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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