does not come ready-equipped with what it means to believe in a transcendent God who would guarantee meaning for all existence or who does not necessarily find within social fellowship the religious inspirations of the communal bond. It is this new notion of religion, which takes on its real autonomy in the social sphere only as an intersubjective ethics, that requires my responsibility for and to the other to become a bond that rests upon a new conception of justice.

Earlier we described the way in which the Other calls into question my own selfsameness or ipseity. This deposing of the sovereign subject indicates that the I or the cogito is not the end-all be-all of existence. In other words, the cogito as a psychism which is an event in being does not suffice of itself to produce justice. This is one of the reasons why Levinas does not believe that ontology can be first philosophy. Instead, ethics (with a specific Levinasian religious foundation) poses itself as first philosophy because it provides the basis for justice in the social sphere, while ontology promotes the war of all against all insofar as they wish to be equal. As Levinas writes: “Ethics is the spiritual optics…The work of justice—the uprightness of the face to face—is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced—and “vision” here coincides with this work of justice. It is our relations with men…that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of” (78-79). Thus, justice is rooted in the ethical relation with the Other who is only holy because there is no transcendent, ontological God (God as Being or a being) to guarantee the value of that ethics. This indicates the fact that, in the ethical relation of the face-to-face, the Other precisely coincides with the idea of God insofar as the former also contains the infinity of the ideatum that overflows the idea: the only real religion comes on the scene when God has been removed from the sky, and the only real ethics takes on its truth-as-justice when the Other is seen as ordinary man in the face.

But this does not yet ground the idea of justice. Instead, it almost threatens to unground it due to the infinity of the Other in the ethical relation. What redeems this notion of justice? In a sense, the ipseity of the ego, the selfsameness of myself, is called into question by the ethical, intersubjective relation: to look in the face of the Other leaves no Self unchanged and unsettled. This transformation of the self, which is an ongoing event demanded by the efficacy of the socio-ethical relation, not only uproots a certain ipseity of the self but also establishes an illeity (literally based on the Latin for ‘he’) in the self, a sort of third-person position that is coterminous with the I. It is this illeity immanent to the ethical relation that guarantees the overcoming of a spontaneous ipseity: in other words, the movement from an I to a You in relation to a Thou (the holy Other) is guaranteed by the existence of a he or she, or maybe even it, if we consider Levinas’ penchant for the impersonal aspect of existence. It is this illeity in the self that allows for God to become invisible, disembodied, and immanent to the ethical relation, legitimating the statement that theological concepts are simply anthropological to a higher degree (Cartesian “perfection,” even if it is based on a negative valuation of man). It is the third-person in me that cries out against the tyranny of the ego in its self-satisfied separation. This is precisely how morality is defined in Totality and Infinity: the ability to reflect upon my actions as violent and arbitrary, and thus to come to the real critique of ipseity.

If Levinas, as he claimed, went against the major tendencies of the history of philosophy in its treatment of man, this may be because Levinas was one of the few philosophers to take Plato seriously and assert that the Good is beyond Being, that ethics is primary over ontology and first, and that knowledge is not the culmination of existence, but learning, teaching, and discourse with the Other are. Subordinating knowledge to teaching and learning is one of the ultimate ways in which Levinas redeemed the face to face relation as an encounter with the infinity of the Other through signification. Nevertheless, if learning and teaching were subordinated to knowledge, we would have the structure of ipseity, the master discourse for determining what is legitimate knowledge and what is excessive. This structure simply cannot stand withstand real democracy in thought and the face of the Other.

Nietzsche. That joy and vision should be brought to bear even in the darkest corner of the human soul — and especially upon that within it which surges upwards and beyond the human species entirely; above the world, and so finally able to see, from a vision born of flight. –To “survey” reality as though from an impossible distance, an incommensurate height.

Joyful wisdom. Science is such that it can only truly be said to exist once many powerful and warring social and psychic desires have been tamed, coerced into accord, allowed to achieve their fragile pact. (A difficult enough thing; and, indeed, the conditions for a joyful science are still far from ripe!) The result being that a scientist, insofar as he or she is a scientist, is precisely the one who is unconcerned about whether another agrees to the “truth” of this or that proposition; in every instance it is rather the force or real function which counts, which is to say: the manner in which a given idea alters, amplifies, and re-assembles already existing systems of ideas. The production of a new semiotic system is always coupled to a wide variety of psychic and social machines, together forming a new regime of ideas along with an appropriate “pragmatics” of desire. This “image of thought,” for our purposes here, can be considered simply as a series of collective practices interwoven with a multiplicity of signifying systems, the coupling of productive processes with anti-productive processes, a conjoining of systems of pure affects with order-words. A pragmatic then is precisely a ‘process’ which can be said to function ‘structurally’ only in a heuristic and reductive sense. Indeed, the reality of thought is not a stasis or immanent emptiness but rather (or more fundamentally) a transfinite process of conception, first and fundamentally a flight into new pragmatic regimes. This a conceiving of new practices  may be realized or constituted in any particular case, but only insofar as it tends to produce novel and singular functions. It is not true that the repetition of a similar effect is the origin of thinking; rather it is precisely a difference, in the last instance a shift in perspective, sometimes infinitesimal, which is required.

Scars. A break is a source, a disjunction capable of unravelling the reality, the stitches of any flux. A break is a void, a schism — think only of the ‘irreducible’ split between grammatical subject and object — which serves a fundamentally connective role, constituting a heterogeneous stitching-together of a multiplicity of disparate elements. The void binds as much as it serves to disjoin and interpose its chilly emptiness and taste of the beyond. So much to say that this unravelling co-extensive with the Void (despite gloomy prophesies to the contrary!) connotes a kind of concerted deconstruction whose force is entirely positive, an affirmative disjunction.

Permutation. An idea, an axiom, and especially a supposedly universal system, cannot help but attach to what is readily available. A finite stock; an endless and chaotic assemblage of variations, as Levi-Strauss’ famous bricoleurs: scientists, artists, philosophers, revolutionaries — what but psychosocial handy-men, making use of what is both close by and useful, what is already and what can be quickly assembled? How could we create new machines, except by utilizing the stock which remains from previous constructions (and deconstructions)?

Michale Brun, A Moment of Silence (1/3)

Novel. The event is rare — is this not an inherently tragic proposition? Would not the souls to witness it  discover the event branded upon them indelibly, or else lost forever? For the new can indeed induce joy; yet under different conditions it is capable of producing a strain under which a break is nearly unavoidable. –Is there breakthrough, novelty, only in extraordinary cases? Deleuze reminds us that Spinoza kept for years the coat he wore the day a young man attempted to take his life, in order to remind himself that human beings do not always love thought. That the event is rare seems a platitude; yet it can be an opening for gloomy passions, for a creeping cynicism and an uncanny piety: in short the belief that there are few beings in the world capable of the creation of new capacities – new concepts, new passions, new perceptions… But we do not know the thresholds, we are groping in the dark: the event is an event, they come in bursts, and their frequency depends on the associated rates of flow. An event is indeed infinite, but to seek a living, transcendent meaning in the pure rate of innovation is to fall prey to one of the most dangerous lures for thought today. –An infinite number of effects is not a cause; nonetheless we believe in extracting the cause from ‘within’ the effect, thinking we are ‘objective’ by thus subtracting the true cause from the field of the question, all the while we are actually subtracting the thought itself from the consciousness of thought.

Vocality. A particle of dream; this cyclonic voice, whose element was never pure breath, but extremely pressurized breath as it flows violently throughout the vocal assemblage — the dangerous and elusive voice, always and already a kind of non-figure, a non-sign strangely parallel with spirit, is not air alone but the intricate disjunction of innumerable micro-movements and a concerted series of infinitesimal resistances. A voice arises without transcendent cause or teleology; yet despite, and in a sense precisely because of this, it engineers an immense and dangerous collision with the outside, with the other. Alterity cannot be taken to indicate a fundamental or direct correlation; the perplexing condition is that every single bit of transmission is indirect, effective only because it is redundant, always and ultimately carried out through an absent third, a medium, whose abstract structure matters much less than the integrity of its encoding and decoding functions. Of course in the last instance direct and indirect channels of transmission cannot really be so readily distinguished; but what matters here is that transitivity, transmissivity logically precedes the  movement of the signifier. The voice is not a sign of the spirit, not a representation of mediation, but more like the material and a-signifying “core” of the sign — an eventfulness, a material whirlwind, a blockade and a line of flight.

Over at Stellar Cartographies there is a new post (called: Speculative realism, stamp collecting, and the question of Science) that goes into great detail about Gabriel Catren’s critique of Meillassoux on the basis of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics (lovingly dubbed by the former as “speculative physics”). The majority of the post (in reality almost already essay-length) focuses on Catren’s extensive essay that appeared in Collapse vol. 5 just recently. There are also at least 5 or 6 essays by Catren that can be found online, some more mathematical than others, but all on theoretical physics and the question of objectivity. I even have the chance and honor to translate one of Gabriel Catren’s essays for the upcoming anthology The Speculative Turn, which will feature many of the big names in the “field” of speculative realism (or transcendental realism, as Laruelle has dubbed his approach, thus reviving an older nomination that could, for example, at one time have labeled Spinoza’s approach…although he was usually considered just a dogmatist by Fichte et al.). Definitely go check this out if you have an interest in the current debates about speculative realism.

For catren’s online essays, check out “On Classical and Quantum Objectivity” and “Can Classical Descriptions of Reality Be Considered Complete?” and “Geometric Foundations of Classical Yangs-Mill Theory” and “Notes on Dilaton Quantum Cosmology” with Claudio Simeone, and “Time asymmetries in quantum cosmology and the searching for boundary conditions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation” with Mario Castagnino and Rafael Ferraro, and finally “Quantization of the Taub cosmological model with extrinsic time” with Rafael Ferraro.

I have recently finished translating Francois Laruelle’s (with his collectif) Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. Kime: Paris (1998). Please feel free to spread the knowledge far and wide, because I intend this to help encourage people to start engaging with non-philosophical concepts and their inevitable entry into all facets of thinking, including the philosophical.

I also want to thank Sid Littlefield and Anthony Paul Smith for their work on some of the definitions. It makes it all the more fitting that the translation would also be a collaborative effort. In that sense, I also want to thank Joe Weissman and Chris Eby for their intellectual support, as well as Ben Woodward and Nick Srnicek for their efforts in editing the work. Lastly, I want to thank Sid again for his constant efforts towards enriching my own intellectual development and those of many others who have the veritable luck to learn from him.

Also, last but first and foremost, let me extend my thanks to Laruelle and his collaborators (A.-F. Schmid, S. Valdinoci, T. Brachet, G. Kieffer, L. Leroy, and D. Nicolet) for their endeavors to make an economy of philosophical vocabularies, i.e. a non-philosophical dictionary, possible.

Here’s a link to the pdf. Enjoy!

Non-expression. Speaking is a donation of words; but in this donation is dramatized an idea of alterity, an uncanny and infinite Power mysteriously unleashed, and this by a seemingly peaceful sharing of signs. 

Is it possible? Ten thousand years of speaking, and still we are waiting for a sign.

Problems. We owe to Deleuze the discovery that the difficulty of a problem is not simply the number of differential elements it assembles within a single ideal situation, but rather the process of problematization of an element or elements which somehow causes the contents of the problem to problematize the very situation itself. This marks  a radical becoming-social of problematics — or if you like, the becoming-event of the concept (becoming-problem.) Yet does it not seem as though this method is still profoundly Lacanian somehow, as though the real is being implicitly understood as a strange hyper-real gap between Difference and itself — mysteriously and paradoxically allowing a differentiation to differenciate itself infinitely, suspending both the emotional-organic ontology of desiring-repression as well as the mechanical logic that underlies materialism, allowing thought to move at infinite speed on a hyperplane of immanence — ripping a hole through the symbolic networks, allowing the transpiercing and reprogramming of the assemblage by the outside? The difficulty remains even if we understand the practice of militant problematization or counter-actualization to be a process of differentiating problematic or ‘insurgent’ elements of the situational social assemblage with respect to their capacity for transformation.

A certain noise is all it takes. Parasites can indeed be shaken off and immediately so; but they are chased out only by a greater noise, by the willing invitation of still more powerful parasites. –So at least there are specific cries which are anathema to a given variety of parasite: the roaring of their host-cum-predators. Of collective liberation.

Other. In order to grasp the organless body of capital, we must also grasp the decoding and distribution of scales (layers) necessitated by its cyclic, redundant pragmatic of infinite dissemination. This transmission of alien messages continuously and cynically demanded by the increasingly-powerful actualization of capitalist social diagrams is in fact an essential characteristic. We must think this transmission on the molecular scale at which capitalism opens, divides, reprograms and transfigures our minds and bodies. But no less can we ignore this transmission on the cosmic scale in which capitalism cannot help but figure as the looming, obscure Power sleeping silently within the earth itself, simply waiting for the right conditions to make contact with powers originating from a radical Outside.

On long ears. What goes “without saying” is undoubtedly far more interesting than what is actually said. 

Logic of cents. Capital occupies a restless place-without-place, presents us with an absent focus of exchange — an obscure third only absolutely present as a kind of channel, or a decoding of series of channels, forming vast networks allowing the growth of indirect and secondary interconnections. Money taken formally as unlimited diffusion continuously re-enacts a strange and arcane drama, the creation of wealth. In some cases the system of capitalist production aligns itself with the existing and traditional power structures only to break with it in the most extreme fashion in others. Primary desiring-repression is much, much older than capitalism; we are today actualizing social diagrams of pain and destruction only dreamed of by the ancients. But it is this specific paradox of necessary and humiliating castration to an inhuman, exterior, malevolent machine which is the very soul of capitalism — or to put it less dramatically, there is a kind of catastrophic desire-to-subvert-desire which constitutes the ultimate logic of capitalist “sense.” 

Is mathematics discovered or invented? But what if we have misplaced the scent from the start; in other words what if this clear distinction elides the process itself, if the particular and immanent relation between invention and discovery forms the basis of the ‘singularizing’ expression involved in a new mathematical proof? But a rigorous diagram of novelty itself, of the Event, seems to escape the boundaries of mathematical thought. Ontology is not the royal road to reality, any more than dreams are a singular road the unconscious. In a way, it does not even seem to get us very far at all; at least in terms of understanding “truth,” that exceptional ontogenesis of knowledge and/or being, which after all constitutes what philosophers have so far approached as the ideal “problem” according to which all others are to be modeled, and to which the creation of any new concepts must invariably be induced to correspond.

Risk. The utter annihilation of the soul is an unavoidable stage of becoming human. The human soul is restless, without certainties — at least until it has finally inoculated itself to the world, jamming any channels still open to the outside.

Nihil. Philosophy is a whirlwind from which very little can escape; the breaks are not always where they appear to be! A pure negation of philosophy remains pure philosophy; it is coded in the same semiotic, an inverse. Even suspending this decision (to separate essence from appearance) is still a philosophical position. Finally, even if we manage to truly escape philosophy and found a new science which could in turn truly take the “human” science of philosophy and grasp it as raw experimental material, the risks of a new asceticism corresponding to this “higher” rigor are nearly unavoidable. All these risks are not unlike those Nietzsche or Deleuze are continually warning us about. The worst consequence of nihilism is not necessarily that of forgetting our philosophy in our despair; rather there is a stranger, more uncanny possibility — that the pious suspension of philosophy would be capable of sweeping reality away along with it, abandoning us in some non-human plane of transcendent nullity, enslaved to transparent emptiness and arcane jargon. Nonetheless, a positive “nihilism” undoubtedly constitutes an ideal space for the creation of a new kind of science capable of grasping in turn any human science, and even philosophy itself.

Supplements. What is true cannot change; what changes cannot be truth — is this not the miserable dream in which too many have diffused their cleverness?

“When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes.”

Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Dream-analysis does not necessitate an affirmation of the existence of universal structures of expression; it need not amount to the tiresome interpretation of the same hidden message over and over again, wherein the forms of thinking and speaking and finally reality itself are rendered identical, cruelly reduced to a single and all-encompassing formula. It suffices to mention that the good doctor Freud would have us believe the dream-work is essentially uncreative, that it amounts in the end to an organic process of coding, one of unsteady translation between the sleeping consciousness and the passive unconscious, producing a kind of dense hieroglyphic writing which must then be interpreted through an analytic exchange. 

The dream understood as writing (even schizowriting) becomes poisoned; the dream taken as representation leaves us only with a kind of mindless condensation and confusion of many distinct memories. Even so, the messages are too free; Freud always seems to lose sight here, missing the material process of decoding unfolding before his eyes. We miss the dream-work entirely, we find only translation instead of production. Freud is neither the last nor first scientist to seek relentlessly to crush singularity in favor the universal — a strange moment where it seems reason itself has gone mad, engaging itself in an infinite and searching analysis “beneath” for some powerful and profoundly-hidden writing. It is this desire for some universal “meaning” disseminating itself through the dream in a distorted form which necessitates the uncreativity, the non-productive character Freud ascribes of the dreamwork. And thus the dream has already frozen, and becomes a little analysis in itself.

The interminability of the analysis corresponds precisely with this frozen process, this hideous arresting of the infinite circulation of the dream. It is only possible to open psychoanalysis to the outside by arresting its own process of continuous interpretation: “No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities… There is no longer a Self that feels, acts and recalls; there is a ‘glowing fog, a dark yellow mist’ that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.” (ATP 180) It is clear enough a non-productive unconscious could not produce a cure; such an unconscious could only accept one imposed from without, a cure intended to code and crush desire — to normalize our unconscious, not to assist its process of production. 

Jargon. A word decodes by assembling: a mobile army, a mob or mass of “blocks,” segments extruded from heterogeneous flows: flows with and without codes, flows of energy and of waste, flows of debt and of money, flows of food and of goods, flows of women and children, flows of pulsing affects and flows of intricate concepts. Speaking assembles together, connects and conjoins or pervades and envelops as many radically divergent elements as possible. Language is at once unifying and fluid, both normalizing and improvised, both static and evolutionary — a system of rules neither abstract nor essentially syntactical but rather constituting a radically material and pragmatic collective assemblage.

Deleuze and Guattari argue as much in A Thousand Plateaus, suggesting the reason for the coextensivity of collective assemblages with language systems, and even with “language as a whole,” is this very fact that these assemblages express a complex pragmatic — a group of transformations which produce the very condition of possibility of language:

“… if the collective assemblage is in each instance coexistensive with the linguistic system considered, and to language as a whole, it is because it expresses the set of incorporeal transformations that effectuate the condition of possibility of language and utilize the elements of the linguistic system…The language-function thus defined is neither information nor communicational; it has to do neither with signifying information nor with intersubjective communication. And it is useless to abstract a significance outside information, or a subjectivity outside communication. For the subjectification proceedings and movement of significance relate to regimes of signs, or collective assemblages. The language-function is the transmission of order-words, and order-words relate to assemblages, just as assemblages relate to the incorporeal transformations constituting the variables of the function. Linguistics is nothing without a pragmatics (semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition of possibility of language and the usage of linguistic elements.”  (Deleuze and Guattari)

 Not language’s “essence” but language’s praxis involves the complex syntactical disjunction of these wildly-varying elements; speaking is not (effectively) tracing-enunciating an ideal form by rote or metempsychotic memory. Pascal notes in Pensées 556: “Languages are ciphers in which letters are not changed into letters, but words into words, so that an unknown language may be deciphered.” It is true that speaking not only defers to but deciphers an ancient and mysterious writing. 

Is language ever simply a tool, even when it is a weapon of power? We think it always conditions and disseminates a protocol operative over the entire communications network of an enormous mega-war machine. Nonetheless, language ceaselessly and systematically invests and reactivates collective desires, awakening decoded flows capable of sweeping away all resistances — indeed forming a kind of collective consciousness: the birth of the war-machine coincides with the birth of the voice. A polyvocality whose essence is not a lack but a fullness; language is not necessarily based not on castration, upon the disinvestment and privatization of the other, of the organs, of the outside. The transformations convoked by the collective assemblage must be understood in the precise terms of a desiring-production which invests the organs and others and outsides, not as subjects (once again users of machines, slaves to events) but rather as the complex assemblages they are. The revolution of collective machines of expression is the  nucleus of the question of language today.

[image: Black Lace, by Kain (Apophysis)]

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.)

A properly ontological investigation is a ceaseless circulation around the notions of emptiness and presence, a rigorous attempt to discern the peculiar concepts of existence and nothingness, always and once again a faithful commitment to seeking out ones and zeroes. Patching up holes; but precisely in such a way that the reality grasped by ontology (like theology) is always-already as a shadow of reality, like the phantasm of another life. Cantor thought transfinite series a pure and untouchable trace of Difference. A proof of transcendence, disguised as a proof of immanence. But how else could a universal theory of events be constructed?

The critique of ontology encounters yet another surprise when it allows its gaze to move beyond the event itself. The patient observer discovers within the folds of interleaving processes an uncanny kind of hidden writing, whose nature is exceptionally difficult to grasp, for the nature of this half-erased or subtle writing ceaselessly shifts its ground as quickly as the question is posed, and can just as easily turn out to have been nothing at all. –A coincidence, upon which ontology has always made a strange decision: that being and nothing are One, existence is non-existence. God may or may not exist, but this subtle writing can be exhumed from the essences of things. It has affirmed this strange paradox precisely in order to allow a meta-philosophical plane of thought to be constructed. 

Being is the first focus of the elliptical orbit traced by ontological thinking. The basic ontological statement is made by Lucretius: all things have within them the seeds of their becoming. Even the void, absolute nothingness, can be seen as a positive emptiness capable of infinite becomings. Being can thus be seen as a kind of positive nothingness, the radically empty pure essence of reality. Hence to be is to become everything — to communicate with infinite becomings, with forces radically exceeding our “individual” structural limitations: the earth, the cosmos; animals, plants, molecules, stars, etc. Thus nothingness is the second focus of the elliptical orbit traced out by ontology, for the reason that to become capable of becoming is the event itself — the paradox which ontology affirms as its rigorous essence: to diagram being. 

Existence is essentially infinite in a precise sense: it has within itself the seeds of countless transfigurations — creative, neutral and destructive events. In fact what ontology can be counted upon most faithfully to remind us is that to be is always already an event, and only falsely divided into subject and object. Being is the source of becoming, already a trans-ontological process ceaselessly disseminating events, communicating with processes beyond its own boundaries. Ironically (perhaps) it is precisely this uncanny inter-resonance of widely disparate events which causes the ontologists’ rigorous functionalization to falter. 

The essence of a channel is to transmit, to disseminate, to yield a flux. The problem of knowledge is correlative to constructing an adequate channel for the reception of an idea, the “proper medium” for a thoughts’ proliferation. Expressed in this way the “idea” is only an ideal problem, which in reality takes on an unsettling and radical complexity. The pure and implacable universality of the idea gives way to the realization of the innumerable fissures and leaks comprising the real — and quite organic — larval origin of thought. 

A kind of thought which, to be sure, still does not issue from myself, and which is neither memory nor imagination, but is rather a thought which breaks through, which traverses me. Hence the universal is always shot through with contingency, a pure implacability which rests precisely upon history, upon the conquering, the decimation of nomad flows indecently refusing to conform. The drive to systematically master desire, for a generalized and radical constructivism, the subtle and uncanny “inner” dynamism of our age, is bent upon a wholesale transformation of the fundamental essence of humanity. 

The breakdown of this machine, this doom upon the universal, is perhaps capable of reproducing itself virally — even as a snapshot of an image of thought in the very process of decomposing (and in relation to which all philosophical gestures seem but supplications, and — so much more rarely — vindications.)

A new medium always is, it must be, painstaking crafted: for once forged, a channel exists only the precondition of a flow, and even upon the continuity of the flux. 

I want to think the concrete peculiarity, the absolute singularity of any channel as such. The continuous flow of water through the machinery of a dam, of a pipe; the unending drift of signals across our always-on global information networks. 

The channel faces every military risk imaginable: takeover, subversion, blockade. But it also faces every theoretical risk imaginable: hyper-specialization, perversion, madness.

Yet the truth is that a channel is only and always a meta-channel, an assemblage, a channeling machine blending very different channels together, and which itself forms a channel in relation to even greater such channels. Whether of water, cement, metal pipe, twisted cable or realized in the very trembling of air molecules, the channel compels us to turn towards what remains, what is not swept away by the flows. 

I just wanted to throw out there that I have finished the bulk of translating Guattari’s The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Now begins the revision stage of my project, and a few interpolations of quotes from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (I’m using the new Penguin editions, which are fabulous translations btw).

I hope this excites some people (I know Joe has been impatient for this…). I, too, am pretty thrilled about this work appearing in English. It has been a difficult work for me to translate, let alone read, but I feel that it is infinitely more valuable to me for all the efforts I have put into it. This book wasn’t necessarily received well in France (one of his interviewers mentions the obscurity and difficulty of this work specifically), perhaps because it is so closely tied to A Thousand Plateaus in scope and timeframe (it was published about 6 months before the latter, being a sort of work book for A Thousand Plateaus, as Gary Genosko puts it). But I hope that this is different for the English, especially with all the work that has gone into translating much of Guattari’s work already, and the Deleuze phenomenon, etc.

Let me just note in passing that this work has helped me overcome one of my own crises. As an English graduate student-dropout, I sort of rebelled against literary criticism, rebaptizing my field of research as philosophy. I gave up on its uses to evoke radical political change, and I felt like it played with the binary oppositions of established culture, not to truly dismantle the phenomena, but to reify them and sediment them more thoroughly.

I can only note with great fervor that the second part of the Machinic Unconscious, which is dedicated to a reading of Proust’s novel, is really something extraordinary, because it takes the obscure theoretical conceptualizations of the first half and propels them into concrete situations, deducing the abstract relations from this reading. But it goes further because it is not just an intellectual exercise: Guattari’s thought, if anything, is so radically enrooted in the outside that every phrase has a rhetorical-micropolitical bent to it.  He proves the validity of literary criticism to really illuminate the inner machinisms of reality, bearing out its political potential in a systematic and pragmatic way.

This book has changed my life. I hope you get a chance to read it.

The world is hollow. In-itself anything is precisely nothing. 

A thing exists positively only in the precise sense that it exhibits certain forces, that it forms connections or disjunctions with other things, or assemblages of things, in such and such a way. 

Moreover, is it not necessary that at some point in the process of any machine, there is something that may and must become reduced to a generic and redundant unit? 

It may indeed be said that the machine presents us with the most spectacular and dangerous breakthrough in all of history, a breakthrough written into our desires themselves.

Love is not a question of signals, but of production. Not words but noise. The word is hollow: in itself everything means precisely nothing. Yet no thought is ever without its heretical dimension, its strange and apocalyptic promise — the dangerous promise of possible knowledge. 

Not only does nothing “exist,” but it is the essence of existence itself, and so all knowledge is a kind of nothingness: a rigorous silence, a selective and critical passivity, a dangerous and misunderstood weakness. 

Truth is a parasite, we are infected: knowledge is never without this vertigo dimension of being self-imposed, like a sickness which you acquire simply by imagining it. 

I emphasize this point precisely because it is all too clearly understood by the creature within. and is it not so that when its roaring becomes imperceptible, we encounter an ancient silence, without limits? 

Yet everything begins in noise.