Evil as the condition of Good
From a Hegelian standpoint, one can say that what Deleuze fails to fully
perceive is what, among others, Schelling saw clearly: the ultimate identity
of these two features, of the lowest and the highest: it is precisely THROUGH
its stubborn attachment to his singular Self that a human individual is able
to extract itself from the particular convolutions of actual life (with its
circular movement of generation and corruption) and enter in relation with
virtual eternity. This is why (insofar as another name for this egotistic
stubborn attachment is Evil) Evil is a formal condition of the rise of the
Good: it literally creates the space for the Good.
Origin of Philosophy
What if it is exceptions themselves that retroactively create the illusion of
the “norm” they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy,
exception is the rule but also what if philosophy—the need for authentic
philosophical thought—arises precisely in those moments when (other)
parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their “proper role?”
What if the “proper” space for philosophy is these very gaps and
interstices opened up by “pathological” displacements in the social
edifice?... In fact, when Lacan endlessly varies the motif of how philosophy
tries to “fill in the holes,” to present a totalizing view of the universe,
to cover up all the gaps, ruptures, and inconsistencies (say, in the total
self-transparency of self-consciousness)—and how, against philosophy,
psychoanalysis asserts the constitutive gap/rupture/inconsistency, and so on
and so forth—he simply misses the point of what the most fundamental
philosophical gesture is: not to close the gap, but, on the contrary, to open
up a radical gap in the very edifice of the universe, the “ontological
difference,” the gap between the empirical and the transcendental, in which
neither of the two levels can be reduced to the other
Transcendental empiricism
The term “transcendental” is used here in the strict philosophical sense of
the a priori conditions of possibility of our experience of constituted
reality. The paradoxical coupling of opposites (transcendental + empirical)
points toward a field of experience beyond (or, rather, beneath) the
experience of constituted or perceived reality. We remain here within the
field of consciousness: Deleuze defines the field of transcendental
empiricism as “a pure a-subjective current of consciousness, an impersonal
prereflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without
self.”
Jackson Pollock
Perhaps Jackson Pollock is the ultimate “Deleuzian painter”: does his
action-painting not directly render this flow of pure becoming, the
impersonal-unconscious life energy, the encompassing field of virtuality out
of which determinate paintings can actualize themselves, this field of pure
intensities with no meaning to be unearthed by interpretation? The cult of
Pollock’s personality (heavy-drinking American macho) is secondary with
regard to this fundamental feature: far from “expressing” his personality,
his works “sublate” or cancel it.
Justice
Furthermore, one should read this Spinozan equation of power and right
against the background of Pascal’s famous pensée: “Equality of possessions
is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have
made right obey might. As they could not fortify justice they have justified
force, so that right and might live together and peace reigns, the sovereign
good.”42 Crucial in this passage is the underlying formalist logic: the form
of justice matters more than its content—the form of justice should be
maintained even if it is, as to its content, the form of its opposite, of
injustice. And, one might add, this discrepancy between form and content is
not just the result of particular unfortunate circumstances but constitutive
of the very notion of justice: justice is “in itself,” in its very notion,
the form of injustice, namely, a “justified force.” Usually, when we are
dealing with a fake trial in which the outcome is fixed in advance by
political and power interests, we speak of a “travesty of justice”—it
pretends to be justice, whereas it is merely a display of raw power or
corruption posing as justice. What, however, if justice is “as such,” in
its very notion, a travesty? Is this not what Pascal implies when he
concludes, in a resigned way, that if power cannot come to justice, then
justice should come to power?
Is the ultimate status of Justice not that of fantasy at its purest and most
radical? Even in deconstruction, even in the late Frankfurt School, Justice
functions as the ultimate horizon, “indeconstructible,” as Derrida put it.
Although Justice comes neither from reasoning nor from experience, it is
absolutely inner to our experience and has to be intuitively presupposed (“
there has to be justice”), otherwise everything is meaningless, our entire
universe falls apart (Kant was on the trace of this status of Justice with
his notion of the “postulates” of pure practical reason). As such, Justice
is the pure construct-presupposition—true or not, it has to be presupposed.
In other words, it is the ultimate “je sais bien, mais quand même …”:
although we know it may be an illusion, we have to rely on it. Justice
provides the secret link between ethics and ontology: there has to be justice
in the universe, as its hidden underlying principle. Since even the “
deconstruction” remains within this theological horizon, one can see why it
is so dificult to be an atheist.
Evil
“Radical” evil does not designate a specific type of evil act but
designates an a priori propensity of human nature (to act egotistically, to
give preference to pathological motivations over universal ethical duty) that
opens up the very space for “normal” evil acts, which roots them in human
nature. In contrast to it, “diabolical” evil does indeed designate a
specific type of evil act: acts that are not motivated by any pathological
motivation but are done “just for the sake of it,” elevating evil itself
into an a priori nonpathological motivation—something akin to Poe’s “imp
of perversity.”…Why is there this oscillation and classificatory confusion
in Kant? Because, if he were to assert the actual possibility of “diabolical
evil,” he would be utterly unable to distinguish it from the Good: since
both acts would be nonpathologically motivated, the travesty of justice would
become indistinguishable from justice itself. And, the shift from Kant to
Hegel is simply the shift from this Kantian inconsistency to Hegel’s
reckless assumption of the identity of “diabolical” evil with the Good
itself. Far from involving a clear classification, the distinction between “
radical” and “diabolical” evil is thus the distinction between the general
irreducible propensity of human nature and a series of particular acts
(which, although impossible, are thinkable). Why, then, does Kant need this
excess over the “normal” pathological evil? Because, without it, his theory
would amount to no more than the traditional notion of the conflict between
good and evil as the conflict between two tendencies in human nature: the
tendency to act freely and autonomously and the tendency to act out of
pathological, egotistic motivations.44 From this perspective, the choice
between good and evil is not itself a free choice since we only act in a
truly free way when we act autonomously for the sake of duty (when we follow
pathological motivations, we are enslaved to our nature). However, this goes
against the fundamental thrust of Kantian ethics, according to which the very
choice of evil is an autonomous free decision.
Resigned indentification
Back to Pascal. Is his version of the unity of right and might not homologous
to Nietzsche’s amor fati and eternal return of the same? Since, in this
unique life of mine, I am constrained by the burden of the past weighing on
me, the assertion of my unconditional will to power is always thwarted by
that which, in the finitude of being thrown into a particular situation, I
was forced to assume as given. Consequently, the only way to assert
effectively my will to power is to transpose myself into a state in which I
am able to will freely, assert as the outcome of my will, what I otherwise
experience as imposed on me by external fate; and, the only way to accomplish
this is to imagine that, in the future “returns of the same,” repetitions
of my present predicament, I am fully ready to assume it freely. However,
does this reasoning not also conceal the same formalism as that of Pascal? Is
its hidden premise not “if I cannot freely choose my reality and thus
overcome the necessity which determines me, I should formally elevate this
necessity itself into something freely assumed by me?” Or, as Wagner,
Nietzsche’s great nemesis, put it in The Twilight of Gods: “Fear of the gods
’ downfall grieves me not, / since now I will it so! / What once I resolved
in despair, / in the wild anguish of dissension, / now I will freely perform,
gladly and gaily.” And does the Spinozan position not rely on the same
resigned identification? Is Spinoza, therefore, not diametrically opposed to
the Jewish-Levinasian-Derridean-Adornian hope of the final Redemption, of the
idea that this world of ours cannot be “all there is” as the last and
ultimate Truth, of the insistence that we should stick to the promise of some
Messianic Otherness? This Derridean “messianicity, stripped of everything”
45 is effectively close to the attitude toward religion in the late Frankfurt
School, best encapsulated by Max Horkheimer’s formula of fetishist disavowal
he resorted to when he wrote about the Critical Theory itself: “It knows
there is no God, and it nevertheless believes in him.” The final feature in
which all the previous ones culminate is Spinoza’s radical suspension of any
“deontological” dimension, that is, of what we usually understand by the
term “ethical” (norms that proscribe us how we should act when we have a
choice)—and this in a book called Ethics, which is an achievement in itself.
In his famous reading of the Fall, Spinoza claims that God had to utter the
prohibition “You should not eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge!”
because our capacity to know the true causal connection was limited. For
those who know, one should say: “Eating from the Tree of Knowledge is
dangerous for your health.” This complete translation of injunction into
cognitive statements again desubjectivizes the universe, implying that true
freedom is not the freedom of choice but the accurate insight into the
necessities that determine us.
Spinoza/Superego
Spinoza’s unheard-of endeavor is to think ethics itself outside the “
anthropomorphic” moral categories of intentions, commandments, and the like.
What he proposes is stricto sensu an ontological ethics, an ethics deprived
of the deontological dimension, an ethics of “is” without “ought.” What,
then, is the price paid for this suspension of the ethical dimension of
commandment, of the Master Signifier? The psychoanalytic answer is clear:
superego. Superego is on the side of knowledge; like Kafka’s law, it wants
nothing from you—it is just there if you come to it. This is the command
operative in the warning we see everywhere today: “Smoking may be dangerous
to your health.” Nothing is prohibited; you are just informed of a causal
link. Along the same lines, the injunction “Only have sex if you really want
to enjoy it!” is the best way to sabotage enjoyment. This conclusion may
appear strange. In a first approach, if there ever was a philosopher foreign
to superego, it is Spinoza. Does his thought not display a unique attitude of
almost saintly indifference, of the elevation not only above ordinary human
passions and interests but also above all feelings of guilt and moral
outrage? Is his universe not that of pure positivity of forces with no
life-denying negativity? Is his attitude not one of the joyful assertion of
life? However, what if superego is the hidden name of this very indifference
and pure assertion of life?
The basic gesture of Kant’s transcendental turn is thus to invert the
obstacle into a positive condition.
However, does this imagined case not provide us with the only consequent
answer to the question “what would a truly free act be,” a free act for a
noumenal entity, an act of true noumenal freedom? It would be to know all the
inexorable horrible consequences of choosing the evil and nonetheless to
choose it. This would have been a truly “nonpathological” act, an act of
acting with no regard for one’s pathological interests.
The basic gesture of Kant’s transcendental turn is thus to invert the
obstacle into a positive condition. In the standard Leibnizean ontology, we,
finite subjects, can act freely in spite of our finitude, since freedom is
the spark that unites us with the infinite God; in Kant, this finitude, our
separation from the Absolute, is the POSITIVE condition of our freedom. In
short, the condition of impossibility is the condition of possibility. In
this sense, Susan Neiman is right to remark that “the worry that fueled
debates about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear
that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us—but rather
the fear that it would.”49 This fear is ultimately ethical: the closure of
the gap between appearance and reality would deprive us of our freedom and
thus of our ethical dignity. What this means is that the gap between noumenal
reality and appearance is redoubled: one has to distinguish between noumenal
reality “in itself” and the way noumenal reality appears within the domain
of appearance (say, in our experience of freedom and the moral Law). This
tiny edge distinguishing the two is the edge between the sublime and the
horrible. God is sublime for us, from our finite perspective—experienced in
itself, God would turn into a mortifying horror.
Philosophy as such is Kantian
Phenomenal reality is not simply the way things appear to me. It designates
the way things “really” appear to me, the way they constitute phenomenal
reality, as opposed to a mere subjective/illusory appearance. Consequently,
when I misperceive some object in my phenomenal reality, when I mistake it
for a different object, what is wrong is not that I am unaware of how things
“really are in themselves” but of how they “really appear” to me. One
cannot overestimate the importance of this Kantian move. Ultimately,
philosophy as such is Kantian, and it should be read from the vantage point
of the Kantian revolution, namely, not as a naive attempt at “absolute
knowledge,” as a total description of the entirety of reality, but as the
work of deploying the horizon of preunderstanding presupposed in every
engagement with entities in the world. It is only with Kant (with his notion
of the transcendental) that true philosophy begins. What we had before was a
simple global ontology, the knowledge about All, and not yet the notion of
the transcendental-hermeneutic horizon of the World.
Subject is the name for a crack in the edifice of Being.
So, when Kant asserts the limitation of our knowledge, Hegel does not answer
him by claiming that he can overcome the Kantian gap and thereby gain access
to Absolute Knowledge in the style of a precritical metaphysics. What he
claims is that the Kantian gap already is the solution: Being itself is
incomplete. This is what Hegel’s motto “one should conceive the Absolute
not only as Substance, but also as Subject” means: “subject” is the name
for a crack in the edifice of Being.
“Self-movement of the Notion”
What is, effectively, the Hegelian “self-movement of the Notion” about?
Recall a boring academic textbook that, apropos of a philosophical problem or
discipline, enumerates the series of predominant opinions or claims: “The
philosopher A claimed that soul is immortal, while the philosopher B claimed
that there is no soul, and the philosopher C that soul is only the form of
the body….” There is something blatantly ridiculous and inadequate in
presenting such a panoply of “opinions of philosophers”—why? We, the
readers, somehow “feel” that this is not philosophy, that a “true”
philosophy must systematically account for this very multitude of “opinions
” (positions), not just enumerate them. In short, what we expect is to get a
report on how one “opinion” arises out of the inconsistencies or
insufficiencies of another “opinion” so that the chain of these “opinions
” forms an organic Whole—or, as Hegel would have put it, the history of
philosophy itself is part of philosophy, not just a comparative report on
whether and how different “opinions” are right or wrong. This organic
interweaving of “opinions” (positions) is what Hegel calls the “
self-movement of the Notion.” This is why, when someone—even if, like
Francis Fukuyama, he claims to be a Hegelian—begins a sentence with “Hegel
believes that …” he thereby automatically disqualifies himself not only as
a Hegelian but also as a serious philosopher. Philosophy is emphatically not
about the “beliefs” of different individual persons.
From “abstract” to “concrete” Universal
Often, we stumble on a particular case that does not fully “fit” its
universal species, that is “atypical”; the next step is to acknowledge that
every particular is “atypical,” that the universal species exists only in
exceptions, that there is a structural tension between the Universal and the
Particular. At this point, we become aware that the Universal is no longer
just an empty neutral container of its subspecies but an entity in tension
with each and every one of its species. The universal Notion thus acquires a
dynamics of its own. More precisely, the true Universal is this very
antagonistic dynamics between the Universal and the Particular. It is at this
point that we pass from “abstract” to “concrete” Universal—at the point
when we acknowledge that every Particular is an “exception,” and,
consequently, that the Universal, far from “containing” its particular
content, excludes it (or is excluded by it). This exclusion renders the
Universal itself particular (it is not truly universal, since it cannot grasp
or contain the particular content), yet this very failure is its strength:
the Universal is thus simultaneously posited as the Particular.
The Real
The wager of Deleuze’s concept of the “plane of consistency,” which points
in the direction of absolute immanence, is that of his insistence on the
univocity of being. In his “flat ontology,” all heterogeneous entities of
an assemblage can be conceived at the same level, without any ontological
exceptions or priorities. To refer to the well-known paradoxes of
inconsistent classification, the plane of consistency would be something like
a mixture of elements thrown together through a multitude of divergent
criteria (recall Borges’s famous taxonomy: brown dogs, dogs who belong to
the emperor, dogs who don’t bark, and so forth—up to dogs who do not belong
to this list). It would be all too easy to counter here that the Lacanian
Real is precisely that which resists inclusion within the plane of
consistency, the absent Cause of the heterogeneity of the assemblage. Is it,
rather, not that this “plane of consistency” is what Lacan called the “
feminine” non-All set, with no exceptions and, for that very reason, no
totalizing agency?56 When, at the very end of Seminar XI, Lacan refers to
Spinoza as the philosopher of the universal signifier and, as such, the true
antipode of Kant,57 he makes the same point: Spinoza is the philosopher of
feminine assemblage, against Kant as the philosopher of the masculine
Exception (the moral Law that suspends the imbrication of phenomenal causes
and effects). The Spinozan One-Whole is thus a nontotalized Real, bringing us
back to Lacan’s fundamental thesis: the Real is not simply external to the
Symbolic but, rather, the Symbolic itself deprived of its externality, of its
founding exception.
Miracle
Or, to put it in Chesterton’s terms: a miracle is no longer the irrational
exception that disturbs the rational order, since everything becomes a
miracle; there is no longer the need to assert excess against normality,
since everything becomes an excess—excess is everywhere, in an unbearable
intensity. Therein resides the true transgression. It occurs when the tension
between the ordinary phenomenal reality and the transgressive Excess of the
Real Thing is abolished. In other words, the truly subversive agent asserts
the univocity of Being, assembling all the heterogeneous elements within the
same “plane of consistency.” Instead of the ridiculously pathetic fake
heroism of forcing the established order toward its transcendent traumatic
core, we get a profoundly indifferent enumeration that, without the blink of
an eye, puts in the same series ethics and buggery.
The only way to save freedom is through this short circuit between
epistemology and ontology
Deleuze continues to read Hegel in a traditional way, as the one who returned
from Kant to an absolute metaphysics that articulates the totally
self-transparent and fully actualized logical structure of Being. Already in
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze interprets Kant’s transcendental Ideas
from the perspective of his notion of “problematicity,” as the excess of
the question over answers to it: a transcendental Idea designates not an
ideal but a problem, a question, a task, which no answer, no actualization,
can fully meet. So, Deleuze can only read the excess of the problem over its
solutions as an anti-Hegelian motif, insofar as he perceives Hegel as the one
who, as it were, filled in the gaps of the Kantian system and passed from Kant
’s openness and indeterminacy to the notion’s complete
actualization/determination.63 What, however, if Hegel does not add any
positive content to Kant, does not fill in the gaps—what if he just
accomplishes a shift of perspective in and through which the problem already
appears as its own solution? What if, for Hegel, “absolute Knowing” is not
the absurd position of “knowing everything” but the insight into how the
path toward Truth is already Truth itself, into how the Absolute is precisely
—to put it in Deleuzean terms—the virtuality of the eternal process of its
own actualization?
We are thereby within the very heart of the problem of freedom: the only way
to save freedom is through this short circuit between epistemology and
ontology—the moment we reduce our process of knowledge to a process external
to the thing itself, to an endless approximation to the thing, freedom is
lost, because “reality” is conceived of as a completed, positive order of
Being, as a full and exhaustive ontological domain.
Absolutely immanent gap of/in the phenomena
for Hegel, the gap between phenomena and their transcendent Ground is a
secondary effect of the absolutely immanent gap of/in the phenomena
themselves. “Transcendence” is the illusory reflection of the fact that the
immanence of phenomena is ruptured, broken, inconsistent. To put it in
somewhat simplified terms, it is not that phenomena are broken, that we have
multiple partial perspectives, because the transcendent Thing eludes our
grasp; on the contrary, the specter of this Thing is the “reified” effect
of the inconsistency of the phenomena.
There is no “primordial” duality of poles in the first place, only the
inherent gap of the One
When Ernesto Laclau elaborates his fundamental opposition between the logic
of difference and the logic of equivalence, he asserts the coincidence of the
opposites: the two logics are not simply opposed, but each logic, brought to
its extreme, converts into its opposite. That is to say, as he repeatedly
points out, a system of pure differentiality (a system totally defined by the
differential structure of its elements, with no antagonism and/or
impossibility traversing it) would lead to a pure equivalence of all its
elements—they are all equivalent with regard to the void of their Outside.
And, at the other extreme, a system of radical antagonism with no structure
at all but just the pure opposition of Us and Them would coincide with a
naturalized difference between Us and Them as the positively existing opposed
species. However, from a Hegelian standpoint, the limitation of this logic is
that it continues to rely on the two externally opposed poles—the fact that
each of the opposites, in the abstraction from the other (i.e., brought to
the extreme at which it no longer needs the other as its opposite) falls into
this other, merely demonstrates their mutual reliance. What we need to do is
to make a step further from this external opposition (or mutual reliance)
into the direct internalized overlapping, which means: not only does one
pole, when abstracted from the other and thus brought to extreme, coincide
with its opposite, but also there is no “primordial” duality of poles in
the first place, only the inherent gap of the One. Equivalence is
primordially not the opposite of difference, equivalence only emerges because
no system of differences can ever complete itself, it “is” only the
structural effect of this incompleteness. (In a homologous way, with regard
to sexual difference, woman is not the polar opposite of man, there are women
because man is not fully itself.) The tension between immanence and
transcendence is thus also secondary with regard to the gap within immanence
itself: “transcendence” is a kind of perspective illusion, the way we
(mis)perceive the gap/discord that inheres to immanence itself. In the same
way, the tension between the Same and the Other is secondary with regard to
the noncoincidence of the Same with itself.
Reinscription of the externality of a field back into the field itself
This reinscription of the externality of a field back into the field itself
is the truly Hegelian gesture. For Hegel, Law is not simply an external
totalizing force regulating the multitude of crimes/transgressions but crime’
s immanent self-sublation, a crime elevated to the absolute, so that the
opposition of Law and crime is inherent to crime itself (and not, as an
incorrect Hegelianism would have us think, to the Law, so that crime is
reduced to a subordinate moment of the self-mediation of the Law). This third
position is the truly subversive one: not Law as opposed to crime but Law
itself as the supreme form of crime. In the same way, the question to be
asked is not “How does the Oedipal matrix repress the free flow of the
desiring machines?” but, rather, “What kind of a desiring machine is
Oedipus?” In Deleuzian terms, one should isolate, within the field of
impersonal, nomadic desiring machines, the “dark precursor” of the “
official” (familial, normalizing, etc.) Oedipus complex. Or, to put it in
Hegelese, the Oedipus complex, in its oppositional determination, is the
place at which the very force of the repression of the desiring machines
encounters ITSELF in its Otherness, as one among the desiring machines.
Subject/Person
This, then, is what Deleuze seems to get wrong in his reduction of the
subject to (just another) substance. Far from belonging to the level of
actualization, of distinct entities in the order of constituted reality, the
dimension of the “subject” designates the reemergence of the virtual within
the order of actuality. “Subject” names the unique space of the explosion
of virtuality within constituted reality. According to The Logic of Sense,
sense is the immaterial flow of pure becoming, and “subject” designates not
the substantial entity whose “predicate” (attribute, property, capacity) is
the sense-event but a kind of antisubstance, a negative/inverted substance—
the immaterial, singular, purely abstract point that sustains the flow of
sense. This is why the subject is not a person. To put it in Deleuzian terms,
“person” belongs to the order of actualized reality, designating the wealth
of positive features and properties that characterize an individual, whereas
the subject is divided precisely in the Deleuzian sense of “dividual” as
opposed to individual. Usually, “personalists” insist on the unique
character of each individual as a combinatoire of features that cannot ever
be repeated and that are organically woven together through an underlying,
unidentifiable je ne sais quoi as the mystery of personality. The subject is,
on the contrary, endlessly repeatable or divisible; it is nothing but the
unending process of division/repetition.
Subject thus relates to substance exactly like Becoming versus Being: subject
is the “absolute unrest of Becoming (absolute Unruhe des Werdens),”71
(i.e., a state of things conceived from the perspective of its genesis). It
was already Fichte (to whom Deleuze himself refers) who conceived the subject
as pure self-positing activity: activity is not a predicate/attribute of the
subject precisely because the subject “is” only (exists exclusively as) the
activity of its own self-positing. In other words, the subject is a purely
virtual entity in the strict Deleuzian sense of the term: the moment it is
actualized, it changes into substance.
Externality of relations
This bring us to Deleuze’s fundamental paradox: the implication of his
absolute immanentism, of his rejection of any transcendence, is precisely
that an effect can transcend its cause, or—another aspect of the same
problematic—that relations are external to the objects that relate to each
other (recall Deleuze’s reading of Hitchcock!). This externality of
relations is grounded in the fact that, in a set of elements, the number of
subsets we can form is larger than the number of the elements themselves.
“Freedom” is inherently retroactive
We subjects are passively affected by pathological objects and motivations;
but, in a reflexive way, we ourselves have the minimal power to accept (or
reject) being affected in this way. Or, to risk a Deleuze-Hegelian
formulation, the subject is a fold of reflexivity by means of which I
retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine me, or, at least, the
mode of this linear determination. “Freedom” is thus inherently
retroactive. At its most elementary, it is not simply a free act that, out of
nowhere, starts a new causal link, but rather a retroactive act of endorsing
which link/sequence of necessities will determine me. Here, one should add a
Hegelian twist to Spinoza: freedom is not simply “recognized/known necessity
” but recognized/assumed necessity, the necessity constituted/actualized
through this recognition.
Teleology is the truth of linear mechanical causality
Is it not that, without this freedom, the effects would, in a way, not only
preexist in their causes but also directly preexist their causes? That is to
say, without the excess/gap between cause and effect, the effect would
preexist its cause in the sense that it would already be given in advance of
its cause, regulating the deployment of the causal link as its hidden telos—
teleology is the truth of linear mechanical causality (as Hegel put it).
Going even a step further, one should paradoxically claim that this assertion
of the excess of the effect over its cause, of the possibility of freedom, is
the fundamental assertion of Deleuze’s materialism. That is to say, the
point is not just that there is an immaterial excess over the material
reality of multiple bodies but that this excess is immanent to the level of
the bodies themselves. If we subtract this immaterial excess, we do not get “
pure reductionist materialism” but instead get a covert idealism. No wonder
that Descartes, the first to formulate the tenets of modern scientific
materialism, was also the first to formulate the basic modern idealist
principle of subjectivity: “There is a fully constituted material reality of
bodies and nothing else” is effectively an idealist position.
Either subjectivity is an illusion or reality is in itself not-All.
When Chalmers writes in his argument against the reductive explanation of
consciousness that “even if we knew every last detail about the physics of
the universe—the configuration, causation, and evolution among all the
fields and particles in the spatio-temporal manifold— that information would
not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience,”8 he commits
the standard Kantian mistake: such a total knowledge is strictly nonsensical,
epistemologically and ontologically. His reasoning is the obverse of the
vulgar determinist notion articulated in Marxism by Bukharin, who wrote that,
if we were to know the entirety of physical reality, we would also be able to
predict precisely the emergence of a revolution. More generally, this line of
reasoning—consciousness as an excess/surplus over physical totality—is
misleading since it has to evoke a meaningless hyperbole. When we imagine the
Whole of reality, there is no longer any place for consciousness (and
subjectivity). There are, as we have already seen, only two options left open
here: either subjectivity is an illusion or reality is in itself (not only
epistemologically) not-All.
Life/Infinity/Self
In one of the unexpected encounters of contemporary philosophy with Hegel,
the “Christian materialist” Peter van Inwagen developed the idea that
material objects like automobiles, chairs, computers, and so forth simply do
not exist. Say, a chair is not effectively, for itself, a chair—all we have
is a collection of “simples” (i.e., more elementary objects “arranged
chairwise”); so, although a chair functions as a chair, it is composed of a
multitude (wood pieces, nails, cushions, etc.) that are, in themselves,
totally indifferent toward this arrangement (there is, stricto sensu, no “
whole” a nail is here a part of). It is only with organisms that we have a
Whole. Here, the unity is minimally “for itself”; parts effectively
interact.9 As it was developed already by Lynn Margulis, the elementary form
of life, a cell, is characterized precisely by such a minimum of
self-relating, a minimum exclusively through which the limit between Inside
and Outside that characterize an organism can emerge. And, as Hegel put it,
thought is only a further development of this For-itself.
In biology, for instance, we have, at the level of reality, only bodily
interacting. “Life proper” emerges only at the minimally “ideal” level,
as an immaterial event that provides the form of unity of the living body as
the “same” in the incessant change of its material components. The basic
problem of evolutionary cognitivism—that of the emergence of the ideal
life-pattern—is none other than the old metaphysical enigma of the
relationship between chaos and order, between the Multiple and the One,
between parts and their whole. How can we get “order for free,” that is,
how can order emerge out of initial disorder? How can we account for a whole
that is larger than the mere sum of its parts? How can a One with a distinct
self-identity emerge out of the interaction of its multiple constituents? A
series of contemporary researchers, from Lynn Margulis to Francisco Varela,
assert that the true problem is not how an organism and its environs interact
or connect but, rather, the opposite one: how does a distinct self-identical
organism emerge out of its environs? How does a cell form the membrane that
separates its inside from its outside? The true problem is thus not how an
organism adapts to its environs but how it is that there is something, a
distinct entity, that must adapt itself in the first place. And, it is here,
at this crucial point, that today’s biological language starts to resemble,
quite uncannily, the language of Hegel. When Varela, for example, explains
his notion of autopoiesis, he repeats, almost verbatim, the Hegelian notion
of life as a ideological, self-organizing entity…The conclusion to be drawn
is thus that the only way to account for the emergence of the distinction
between the “inside” and “outside” constitutive of a living organism is
to posit a kind of self-reflexive reversal by means of which, to put it in
Hegelese, the One of an organism as a Whole retroactively “posits” as its
result, as that which it dominates and regulates, the set of its own causes
(i.e., the very multiple process out of which it emerged). In this way—and
only in this way—an organism no longer is limited by external conditions but
is fundamentally self-limited. Again, as Hegel would have articulated it,
life emerges when the external limitation (of an entity by its environs)
turns into self-limitation. This brings us back to the problem of infinity:
for Hegel, true infinity does not stand for limitless expansion but stands
for active self-limitation (self-determination) in contrast to
being-determined-by-the-other. In this precise sense, life (even at its most
elementary as a living cell) is the basic form of true infinity since it
already involves the minimal loop by means of which a process no longer is
simply determined by the Outside of its environs but is itself able to (over)
determine the mode of this determination and thus “posits its
presuppositions.” Infinity acquires its first actual existence the moment a
cell’s membrane starts to functions as a self-boundary. So, when Hegel
includes minerals in the category of “life,” as the lowest form of
organisms, does he not anticipate Margulis, who also insists on forms of life
preceding vegetable and animal life? The further key fact is that we thus
obtain a minimum of ideality. A property emerges that is purely virtual and
relational, with no substantial identity:
My sense of self exists because it gives me an interface with the world. I’m
“me” for interactions, but my “I” doesn’t substantially exist, in the
sense that it can’t be localized anywhere…. An emergent property, which is
produced by an underlying network, is a coherent condition that allows the
system in which it exists to interface at that level—that is, with other
selves or identities of the same kind. You can never say, “This property is
here; it’s in this component.” In the case of autopoiesis, you can’t say
that life—the condition of being self-produced—is in this molecule, or in
the DNA, or in the cellular membrane, or in the protein. Life is in the
configuration and in the dynamical pattern, which is what embodies it as an
emergent property.11
Here we encounter the minimum of “idealism” that defines the notion of
Self. A Self is precisely an entity without any substantial density, without
any hard kernel that would guarantee its consistency. If we penetrate the
surface of an organism and look deeper and deeper into it, we never encounter
some central controlling element that would be its Self, secretly pulling the
strings of its organs. The consistency of the Self is thus purely virtual; it
is as if it were an Inside that appears only when viewed from the Outside, on
the interface-screen—the moment we penetrate the interface and endeavor to
grasp the Self “substantially,” as it is “in itself,” it disappears like
sand between our fingers. The materialist reductionists who claim “there
really is no self” are thus right, but they nonetheless miss the point. At
the level of material reality (inclusive of the psychological reality of “
inner experience”), there effectively is no Self. The Self is not the “
inner kernel” of an organism but a surface-effect. A “true” human Self
functions, in a sense, like a computer screen: what is “behind” it is
nothing but a network of “selfless” neuronal machinery.
(Self)Consciousness
The problem with this autopoietic notion of life, elaborated by Maturana and
Varela in their classic Autopoiesis and Cognition,13 does not reside in the
question “Does this notion of autopoiesis effectively overcome the
mechanistic paradigm?” but, rather, in the question “how are we to pass
from this self-enclosed loop of Life to (Self)Consciousness?”
(Self)Consciousness is also reflexive, self-relating in its relationship to
an Other. However, this reflexivity is thoroughly different from the organism
’s self-enclosure. A (self)conscious living being displays what Hegel calls
the infinite power of Understanding, of abstract (and abstracting) thought—
it is able, in its thoughts, to tear apart the organic Whole of Life, to
submit it to a mortifying analysis, to reduce the organism to its isolated
elements. (Self)Consciousness thus reintroduces the dimension of DEATH into
organic Life: language itself is a mortifying “mechanism” that colonizes
the Organism. (This, according to Lacan, is what Freud was after in his
hypothesis on the “death drive.”) It was (again) already Hegel who
formulated this tension (among other places) at the beginning of the chapter
on Self-Consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he opposed the
two forms of “Life” qua self-relating through relating to the Other:
(organic-biological) life and (self) consciousness. The true problem is not
(only) how to pass from preorganic matter to life but how life itself can
break its autopoietic closure and ex-statically start to relate to its
external Other (where this ex-static openness can also turn into the
mortifying objectivization of Understanding). The problem is not Life but the
Death-in-Life (“tarrying with the negative”) of the speaking organism.
The big Other
It is similar with the celebration, in movies and narratives, of a lone hero
who accomplishes his sacrificial act for the good of others unseen, without
others being aware of it. Although people around him ignore him or even laugh
at him, he is deeply satisfied in and with himself—or is he? Is it not,
rather, that he did it for the big Other who appears precisely at this point
at which there are no “real” others to take note of him? In other words,
does not the satisfaction he gets emerge from the imagined gaze that observes
him? This big Other is eventually embodied in us, spectators—as if the hero
knows he is part of a film (or, at least, part of a story). (The concept of
the big Other, with its ambiguous virtual status, is, in itself, a
compromise, the avoidance of both terms of the alternative confronts us, or
to quote Arthur Clark: “Either we are alone in the universe [with no other
intelligent beings out there], or we are not alone. Both possibilities are
equally terrifying.” The big Other is thus something in-between, enabling us
to have our cake and eat it too. There is no real Other out there, but there
is nonetheless the fiction of the big Other that enables us to avoid the
horror of being alone.)
The zero-degree of “humanization”
Of course, the enigma here is how does this short circuit come about? How can
the pleasure experience, which was originally a mere by-product of the
goal-oriented activity aiming at our survival (i.e., a signal that this goal
was achieved), turn into an aim-in-itself? The exemplary case here, of
course, is that of sexuality: sexual pleasure, which originally signaled that
the goal of procreation was achieved, becomes an aim-in-itself, so that the
human animal spends large amounts of time pursuing this aim, planning it in
all details, even directly blocking the original goal (through
contraception). It is the Catholic attitude of allowing sex only for the goal
of procreation that debases it to animal coupling.
The basic paradox here is that the specifically human dimension emerges
precisely when what was originally a mere by-product is elevated into an
autonomous aim: man is not more “reflexive”; on the contrary, man perceives
as a direct goal what, for an animal, has no intrinsic value. In short, the
zero-degree of “humanization” is not a further “mediation” of animal
activity, its reinscription as a subordinated moment of a higher totality
(say, we eat and procreate to develop higher spiritual potentials) but the
radical narrowing of focus, the elevation of a minor activity into an
end-in-itself. We become “humans” when we get caught into a closed,
self-propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction
in it.
Symbolic representation is strictly correlative to the emergence of the abyss
of the Other’s desire
Along these lines, when Dennett discusses the passage from “free-floating”
intentionality to explicit intentionality (from a mind that acts
intentionally without being aware of it to a mind that is “fully conscious,
” which explicitly sets its goals, which not only acts blindly in an
intentional way but represents to itself its intentions—in short, the
Hegelian passage from In-itself to For-itself, from implicit intentionality
to intentionality posited as such), he introduces two interconnected
features.45 First, such a passage is embedded in (what will later become) “
intersubjectivity”: an agent is led to represent its goals to itself when it
is compelled to probe into the enigma of other’s (his competitors, his prey
or predators) goals. Second, the capacity to explicitly communicate the goal
of one’s behavior to another agent (gestures that mean “Look, I am trying
to catch a fish!” “Look, I am trying to escape!” etc.) is strictly
correlative to the capacity to cheat, to keep a secret (to pretend not to
know something—say, the location of a rich source of food—or, on the
contrary, to pretend to know something one does not really know), to delude
the other as to one’s true intention. The capacity to explicate meaning
equals the capacity to conceal what one really means—or, to refer to
Talleyrand (quoted by Dennett): “Language was invented so that people could
conceal their thoughts from each other.”46 And, one might add, language
helps people conceal their thoughts from themselves. Or, as Lacan put it,
symbolic representation is strictly correlative to the emergence of the abyss
of the Other’s desire: “ Che vuoi? ” What do you really want from me?
Dennett refers here to the case of a hare chased by a fox who, when it
determines that this fox is unlikely to succeed in its chase,
does a strange and wonderful thing. It stands up on its hind legs, most
conspicuously, and stares back the fox down! Why? Because it is announcing to
the fox that the fox ought to give up. “I’ve already seen you, and I’m not
afraid. Don’t waste your precious time and even more precious energy chasing
me. Give it up!” And the fox typically draws just this conclusion, turning
elsewhere for its supper.47
Dennett is right to insist that, in spite of appearances, we are not yet
dealing here with the case of proper communication, in which the speaker
declares to the addressee its intention-to-signify—the hare does not yet
fulfill the four levels which, according to the classical analysis of Paul
Grice, have to be present in a full act of signification.48 So, what should
we add? It is not enough to impute to the hare the capacity to cheat (say,
adopting this stance even if it “knows very well” that he is close enough
to the fox for the fox to catch it). One should here follow Lacan and affirm
that, in order for the hare’s gesture to count as symbolic communication,
the hare should display the capacity of cheating in the guise of truth: for
instance, it should adopt this stance, counting on the fact that the fox will
think that the hare is trying to deceive it and nonetheless start to run
after it, thereby achieving it true aim (say, of diverting the fox’s
attention from another hare, the first hare’s beloved mating partner, which
effectively is close enough to the fox to be caught by it).
Art
In art, sublimating is incomplete—the artist clings to (a piece of)
experiential reality, but this very incompleteness of sublimating enables him
or her to generate the effect of the Sublime by way of elevating this “
pathological” remainder to the “dignity of the Thing.” One encounters here
the ambiguity of the Hegelian formula of art as “the sensitive manifestation
of the Idea.” As Schelling already knew, this formula is not to be read as
if a preexisting notional truth is to be dressed in sensitive clothes—the
structure is more paradoxical. The key term here is “Idea,” which (in Kant)
is precisely an index of the unknowable. So the point is that art manifests
what resists the grasp of knowledge: the artistic “Beautiful” is the mask
in the guise of which the abyss of the Real Thing, the Thing resisting
symbolization, appears.
Courtly love
This is why Vertigo is not simply the movie about a contemporary case of
courtly love but the movie that renders palpable the deadlock of courtly
love, the terrible price that both partners have to pay for it. When, in his
Seminar VII on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that, in courtly
love poetry, the Lady is reduced to a void, that the predicates attributed to
her (beauty, wisdom, etc.) are not to be read as actual descriptions, so that
it appears as if all poets are addressing the same empty abstraction,20 what
is at stake here is not the claim that the poet loves the lady independently
of her positive features, that he aims at the core of her being, the void of
her subjectivity beyond all her positive characteristics.21 Courtly love
poetry effectively involves the mortification of the beloved Lady: what is
missing in courtly love is the sign of imperfection, the minimal “
pathological stain” that causes me to fall in love. Or, to put it in Badiou’
s terms, courtly love goes to the end in the passion of purification,
abstracting all positive features of its object, reducing it to the Void. In
contrast to it, true love follows the passion of subtraction— in suspending
the weight of all positive features of the beloved, it does not merely reduce
the beloved Other to a void; it also renders visible the “minimal difference
” between the void and the pathological stain, the remainder of the Real,
which sustains this void.
The true cynics
Recall the immigrant-bashing skinhead who, when interviewed, sneers back at
the journalist and provides him with a perfect social psychologist’s
explanation of his own misdeeds (lack of paternal authority and maternal
care, the crisis of values in our society, etc.), and whose unsurpassable
model is still the song “Officer Krupke” from Leonard Bernstein’s West
Side Story. This figure cannot simply be dismissed as the supreme case of
cynical reason, as the embodiment of the actual functioning of today’s
ideology. Since he speaks from the position of the explanandum, his remarks
also effectively denounce the fakeness and falsity of the way the ruling
ideology and its knowledge account for his acts: “This is what you think I
am, this is how, in your learned interventions and reports, you will
characterize and dismiss me, but you see, I can also play that game, and it
doesn’t touch me at all!” Is this not an act of denouncing the hidden
cynicism of the humanist “all-understanding” social workers and
psychologists themselves? What if they are the true cynics in this affair?
Democracy
In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects but new
social (interpersonal) relations themselves. It was already Marx who
emphasized how material production is always also the (re)production of the
social relations within which it occurs; with today’s capitalism, however,
the production of social relations is the immediate end/goal of production.
The wager of Hardt and Negri is that this directly socialized, immaterial
production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them
when production is directly social, formally and as to its content?); the
producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations
(politics) is the stuff of their work. The way is thus open for “absolute
democracy,” for the producers directly regulating their social relations
without even the detour of democratic representation.
The problem here is, at a minimum, triple. First, can one really interpret
this move toward the hegemonic role of immaterial labor as the move from
production to communication, to social interaction (i.e., in Aristotelian
terms, from techne as poiesis to praxis?) Does it really indicate the
overcoming of the Arendtian distinction between production and vis activa, or
of the Habermasian distinction between instrumental and communicational
reason? Second, how does this “politicization” of production, in which
production directly produces (new) social relations, affect the very notion
of politics? Is such an “administration of people” (subordinated to the
logic of profit) still politics, or is it the most radical sort of
depoliticization, the entry into “post-politics”? And last but not least,
is democracy not by necessity, with regard to its very notion, nonabsolute?
There is no democracy without a hidden, presupposed elitism. Democracy is, by
definition, not “global”; it has to be based on values or truths that one
cannot select “democratically.” In democracy one can fight for truth but
not decide what is truth. As Claude Lefort and others amply demonstrated,
democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately
re-presenting (expressing) a preexisting set of interests, opinions, and so
forth since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such
representation. In other words, the democratic articulation of an interest is
always minimally performative: through their democratic representatives
people establish what their interests and opinions are. As Hegel already
knew, “absolute democracy” could actualize itself only in the guise of its
“oppositional determination,” as terror. There is, thus, a choice to be
made here: do we accept democracy’s structural, not just accidental,
imperfection, or do we also endorse its terroristic dimension?
The tautological repetition
Many a commentator has made ironic remarks about the apparent stylistic
clumsiness of the titles of Soviet Communist books and articles, such as
their tautological character, in the sense of the repeated use of the same
word (such as “revolutionary dynamics in the early stages of the Russian
revolution” or “economic contradictions in the development of the Soviet
economy”). However, what if this tautology points toward the awareness of
the logic of betrayal best rendered by the classic reproach of Robespierre to
the Dantonist opportunists: “What you want is a revolution without
revolution?” The tautological repetition thus signals the urge to repeat the
negation, to relate it to itself—the true revolution is “revolution with
revolution,” a revolution that, in its course, revolutionizes its own
starting presuppositions. Hegel had a presentiment of this necessity when he
wrote, “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its
constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a
revolution without a reformation.”39 He thereby announced the necessity of
what Mao Ze Dong called the “Cultural Revolution” as the condition of the
successful social revolution. What, exactly, does this mean? The problem with
hitherto revolutionary attempts was not that they were “too extreme” but
that they were not radical enough, that they did not question their own
presuppositions. In a wonderful essay on Che-vengur, Platonov’s great
peasant Utopia written in 1927 and 1928 (just prior to forced
collectivization), Fredric Jameson describes the two moments of the
revolutionary process. It begins with the gesture of radical negativity:
[T]his first moment of world-reduction, of the destruction of the idols and
the sweeping away of an old world in violence and pain, is itself the
precondition for the reconstruction of something else. A first moment of
absolute immanence is necessary, the blank slate of absolute peasant
immanence or ignorance, before new and undreamed-of-sensations and feelings
can come into being.40
Then follows the second stage, the invention of a new life—not only the
construction of the new social reality in which our utopian dreams would be
realized but also the (re)construction of these dreams themselves:
[A] process that it would be too simple and misleading to call reconstruction
or Utopian construction, since in effect it involves the very effort to find
a way to begin imagining Utopia to begin with. Perhaps in a more Western kind
of psychoanalytic language … we might think of the new onset of the Utopian
process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention
of the desire called Utopia in the first place, along with new rules for the
fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing—a set of narrative protocols with
no precedent in our previous literary institutions.41
The reference to psychoanalysis is crucial and very precise: in a radical
revolution, people not only “realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams
”; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. Is this not
the exact formula of the link between death drive and sublimation? It is only
this reference to what happens after the revolution, to the “morning after,
” that allows us to distinguish between libertarian pathetic outbursts and
true revolutionary upheavals. These upheavals lose their energy when one has
to approach the prosaic work of social reconstruction—at this point,
lethargy sets in. In contrast to it, recall the immense creativity of the
Jacobins just prior to their fall, the numerous proposals about new civic
religion, about how to sustain the dignity of old people, and so on. Therein
also resides the interest in reading the reports about daily life in the
Soviet Union in the early 1920s, with the enthusiastic urge to invent new
rules for quotidian existence: how does one get married? What are the new
rules of courting? How does one celebrate a birthday? How does one get buried?
…42 It is precisely with regard to this dimension that revolution proper is
to be opposed to the carnivalesque reversal as a temporary respite, the
exception stabilizing the hold of power:
In the European Middle Ages it was customary for great households to choose a
“Lord of Misrule.” The person chosen was expected to preside over the
revels that briefly reversed or parodied the conventional social and economic
hierarchies…. When the brief reign of misrule was over, the customary order
of things would be restored: the Lords of Misrule would go back to their
menial occupations, while their social superiors resumed their wonted status
…. Sometimes the idea of Lord of Misrule would spill over from the realm of
revel to the realm of politics…. The apprentices took over from their guild
masters for a reckless day or two, … gender roles were reversed for a day as
the women took over the tasks and airs normally associated only with men.
Chinese philosophers also loved the paradoxes of status reversed, the ways
that wit or shame could deflate pretension and lead to sudden shifts of
insight…. It was Mao’s terrible accomplishment to seize on such insights
from earlier Chinese philosophers, combine them with elements drawn from
Western socialist thought, and to use both in tandem to prolong the limited
concept of misrule into a long-drawn-out adventure in upheaval. To Mao, the
former lords and masters should never be allowed to return; he felt they were
not his betters, and that society was liberated by their removal. He also
thought the customary order of things should never be restored.43
Is, however, such a “terrible accomplishment” not the elementary gesture of
every true revolutionary? Why revolution at all, if we do not think that, “
the customary order of things should never be restored.” What Mao does is to
deprive the transgression of its ritualized, ludic character by way of taking
it seriously: revolution is not just a temporary safety valve, a
carnivalesque explosion destined to be followed by a sobering morning after—
it is here to stay. Furthermore, this logic of carnivalesque suspension is
limited to traditional hierarchical societies. With the full deployment of
capitalism, especially today’s “late capitalism,” it is the predominant “
normal” life itself that, in a way, gets “carnivalized,” with its constant
self-revolutionizing, its reversals, crises, reinventions, so that it is the
critique of capitalism, from a “stable” ethical position, that more and
more appears today as an exception.
How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant
self-revolutionizing? Perhaps, this is the question today.

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