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I reject the widespread idea that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is based on an « ontology of difference ». The only book where he seems to propound such an ontology is in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, and in the very next book LOGIC OF SENSE « difference » plays next to no role. « Difference » is a mask for multiplicity.
This idea of difference as being only one (and temporary) instantantiation of multiplicity is explicated in many places on my blog and in my various articles, but it can be found specifically set out here:
https://www.academia.edu/11652059/LARUELLE_AND_DELEUZE_from_difference_to_multiplicity
It would be a mistake to concludee that Deleuze progressed from differentialism to pluralism Guattari’s influence. The conceptual evolution involved is more complex than that.
First we must remark that Deleuze was already a pluralist before DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION (1968), the adhesion to pluralism is very clear in his NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY (1962), and straight after in LOGIC OF SENSE (1969).
In other words, far from being the key to Deleuze’s thought DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION is the exception, in which Deleuze takes on the « mask » of difference to speak to the contemporary conceptual conjuncture influenced by structuralism and to inflect it towards pluralism.
Note: I put « mask » in scare-quotes because it is more than a disguise on the same conceptual level, as if it were a case of a simple reformulation in the terms of the current vocabulary. It is rather a question of a difference in conceptual level, the ontology of difference is just one instantiation of Deleuze’s pluralist meta-ontology (as is the ontology of desiring machines) which progressively fades away in the chapters of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, in favour of an ontology of « assemblages ».
My analysis here differs from that set out by Laruelle in his book PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE (1986). As I have argued elsewhere on this blog Laruelle comes rather late to the game, propounding post festum his « critical introduction » of philosophies of difference at a moment when all the major thinkers of difference had already long abandoned it.
My second objection to Laruelle on this Deleuzian strand is that he misreads the status of difference in Deleuze, seeing it as the ultimate ontological concept whereas it is the provisional instantiation of a pluralist meta-ontology implemented for intervening in a specific conjuncture, and not to be inflated into a systemic ground.
Deleuze talks about the primacy of multiplicities in all his major works, and about difference in only one. In my reconstruction I call Deleuze’s overarching research programme a pluralist meta-ontology. One of the key traits of pluralism in this sense is diachronicity (the ontology evolves over time and varies over contexts, what Deleuze calls « heterogenesis), another is porosity (the existence of semantic or structural incommensurabilities does not exclude pragmatic interactions, which Deleuze calls « encounters » or « dialogues ».
It is on the basis of this model that I think « difference » is far less important for Deleuze than commonly believed, and that is embodies a low degree of ontological pluralism.
For some wider context, my original paper (from 1980): https://www.academia.edu/42083394/PLURALIST_FLEXI_ONTOLOGY_Deleuze_Lyotard_Serres_Feyerabend_
In 1980 after spending six months in Paris attending Deleuze and Foucault’s seminars, and interviewing Serres and Lyotard, I returned to Sydney and gave a paper synthesising my impressions. In particular I set out my idea of a common meta-ontology of pluralism (that I called « flexi-ontology » at the time, to highlight the diachronic aspect).
It was on the basis of this wider research programme that I elaborated my blog Agent Swarm, and I was pleased to see that Bruno Latour underwent a meta-ontological turn that confirmed my prior hypotheses, asking what is the recommended dose of ontological pluralism?, and distinguishing different levels of dose:
It is interesting in this context to see that Deleuze in 1989 played with the idea of grouping his published works not in chronological order, but rather in an order that we could call « thematic », but that is better described in the light of the distinctions made above between meta-ontology, instantiations, and degrees of ontological pluralism, that in Deleuzian terms we could call degrees of deterritorialisation.
In David Lapoujade’s introduction to DESERT ISLANDS, he cites the divisions that Deleuze envisions for his bibliography:
« I. From Hume to Bergson / II. Classical Studies / III. Nietzschean Studies / IV. Critical and Clinical / V. Esthetics / VI. Cinema Studies / VII. Contemporary Studies / VIII. The Logic of Sense / IX. Anti-Oedipus / X. Difference and Repetition / XI. A Thousand Plateaus »
I am indebted to Alexander Boyd who, citing this classification, posed the question of the logic behind the last four divisions.
In terms of the analysis I have been developing one could see Deleuze’s grouping as corresponding to an order of increasing degrees of deterritorialisation, or of ontological pluralism.
From this point of view, LOGIC OF SENSE is the odd-one-out, as it relies on psychoanalysis (content), series (method), surfaces (metaphysics). ANTI-OEDIPUS constitutes a rupture with all three.
Nonetheless ANTI-OEDIPUS is itself over-engaged in the agon with psychoanalysis and does not make explicit the new image of thought. Deleuze in his new preface to the American edition of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION makes it clear that over and above the ontology of difference is the « liberation of thought from the images that imprison it ».
This new pluralist practice of thought is described and analysed in Chapter 3 of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, but is only partially instantiated in that book. The concrete instantiation of a new image of thought in a variety of domains is finally accomplished in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS.
This is why Deleuze claims that the key chapter in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION is Chapter Three on the image of thought (and not the chapters on repetition and difference), that this chapter is « the most necessary and the most concrete » and that it serves as the best introduction to the books that follow.
terenceblake
Live-blogging la lecture du « nouveau » livre de Michel Foucault
PARADOXE DE (LA MORT DE) L’AUTEUR
La publication aujourd’hui, « maintenant » en mai 2023, d’un manuscrit écrit en 1966 est une entreprise paradoxale, surtout lorsque le livre est de Michel Foucault, qui proclamait à la fois la « mort de l’auteur » et affirmait son autorité auctoriale en interdisant toute publication « posthume ».
Après la publication posthume de CONFESSIONS DE LA CHAIR, nous avons maintenant le plaisir de pouvoir lire une nouvelle publication, d’un manuscrit inédit et pratiquement achevé de Michel Foucault, ce qui constitue une contribution majeure à la publication progressive des parerga et paralipomena de Foucault.
PARADOX DU « MAINTENANT »
Un livre « nouveau », âgé de 57 ans – c’est un paradoxe. Le livre lui-même réfléchit sur le « paradoxe du maintenant » et doit être lu à la lumière de cette réflexion. Comme de nombreux travaux interrogeant les limites de l’actualité de la pensée, nous courons le danger de nous perdre dans les labyrinthes de l’auto-réflexion. C’est ce que nous sommes invités à faire en lisant ce livre, nous perdre, nous égarer dans l’espace. L’espace conceptuel (au sens que Deleuze et Guattari donne au concept dans QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE ?) est autoréférentiel. Si vous n’êtes pas « perdu », vous ne comprenez pas.
Les premiers mots de DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE font référence au « maintenant » :
« Depuis quelques temps déjà ».
Foucault ne commence pas son livre par un geste fondateur, un point absolu de rupture, mais il s’inscrit dans un devenir en cours, qui sépare constamment le passé (des archives) du présent (des mutations). Il continuera à diviser ce « maintenant » (plus proche de la fission de l’atome que du coupage des cheveux en quatre) dans le reste de l’argumentation du livre.. Donc pour le moment, nous ne savons pas dans quel « maintenant » Foucault situe son livre.
Cette division du maintenant commence déjà dans la deuxième partie de la phrase:
« Depuis quelque temps déjà – est-ce depuis Nietzsche ? plus récemment encore ? »
Note : Foucault, dans cette première phrase, utilise l’une des nombreuses façons de se référer au « maintenant ». Il n’utilise pas le mot « maintenant », qu’il analysera plus tard en détail, mais un mode d’expression plus complexe connotant la continuité plutôt qu’un simple « point » dans le temps.
« Déjà » ici est utilisé en conjonction avec « depuis » et un verbe au présent parfait, donc le sens est d’une durée indéfinie jusqu’au présent inclus. Il s’agit d’un cas d’aspect parfait. Foucault poursuit dans le chapitre 2 en analysant les différentes emplois de « maintenant » dans les différents modes de discours (scientifique, littéraire, philosophique, ordinaire), s’appuyant sur les analyses de Jakobson et Benveniste.
Foucault construit une grammaire énonciative des différents types de discours, mais malheureusement il n’incorpore pas dans son analyse une considération explicite de l’aspect perfectif (un mode qui a des utilisations philosophiquement importantes dans le discours de Foucault lui-même).
Pour Foucault, la périodisation de ce « maintenant » est peu claire, et pour situer sa différence il est obligé de remonter aux Grecs anciens, et encore plus loin, en se référant aux « arts millénaires », ce qui renvoient aux chamans, remontant même avant les Égyptiens, avant de revenir à aujourd’hui.
PARADOXE DE LA PHILOSOPHIE : contre les essences
Dans LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, Foucault pose explicitement la question « qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » et y répond de manière provisoire. Pour ma part, je vais tenter de produire une lecture « naïve » ou non universitaire du livre. Un bon livre compagnon à garder à l’esprit est QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? de Deleuze et Guattari, qui traite des problèmes similaires.
QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? a été publié en 1991 (il y a 32 ans) et le livre fait explicitement référence aux idées de Foucault des années 1960, sans citer LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, encore inédit à l’époque. La comparaison des deux œuvres peut nous donner nous donner une aide précieuse pour saisir de la problématique de Foucault.
Foucault avait 40 ans lorsqu’il a rédigé son livre, Deleuze et Guattari avaient la soixantaine lorsqu’ils ont publié le leur.
Pour nous, le « nouveau » livre de Foucault, tout comme celui de Deleuze et Guattari (hélas !), appartient à l’époque précédente et à son archive. Ou plutôt, ils appartiennent au sous-ensemble de l’archive indiqué par Deleuze et Guattari contenant la « bibliographie » de la question:
« Peut-être ne peut-on poser la question Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? que tard, quand vient la vieillesse, et l’heure de parler concrètement. En fait, la bibliographie est très mince. »
Bien sûr, la « question » Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? est une plaisanterie, c’est un paradoxe. « Qu’est-ce que X ? » semble chercher une essence, alors que Deleuze et Guattari, tout comme Foucault, rejetaient l’essentialisme au profit d’une approche casuistique – il n’y a pas de question et réponse générale, mais seulement un ensemble ouvert de cas et de circonstances.
Nous verrons comment Foucault traite cette distinction entre « la voie royale de la philosophie » et la voie mineure d’une non-philosophie qui serait co-originelle avec cette image royale de la pensée dans le deuxième paragraphe.
PARADOXE DE L’ÂGE : senex vs puer
Nous avons vu que l’incipit de QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? comporte un paradoxe et nous renvoie aux cas concrets:
« Peut-être ne peut-on poser la question Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? que tard, quand vient la vieillesse, et l’heure de parler concrètement. En fait, la bibliographie est très mince. »
On peut voir dans ce texte de Deleuze et Guattari leur manière à eux de déployer la distinction senex/puer : le puer fait, le senex réfléchit.
Comme le souligne James Hillman, cette distinction ne doit pas être entendu litéralement, de manière chronologique. Senex et puer sont des personnages conceptuels exprimant des phases ou des moments qui traversent toute la vie. Ainsi, nous ne pouvons pas opposer facilement le vieux et le jeune.
Je suppose que l’on peut qualifier le Foucault qui écrit LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, comme étant d’âge moyen, ni jeune ni vieux, au milieu de la vie.
Le mot clé n’est pas « l’âge », mais « le milieu », entre-deux, là où les choses poussent (selon Deleuze et Guattari). Foucault se trouve au milieu, entre les livres d’action culminant avec LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES et le livre de réflexion L’ARCHÉOLOGIE DU SAVOIR. Le milieu est l’endroit où les choses poussent, où les événement se passe, où le nouveau émerge. Aucun âge requis.
PARADOXE DE L’AUTO-DIAGNOSTIC : une entreprise risquée
La bibliographie de la question « qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » a depuis lors grandi, et nous avons de nombreux nouveaux ouvrages à ajouter, des livres par Badiou, Lyotard, Laruelle, Latour, Stiegler, etc. Mon blog est consacré à la discussion de ces œuvres, et je peux dire en toute vérité que je me suis posé la question toute ma vie.
Je lirai donc Foucault comme il ne pouvait pas se lire lui-même, à la lumière de tous ces autres travaux, essayant de lui donner une actualité différente de celle qu’il prétendait ne pas connaître, mais seulement diagnostiquer, et ainsi se diagnostiquer lui-même avec elle.
PARADOXE DE LA DIVINATION : la philosophie est (aussi) une non-philosophie
Foucault commence sous le signe de Nietzsche (mais c’est déjà un signe interrogatif) :
« Depuis quelque temps déjà – est-ce depuis Nietzsche? plus récemment encore? –, la philosophie a reçu en partage une tâche qui lui n’était jusqu’ici point familière: celle de diagnostiquer ».
Ceci est la première phrase du livre, et nous pouvons déjà y deviner beaucoup. Il affirmera ensuite que le philosophe a toujours été tant soit peu « voyant » ou « devin ». C’est ainsi, en étant nous-mêmes devins, que nous pouvons lire Foucault philosophiquement.
En d’autres termes: pour lire philosophiquement, il faut aussi lire non-philosophiquement.
Il y a la philosophie en tant que modèle de pensée, ce que Foucault appelle, dans le paragraphe suivant, la « voie royale », pour la caractériser en termes de sa volonté de fonder ou d’achever la connaissance, d’énoncer l’être ou l’homme » (deuxième paragraphe).
Il y a aussi la philosophie en tant qu’art divinatoire, pratique médicale, tâche exégétique. La philosophie en tant que diagnostic par opposition à la philosophie en tant que fondement. « La » philosophie a été les deux activités, depuis le début: fonder et totaliser, et deviner et diagnostiquer. A la fois systématique et casuistique, philosophie et non-philosophie.
PARADOXE DU « NIETZSCHÉISME »: diagnostic sans mal et sans remède
Nous pouvons donc deviner que la référence foucaldienne à Friedrich Nietzsche devra être élargie et complexifiée, et que le concept de « diagnostic » devra être déconstruit, en le libérant du modèle médical qui le lie à la découverte d’une maladie et à la proposition d’un remède.
Ce manuscrit a été écrit en 1966, l’année de publication des Écrits de Jacques Lacan. La psychanalyse des années 50 et 60 s’était affranchie du modèle médical du diagnostic et du traitement, ainsi que du fantasme médical d’une « guérison » entendu comme un retour à la normale.
Dans ce contexte, Foucault affirme la priorité généalogique de Nietzsche dans la déconstruction du modèle médical tout en validant la communalité d’une cause partagée. Foucault ne mentionne pas la psychanalyse, il est déjà trop déterritorialisé pour cela, mais cette cause commune consistant à nous libérer de l’image médicale de la pensée est un exemple de ce que Foucault appellera un peu plus tard, au début du chapitre 2, « l’isochronie » par opposition à la synchronie.
PARADOXE DU MOMENT (PARTAGÉ): isochronie vs synchronie
L’œuvre de Foucault se déroule sur une grande partie de la même période que celle de Lacan, et chacun a une place importante dans la culture commune contemporaine. De ce point de vue, les deux œuvres sont synchrones.
Cependant, « l’isochronie » concerne un autre aspect du discours philosophique, « le « moment » même où elle se déploie » (Le Discours Philosophique, page 22). Cette déconstruction de l’image médicale de la pensée, partagée par de nombreux autres (comme Ivan Illich, James Hillman), est ce qui unit Foucault et Lacan dans une cause commune de l’époque. C’est en tant que tels qu’ils sont « isochrones ».
Quelque chose est en train de changer dans la culture commune, une mutation se prépare, sans quoi les penseurs contemporains ne pourraient pas penser ce qu’ils pensent, et Lacan et Foucault en font partie. La relation de l’homme ordinaire à l’inconscient, au corps, à la médecine et à la philosophie change, et le modèle médical, dans sa forme traditionnelle, se dissout.
PARADOXE DE LA PROPHÉTIE: le « maintenant » est à venir
Foucault commence son manuscrit ici, en anticipant implicitement, « déjà » – dans le présent, les devenirs émergent de mai 68. Il commence donc par nouer la question « qu’est-ce que la philosophie? » à une question peut-être plus large « qu’est-ce que le diagnostic? ».
La tâche de la philosophie serait de diagnostiquer dans le présent ce qui désormais appartient au passé, et ce qui déjà participe à l’avenir. C’est ce que Foucault appelle à la fin du deuxième paragraphe la tâche de « prophétiser l’instant ».
terenceblake
Live-blogging reading PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE, the new book by Michel Foucault.
In the preceding post I began to discuss the different modes French has of referring to the « now » as they are deployed in Foucault’s text. To do this I employ the terms of the sort of enunciative grammar, based on his knowledge of Jakobson and Benveniste, that Foucault uses in Chapter 2 to sketch the grammar of the different discourses (scientific, literary, philosophical, ordinary) that he analyses, in terms of their differing relation to the « now » (and also to the « I » and the « here »).
In the first sentence Foucault uses another mode of reference to the now: « hitherto » (« jusqu’ici », literally « up to here »). The full sentence reads:
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently? – philosophy has been allotted a task with which it was hitherto [NB: one could also translate this as « up to now »] totally unfamiliar: to diagnose ».
It is interesting to point out these markers of the « now », as this first chapter ends on a reference to the present. To give a definition of the present
« the philosopher must say quite simply 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠. Not being, nor the things themselves…But what there is, with neither recoil nor distance, in the very instant that he is speaking ».
It is to be noted that the expression « in the very instant » refers, once again but differently, to the « now » or the moment of enunciation.
Diagnosis, for Foucault, is an ontological speech act. To diagnose is to say what there is (not what is, or what exists) in the instant of enunciation.
This tying together, in the first sentence, of philosophy, diagnosis and the now in an enuciative knot will become the key to an ontology of the present at the conclusion of the first chapter.
terenceblake
Comment et pourquoi philosopher aujourd’hui? Quel rapport peut-on établir entre notre actualité et l »inactuel des monuments (petits et grands) noétiques édifiés par les penseurs qui nous ont précédés. Plus particulièrement, est-ce que les grands penseurs de la deuxième moitié du 20ième siècle sont encore nos contemporains, capables d’informer et de vivifier notre pensée? ou sont-ils précisément des monuments historiquement datés et dépassés, à peine moins éloignés de nos vies que les grecs anciens?
Ces questions de posent avec encore plus de vivacité suite à la publication récente d’un manuscrit inédit de Michel Foucault : DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE (texte établi par Daniele Lorenzini et Orazio Irrera, sous la direction de François Ewald – paru chez Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, le 12 mai 2023.
Le manuscrit date de 1966, il a été écrit après LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES, publié en 1966, et avant la publication de L’ARCHÉOLOGIE DU SAVOIR en 1969. Comme on peut le voir en parcourant la table des matières, et comme la datation de l’écriture le suggère, ce « nouveau » livre constitue le pont parfait entre ces deux œuvres établies.
De surcroît, suivant mon fil rouge du rapport entre l’actuel et l’inactuel, qui constitue aussi un des thèmes majeurs du livre, je tenterai d’arguer que ce nouveau livre publié à titre posthume a une valeur bien plus grande que la simple nostalgie qu’on peut ressentir devant un monument perdu, retrouvé, restauré et enfin dévoilé aux yeux d’un public pieux? (pour ne pas dire crédule, mais est-ce qu’on y « croit » aujourd’hui?).
Les méditations de Michel Foucault contenues dans Le Discours Philosophiques sont en puissance, et peut-être aussi en acte pour le lecteur sérieux et naïf, « intempestives », et peuvent donc être utiles pour nous aujourd’hui, alors que nous sommes confrontés à un mouvement de révision réactionnaire (Domenico Losurdo, Jan Rehmann) en théorie, qui tente une fois de plus de liquider l’héritage des grands penseurs post-nietzschéens français inspirateurs et héritiers d’un mai ’68 de la pensée (et non d’une « pensée ’68 » fabriquée de toutes pièces par les liquidateurs des générations précédentes).
« LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE de Michel Foucault pourrait bien être l’équivalent dans son œuvre de QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE ? de Deleuze et Guattari, car nous savons d’après les propres dits de Foucault que son travail est philosophique, en ce qu’il se place dans le domaine de l’histoire des idées, mais n’est pas lui-même un travail d’historien.
En tant que tel, le nouveau livre ne devrait pas être lu uniquement historiquement, comme un document historique fournissant le lien manquant entre LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES et L’ARCHÉOLOGIE DU SAVOIR, mais aussi philosophiquement, en termes de clarification de notre présent et d’ouverture de nouvelles lignes pour la recherche et la vie à venir.
En tant que tel, le livre est à la fois une contribution à une archive datée et dépassée et un catalyseur potentiel pour la pensée future. En bref, je demande au livre de se diagnostiquer et de se soigner lui-même, selon les deux mouvements que Foucault attribue à la philosophie actuelle dans le premier chapitre :
Il convient de noter que QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? de Deleuze et Guattari est un livre non pas de « guérison », mais de souci de soi, et soin de la pensée. « Penser c’est panser » nous disait Bernard Stiegler, en s’inspirant des œuvres de Foucault et de Deleuze et Guattari.
QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE? commence, après une introduction situant son intervention dans l’état actuel de la question, avec un ensemble plutôt structuraliste de démarcations (entre la philosophie, l’art et la science) et se termine par une typologie poststructuraliste d’œuvres violant ces démarcations.
Le nouveau livre de Foucault, LE DISCOURS PHILOSOPHIQUE, trace un mouvement semblable. Il commence, après avoir établi une typologie du regard philosophique, avec une analyse des démarcations qui séparent le discours philosophique de trois autres instances – les discours littéraires, scientifiques et « ordinaires ». Il se termine avec le constat d’un fait nouveau, la constitution d’un « archive intégrale », et à partir de cette nouvelle donne l’émergence de la « discursivité » comme forme ontologique transversale aux distinctions et démarcations des époques précédentes de la pensée.
terenceblake
Je viens de regarder le nouvel épisode de Planète B – émission très intéressant qui noue spéculation SF et réflexion politique tout en augmentant notre PAL avec maintes références à des œuvres essentielles pour nourrir nos pensées et affects.
Cette vidéo (épisode 7) contient un entretien d’une trentaine de minutes avec Alain Damasio. Par un hasard du calendrier (mais est-ce un hasard? on verra plus loin comment l’actualité rend possible de telles rencontres) le nouveau livre inédit de Michel Foucault, Le Discours Philosophique, est sorti le même jour.
Dans ce billet, je vais tenter de considérer les deux documents, livre et vidéo, ensemble.
Le premier chapitre du livre de Foucault contient une réflexion sur la notion de la philosophie comme pratique de « diagnostiquer » le présent comme foyer d’une « actualité » qui est à la fois déjà là et à venir.
Diagnostiquer l’actualité, en philosophie ou en SF, c’est une fonction noétique partagée par beaucoup de créateurs et d’activistes contemporains. Foucault consacre un chapitre à l’analyse de cette fonction, à la fois millénaire et très moderne, pour cerner sa mutation récente.
Dans son premier chapitre, Foucault argue que la fonction de diagnostic spéculatif aujourd’hui diffère de ces avatars précédents en ce qu’elle sort du modèle médical classique curatif (trouver le mal/proposer le remède), pour devenir une activité de constat et de « dire ce qu’il y a ». Non pas déceler et guérir, mais constater. Rendre perceptibles, non pas un état de choses, mais des mouvements et des tendances en cours.
Alain Damasio argue, pour sa part, que l’écrivain de science fiction reçoit en partage cette même tâche, de diagnostiquer le présent. C’est ici que je trouve l’autocritique de Damasio illuminant. Dans son retour réflexif sur œuvre Damasio fait usage de concepts foucaldiens tirés d’une phase ultérieure de la pensée de Foucault pour situer sa propre évolution intellectuelle et artistique concernant la conception du fonctionnement du pouvoir et sa figuration dans la SF.
Selon Damasio, dans son roman La Zone du Dehors (1999), il restait encore prisonnier d’une conception transcendante, « pyramidale », centralisée, du pouvoir, alors que que 20 ans plus tard, dans Les Furtifs (2019), il avait assimilé la leçon foucaldienne de l’immanence du pouvoir dans une réticulation « plane », dispersive et omniprésente. Son propos est riche et lui permet des développements stimulants, mais ce qui m’intéresse ici c’est le regard rétroactif que ce déploiement de concepts et figurations tirés du Foucault des années 70 permet, et son utilité pour éclaircir les analyses du Foucault des années 60, càd pour les diagnostiquer.
Grâce à cette boucle de rétroaction, on peut voir que cette distinction entre modèle transcendante et image immanente est déjà à l’œuvre dans le « nouveau » livre de Foucault, dont le manuscrit a été rédigé en 1966.
Ce qui est en jeu dans le Chapitre 1 du livre Le Discours Philosophique est la déconstruction d’une conception transcendante de la fonction diagnostique (regard surplombant, logique binaire bien/mal, guérison par rétablissement normatif) et le dégagement progressif d’une conception immanente (regard participant dans un champ divisé et mouvant, sans logique du mal ni pratique de guérison normative).
Dans le cas de ces deux auteurs on constate leur convergence sur un point de renversement récent. Le philosophe, tout comme l’écrivain, ne s’engage pas à partir d’une discipline (philosophique, artistique) transcendante mais crée (philosophiquement, artistiquement) à partir d’un engagement immanent. Les rapports entre engagement et création se sont inversés.
D’où le côté parfois tortueux des réflexions en boucle: diagnostiquer le « diagnostic », être contemporain de sa contemporanéité sans y coïncider, sans y être « synchrone ». Selon la formule de Foucault, la tâche serait d’être isochrone, sans être synchrone.
En conclusion, pour parler du contemporain il faut être à la fois clair et tortueux. Hier j’étais en train de lire le livre inédit de Michel Foucault, Le Discours Philosophique, et j’ai regardé l’interview avec Alain Damasio. Chacun me semblait éclaircir l’autre, créant ainsi des étincelles noétiques, que j’ai essayé de capturer ici. J’espère que mon propre diagnostic a été plus clair que tortueux.
terenceblake
Live-blogging reading PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE, the new book by Michel Foucault.
PARADOX OF THE (DEATH OF THE) AUTHOR
Publishing today, « now » in 2023, a manuscript written in 1966 is a paradoxical enterprise, especially when the book is by Michel Foucault, who both proclaimed the « death of the author » and asserted his authorial authority by forbidding any « posthumous » publications. After the posthumous publication of CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH we now have the delight of a new publication of a virtually complete manuscript of Michel Foucault, a major new contribution to to the ongoing publication of Foucault’s parerga and paralipomena.
PARADOX OF THE NOW
A « new » book, 57 years old – a paradox. The book itself reflects on the « paradox of the now », and must be read in the light of this reflection. As with many works interrogating the limits of thought’s actuality we are in danger of being « lost in the self-reflection » (in the words of https://twitter.com/ConejoCapital). This is what we are invited to do in reading this book, to lose ourselves, to be lost in space. Conceptual space (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of concept, in tWHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?) is self-referential. If you’re not « lost », you’re not understanding.
The first words of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE involve a reference to the « now »:
« Depuis quelques temps déjà » – « For some time now ».
Foucault does not begin in some foundational gesture, some absolute point of rupture, but inserts himself into an ongoing becoming. He will go on to split this « now » (more splitting the atom than splitting hairs) in the rest of the book’s argument, so for the moment we are unsure in which « now » Foucault is situating his book.
This splitting of the now begins already in the second part of the sentence:
« Depuis quelque temps déjà – est-ce depuis Nietzsche? plus récemment encore?«
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently?«
Note: Foucault in this first sentence uses one of the many modes of referring to « now ». He does not use the French word « maintenant » (« now »), which he will later analyse in detail, but a more complex mode of expression connoting continuity rather than a simple « point » in time.
« Déjà » in isolation is usually translated as « already », but here it is used in conjunction with « depuis » and a verb in the present perfect, so the sense is of an indefinite duration up to and including the present. This is a case of the perfective aspect. Foucault goes on in Chapter 2 to analyse the different uses of the « now » (« maintenant ») in the different modes of discourse (scientific, literary, philosophical, ordinary), drawing on the analyses of Jakobson and Benveniste. Foucault thus constructs an enunciative grammar of the different discourses, but unfortunately he does not include an explicit consideration of the perfective aspect (a mode that has philosophically important uses in Foucault’s own discourse) in his analysis.
For Foucault the periodisation of this « now » is unclear, and he will have to go back not only to the ancient Greeks but even earlier, referring to the « age-old arts » (« les arts millénaires« ) harking back beyond even the Egyptians to the shamans, before coming back to today.
PARADOX OF PHILOSOPHY: against essences
In PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE Foucault is explicitly asking, and tentatively answering, the question « what is philosophy? ». I will be attempting a « naive » or non-scholarly reading of the book. A good companion book to keep in mind is Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? was published in 1991 (32 years ago) and explicitly refers to Foucault’s ideas from the 1960s, without citing the unpublished PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE, but giving us precious insight into Foucault’s problematic. Foucault was 40 years old when he wrote his book, Deleuze and Guattari were in their 60s.
For us, Foucault’s « new » book, like Deleuze and Guattari »s (alas!), belongs to the preceding epoch, and to its archive. Or rather they belong to the sub-archive indicated by Deleuze and Guattari containing the « bibliography » of the question. Of course, the « question » is a joke, a paradox. « What is X? » seems to ask for an essence, when Deleuze and Guattari, like Foucault, reject essentialism in favour of a casuistic – there is no general question and answer, but an open ensemble of cases and circumstances.
We shall see this distinction between the « royal road of philosophy » and a seeming non-philosophy co-originary with the royal image of thought in the second paragraph.
PARADOX OF AGE: senex vs puer
The Incipit to WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY reads:
« Perhaps one can pose the question What is philosophy? only late, when old age comes, and the hour to speak concretely. In fact, the bibliography is very slim ».
This is Deleuze and Guattari’s version of the senex/puer distinction: the puer does, the senex reflects.
As James Hillman points out, this distinction is not to be taken chronologically, senex and puer are phases or moments that run through all of life. So we cannot contrast old and young so easily. I suppose we can call the Foucault of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE middle-aged.
The operative word is not « age » but « middle », where things grow (according to D&G). Foucault is in the middle, between the « doing » books culminating in THE ORDER OF THINGS and the reflecting book THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE. The middle is where things happen. No required age.
PARADOX OF SELF-DIAGNOSIS: a risky enterprise
The bibliography of the question « what is philosophy? » has grown since then, and we have many new works to add, by Badiou, Lyotard, Laruelle, Latour, Stiegler etc. My blog Agent Swarm has been devoted to discussing these works, and I can truthfully say I have been asking the question all my life.
So I will be reading Foucault as he could not read himself, in the light of all these other works, trying to give him a different actuality to the one that he did not claim to know, but only to diagnose, and so to diagnose himself with it.
PARADOX OF DIVINATION: philosophy is (also) non-philosophy
Foucault begins under the sign of Nietzsche (but it is already an interrogative sign):
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently? – philosophy has been allotted a task with which it was hitherto totally unfamiliar: to diagnose » (my translation).
This is the first sentence of the book, and we can already divine much. He will go on to affirm that the philosopher has always been something of a « seer » or a « diviner » (« devin » in French). So this is how we can read Foucault philosophically. Another way of saying this is that to read philosophically one needs to read non-philosophically.
There is philosophy as model of thought, what Foucault calls, in the next paragraph, the « royal road », characterising it in its concern for founding or completing knowledge, enouncing being or man » (2nd paragraph).
There is also philosophy as a divinatory art, a medical practice, an exegetical task. Philosophy as grounding vs philosophy as diagnosis. Philosophy has been both, from the beginning, philosophical grounding and non-philosophical divining and diagnosing.
PARADOX OF DIAGNOSIS: diagnosis without illness and without cure
We can divine then that the reference to Nietzsche will have to be expanded and complexified, and the concept of « diagnosis » will have to be deconstructed, freeing it from the medical model that ties it to discovering an illness and to proposing a cure.
This text was written in 1966, in the year of publication of Lacan’s Écrits. Psychoanalysis in the 50s and 60s had freed itself from the medical model of diagnosis and treatment and from the medical fantasy of a « cure » as a return to normal.
In this context, Foucault is affirming the genealogical priority of Nietzsche in the deconstruction of the medical model at the same time as he is endorsing the commonality of a shared cause. Foucault does not mention psychoanalysis, he is already too deterritorialised for that, but this common cause of freeing us from the medical image of thought is an example of what Foucault a little later, at the beginning of Chapter 2, calls « isochrony » as opposed to synchrony.
PARADOX OF THE (SHARED) MOMENT: synchrony vs isochrony
Foucault’s work takes place over much of the same time period as Lacan’s, and each is an important part of the shared contemporary culture. In that sense they are synchronous.
However, « isochrony » concerns something else, « the very « moment » in which it unfolds » (Le discours philosophique, 22, my translation). This deconstruction of the medical image of thought, shared by many others (e.g. Ivan Illich, James Hillman) is what unites Foucault and Lacan in a common cause of the epoch, and as such they are « isochronous ».
Something is changing in the culture, without which they could not think what they think, and Lacan and Foucault are part of it. People’s relation to the unconscious , to medecine, and to philosophy is changing, and the medical model, in its traditional form, is dissolving.
Foucault begins his manuscript here, already « prophetising » (his word) in the present the becomings of May ’68. Foucault begins by knotting the question « what is philosophy? » to the wider question « what is diagnosis? »
terenceblake
« It is curious how the objections people make are retardants. When you are trying to swim in a river people attach balls and chains to your ankles: have you thought of this? what do you make of that? are you really coherent? don’t you see the contradiction? Also, how sweet it is never to answer ».
This quote is translated from the first of the « missing » passages of Deleuze and Guattari’s RHIZOME (which was first published in 1976 as a separate book, and then in 1980, substantially modified, as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus).
For the rest of this passage, which goes on to discuss « reflection » (the practice of returning to a previous work instead of thinking things forward) see:
RHIZOME the missing paragraph – text and translation (ii)
This passage describes only one type of objections, but does not cover all cases. Deleuze and Guattari are exceeding their own image of thought in presenting as a generality what would better be described casuistically. There is no « essence » of objections.
A more positive image of objections could be given in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms. One would have to make of an objection an « encounter », irradiating one’s conversational partner with particles of light or waves of intensity rather than impeding them with « balls and chains ».
The problem with « objections » is that they are profered in terms of a binary logic, making an exclusive use of the disjunctive synthesis and so they stop the process. A paraconsistent practice of objections is not ruled out, as it makes an inclusive use of the disjunctive synthesis.
This logical point, concerning different uses of the disjunctive synthesis, underlies Deleuze and Guattari »s reserves about « objections » and their repeated condemnation of « discussion ».
Deleuze and Guattari did in fact talk to, and argue with, each other in a dialogical practice they called « conversation » in contradistinction to « discussion ». Deleuze published a book with Claire Parnet called DIALOGUES, and the conditions for, and obstacles to, dialogue are articulated at the same time as they are exemplified in this book.
For more on the question of objections in relation to the missing paragraph in RHIZOME see:
terenceblake
1) INTRODUCTION
I am providing a translation of the incipit as reproduced at the end of a pre-publication review of Michel Foucault’s forthcoming book PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. The review was published online by Philosophy Magazine and discusses the ideas expressed therein chiefly in structuralist-demarcationist terms, given that the book focuses on enouncing the demarcations between philosophy, science, and literature.
This orienting perspective is perfectly normal, but it leaves out Foucault’s struggle with « structuralism » at that time (the manuscript was written between July and October 1966). In his interviews from that period Foucault moves rapidly from endorsing the claim that THE ORDER OF THINGS is structuralist to vehemently denying it. These hesitations exhibit a tension that is implicit not only in Foucault’s texts but in their reception, the tension between structuralism and post-structuralism.
We can see a further tension, closely tied to the first, between articulating the demarcations separating the different types of discourse (philosophy, science, literature) and the coming to the fore (under the epochal condition of the « new mutation ») of a universal (and thus transversal) discursivity conceived as « inexhaustible exteriority » and « element », cf my translation of the table of contents.
I think a change of perspective arises if one asks the question: to what archive does this « new » book/old manuscript belong?
If we read the book as belonging to the « Foucault-archive », then its publication is above all a scholarly « event » in the world of Foucault scholarship, and any discussion of it evidently belongs to the type of discourse that is detached from the « now », reference-oriented discourse.
If we read the book as belonging to the « philosophy-archive », then its publication is a philosophical event, in the sense of an untimely intervention in the « now » and and any discussion of it belongs to lay readers trying to understand the world and the thought of today, sense-oriented discourse.
2) THE INCIPIT
This is my translation of the first two paragraphs of Foucault’s forthcoming book (as reproduced at the end of the review cited above),
Chapter 1 « The Diagnostic » (pp13-14):
« For some time now – is it since Nietzsche? or even more recently? – philosophy has been allotted a task with which it was hitherto totally unfamiliar: to diagnose. To recognise, from a few sensible marks, what is happening. To detect the event raging within the murmuring that we no longer hear, we are so used to it. To say that which gives itself to be seen in what we see every day. To bring to light, all of a sudden, that grey hour where we are. To prophetise the instant.
Is that however such a new function? In wanting to be an enterprise of diagnosis, in devoting itself to such an empirical, fumbling, oblique and diagonal task, it could easily seem that philosophy is wandering away from the royal path that characterised it when it was concerned with founding or completing knowledge, with enouncing being or man. In fact, one could say just as well – or say even more aptly, given our appreciation for such retreats to the origin – that philosophy, in becoming diagnostic discourse, rediscovers its kinship with the age-old arts that taught us how to observe the signs, to interpret them, to reveal the hidden sickness, the unbearable secret, to name that which, majestically, remains silent at the heart of so many confused words. From the depths of the Greek era, philosophy has never renounced its pretention of being, at least to a certain degree, a seer: it has always been somewhat of a doctor and an exegete. Heraclitus and Anaximander taught it to listen to the god’s words, to to decipher the secret of bodies. For rather more than two thousand years philosophers have been reading signs ».
terenceblake
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE may well be Foucault’s equivalent to Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, as we know from Foucault’s own words that his work is philosophical, in that it places itself within the domain of the history of ideas, but is not itself a historian’s work.
As such the new book should not be read only historically, as a historical document providing the missing link between THE ORDER OF THINGS and THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE , but also philosophically, in terms of how it clarifies our present and opens up new lines for future research and living.
As such, the book is both a contribution to an outdated archive and a potential catalyst to future-thinking. In short I am asking the book to diagnose and to heal itself, according to the two moves it attributes to philosophy in the first chapter:
It is to be noted that Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? is such a self-healing book. It begins, after an introduction situating its intervention in the current state of the question, with a rather structuralist set of demarcations (between philosophy, art, and science) and ending with a post-structuralist typology of works violating those demarcations.
terenceblake
This is a translation of the summary on the back cover of the forthcoming previously unpublished book by Michel Foucault entitled PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. Text established by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera, under the direction of François Ewald (Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, May 2023).
« What is philosophy and what is its role today? Between July and October 1966, several months after the publication of THE ORDER OF THINGS, Michel Foucault, in a very carefully written manuscript, that nonetheless he will never publish, proposes his answer to this much discussed question.
Distinguishing himself from those contemporaries who devoted themselves to unveiling the essence of philosophy or to pronouncing its death, Foucault apprehends philosophy , in its materiality, as a discourse whose economy is to be articulated with respect to the other discourses (scientific, fictional, ordinary, religious) which circulate in a given context.
THE PHILOSPHICAL DISCOURSE thus proposes a new manner of doing the history of philosophy, which decenters it from the commentary on the great philosophers. Nietzsche, however, has a special position in this history as he inaugurates a conjuncture in which philosophy becomes an enterprise of diagnosis of the present. From that point philosophy’s role is to enounce, on the basis of the « integral archive », that which constitutes its actuality.
Not only is THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, which is devoted to the methodological stakes of such a project, adumbrated in this book, THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE is the only place where Michel Foucault spells out in as much length the ambitions of his intellectual program ».
terenceblake
Publication of an unpublished book manuscript by Michel Foucault: PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. Text established by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera, under the direction of François Ewald – to be published by Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, in May 2023
The manuscript dates from 1966, it was written after THE ORDER OF THINGS, published in 1966, and before the publication of THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE in 1969.
As will be seen from the table of contents, and as the dating of the writing suggests, this book provides the perfect bridge between those two established works. Further, this posthumously published book is of far more than nostalgic value.
Foucault’s meditations are « untimely » and so may serve again today where we are confronted with a reactionary revision (Domenico Losurdo, Jan Rehmann) in Theory, trying yet again to liquidate the heritage of the great French post-Nietzschean thinkers.
What follows is my translation of the detailed Table of Contents that Daniele Lorenzini shared on his twitter feed: https://twitter.com/DanieLorenzini/status/1629959851919941633
Notice (p5)
Rules for the establishment of the text (p7)
Chapter 1 The Diagnostic (p13):
philosophy as diagnostic enterprise – to interpret and to cure – the philosopher must say what there is
Chapter 2 Now (p21):
philosophical discourse and its « today » – the « now » of everyday discourse, or the triad of « I-here-in the present » – scientific and literary discourse are freed from this now
Chapter 3 Philosophical Discourse and Scientific Discourse (p29):
the singular relation of philosophical discourse to its now – the justification of philosophical discourse – the ambiguous relation of philosophical discourse to the triad of « I-here-in the present » – two forms of philosophy since Descartes: unveiling and manifestation – the problem of the subject – the role of the cogito – the difference between philosophical discourse and scientific discourse
Chapter 4 Fiction and Philosophy (p41):
the now of philosophical discourse and of fictional discourse – their justification – their functional forms – the irreducibility of the speaking subject – the principle of closure of works – the difference between philosophical discourse and literary discourse – philosophical discourse as exegesis or interpretation
Chapter 5 Philosophy and the Everyday (p57):
the relation to « actuality » and to the « present » in philosophical discourse and in everyday discourse – the difference between philosophical discourse and everyday discourse – the critical function of Western philosophy
Chapter 6 The Birth of Philosophical Discourse (p71):
the singularity of philosophical discourse since Descartes – the general mutation in the order of discourses in the XVIIth Century – Cervantes and the new regime of discourses of fiction – Galileo and the new regime of scientific discourse – the Word of God and the new regime of religious exegesis – the emergence of Western philosophical discourse
Chapter 7 The General Disposition of Philosophical Discourse (p91):
Comparison between philosophical discourse and religious exegesis – the function of commentary – the mode of existence of philosophical discourse: four fundamental functions and four fundamental tasks – the discursive necessities of philosophy since the Classical Age – God, the soul and the world – philosophy as destruction of metaphysics – the disappearance of metaphysica specialis and the displacement of metaphysica generalis – Kant and the constitution of a new ontology
Chapter 8 The Two Models of Discourse (p109):
philosophical discourse as condition of possibility of philosophical systems appearing in history – the two series of choices authorised by philosophy since Descartes – the first model of post-Cartesian philosophical discourse: unveiling, origin, appearance, encyclopedia – the second model of post-Cartesian philosophical discourse: manifestation, sense, unconscious, memory
Chapter 9 Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ontology (p127):
two models of philosophical discourse and two types of relations between ontology and metaphysics – pre-Kantian philosophy as metaphysics of representation and ontology interior to discours – post-Kantian philosophy as anthropology and ontology exterior to discourse – the displacements operated by Kant’s critique – Fichte and Husserl
Chapter 10 Description of Philosophy (p147):
the method of functional description – philosophical systems – the four main types of history of philosophy (system, experience, ideology, deciphering) as functional moments of philosophical discourse – the irreducibility of functional description to the history of philosophy – the interstice of works and history as space of simultaneous possibilities
Chapter 11 The New Mutation (p169):
historical conditions of the possibility of philosophy – the crisis and the philosophical void of the present (distress, forgetting, beginning again, listening) – Nietzsche and the decomposition of philosophical discourse – the negative perception of the crisis and the new wealth which is emerging: philosophical acts – the « great pluralism » of Nietzsche
Chapter 12 Thinking after Nietzsche (p191):
the reorganisation of the general regime of discourses after Nietzsche – the question of philosophy posed by the discourses at the limit of philosophy: logical positivism, ontology, description of lived experience, search for structures – phenomenology and the unity of the Cartesian-Husserlian discourse: pure description and the search for the foundation
Chapter 13 The Archive (p209):
the contemporary mutation of our thought and the interrogation of language – the passage of language outside itself – the constitution of the integral archive as cultural form defining the conservation, selection, and circulation of discourses – the double-sided reality of the discourse-archive – the discourse-archive as system of constraints for language and history – archeology as discipline of the discourse-archive
Chapter 14 The History of the Discourse-Archive (p227):
the impossibility for any culture to step out of its own system of discourse-archive – the immanent ethnology of the discourse archive – the main stages of the history of the discourse archive – the historical discontinuities according to the envisaged chronological markers – the interdependence of stabilities and ruptures in the history of the archive and in the history of discourse – the unavailability to totalisation of the history of the discourse-archive: a world of rupture
Chapter 15 The Mutation Today (p241):
the emergence of an integral archive and the transformation of its functioning – the neutralisation of speech acts and their distribution in the space of proliferation of discourses – the inexhaustible exteriority of discourse: the element of discursivity – the constitution of discourse as general referential and condition of possibility of the non-discursive – the transformability into discourse as a property of discourse itself
Annex – Extracts from Notebooks 4 and 6, July – October 1966 (p251)
Situation (p261)
Index of Notions (p297)
Index of Names (p299)
terenceblake
End of the analysis of the first paragraph. Deleuze and Guattari’s method. Motivation and meaning of the question. Gerontocracy vs ripeness.
terenceblake
Hello, I want to talk to you today about a new book by Tristan Garcia that came out just this Wednesday (February 8 2023).
TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING THE TITLE: Heidegger with Nietzsche
The book’s title is LAISSER ËTRE ET RENDRE PUISSANT, that I am translating literally as « letting be and making powerful ». You can also translate that as to let be and make powerful, or to « empower » instead of to « make powerful ». However, the concept of power comes up quite a lot in the book as a contrast with possible, so it’s probably best to keep it as two words: make powerful.
The title LETTING BE AND MAKING POWERFUL suggests that the project of the book is to put into dialogue, perhaps even to reconcile, two images of thought, as exemplified by Heidegger and Nietzsche: Heidegger, with the « letting be », and Nietzsche, with the « making powerful ».
Another way of expressing the project encoded in the title is: how can we think an ontological pluralism that does not degenerate into the powerlessness or paralysis of a self-defeating radical relativism?
PHILOSOPHICAL LANDSCAPE (physical and mental)
As I said, the book came out on Wednesday, I live in Nice, in France. So I took a 10 minute walk to the local bookshop on Wednesday afternoon. It was a typical sunny winter day on the Côte d’Azur, with a beautiful blue sky. I live just five minutes walk from where Nietzsche lived in the winter.
I didn’t even have to reserve the book, I just went in and picked it up on the new arrivals in philosophy shelf. So I’ve had a couple of days to look through it. I haven’t read it all yet, but it’s a pleasure to read. It’s a work in the tradition of those great philosophical treatises that include all and everything, that the French capable of, exemplifying the ambition and scope of French philosophers at their best.
SPECULATIVE TREATISE: scope and form
LETTING BE AND MAKING POWERFUL is written in non technical language for the most part, and is 550 pages long. Tristan Garcia’s previous big treatise was FORM AND OBJECT (published in France in 2011), roughly the same size and format, produced by the same publisher (PUF), but only 480 pages long, as compared to LETTING BE AND MAKING POWERFUL’s 550 pages.
The work is in the form of a speculative treatise subdivided into five « books ». After the Introduction we have Book 1 LETTING BE, Book 2 CATABASIS, Book 3 NEMESIS, Book 4 ANABASIS, and finally Book 5 MAKING POWERFUL. It covers not only fundamental ontology and its movements of thought (letting be, descent, encounter with the enemy, ascent, making powerful) but also time, life, subjectivity, politics and ethics.
So the new book is longer and more inclusive than Garcia’s previous grand treatise. As noted above, the title indicates that LETTING BE AND MAKING POWERFUL is an attempt to reconcile, or to put into dialogue, two images of thought, or constraints on thought, as exemplified by Heidegger (« letting be ») and Nietzsche (« making powerful »).
ONTOLOGICAL PLURALISM: expansion and contraction
Thus we have a movement of expansion and contraction – one of the aims of the book is to see how this sort of ontological expansion to include as much of the possibles as one can, while still being able, and this is the necessary contraction, to operate effectively and to think and to act with power, in the sense of potency (« puissance »), not in the sense of authoritarian power, or power over others (« pouvoir »).
The book aims to reconcile the greatest dose of ontological pluralism and a maximum of potency. This is all already in itself, a very interesting project, and situates itself in the lineage of recent French philosophical thought on the advantages and dangers of ontological pluralism.
Bruno Latour, a few years ago, published a synthetic article on the question « What is the recommended dose of Ontological Pluralism for a safe Anthropological Diplomacy? », where he sums up the different stages in thinking through an ontological pluralism that would not dissolve into a radical relativism.
In resonance with Latour’s question, Garcia’s title makes clear that this idea of ontological pluralism has to go together with not only an idea of diplomacy, but also with a notion of potency, of effectivity or of operativity, if it is not to be some sort of neutralising or paralyzing force. So much for the title for the moment.
PRELIMINARY SUMMARY: reading the back cover
To see further into the basic idea of the title, I’m going to translate from the back cover, which gives us a short summary of the book. We shall see that there’s a notion of what Garcia calls « liberality » in the idea of « letting be », and a notion of force, power, effectivity contained in the second part of the title, « making powerful ».
Publisher’s summary [my comments are in square brackets]:
We are separated and opposed. Our struggles result in conceptions that are irreconcilable as to the very being of things. In this work Tristan Garcia refuses to accept the confrontation and proposes to grant rather a common existence, that is a minimal and equal, to grant a minimal equal common existence to all possible entities, so as to better reconstitute their differences and their powers.
[This is the liberal side, or you could call it the anarchistic side. I’m not sure if Garcia willing to use the word here. This is the « letting be » side that then, and this is the « making powerful » or empowering side, reconstitutes their differences, powers, and degrees. So Garcia doesn’t want ontological pluralism to end up in a sort of in the undifferentiated blob, in a Hegelian night where all cows are black, i.e. in a state of ontological and phenomenological confusion. He wants to maintain differences and distinctness despite tolerating all possibles, and he wants these possibles to be powerful, to have their own power or powers as much as possible.]
He responds to the destitution of the universal that is criticized on all sides, by way of the research for a « distinct common »
[or a « distinct commons », perhaps we can sometimes append the « -s and sometimes not, because Garcia makes extensive use of this notion of the common, including both the ontological and the political dimensions]
that is to say of a being that is common to all things, a minimum of determination, which would not be the expression of a power,
[which would be without authoritarian power, without power (« pouvoir ») over something else (and not in the other sense of power, « puissance », which is present is in the title, which means potency]
without falling for all that into inconsistency.
[so a minimum of determination, that does not express a power and yet does not fall into inconsistency]
By means of this non hegemonic conception, critical thought, materialism or realism are reconsidered. The liberality and the authority of each position of thought are elucidated up to the point of exposing the contradiction of every ontology that is too liberal: letting be also that which blocks being.
[this is the basic contradiction of a liberal or anarchistic pluralist ontology. If you are to be tolerant and let everything be, then you have to tolerate, i.e. to « let be », that which denies this tolerance and tries to impose its own authority. I’ll get to this later when I discuss the contents of the book.
In brief, for Garcia there is a descent from where we are now, from our conflicting modes of being and thinking about what exists. We descend via abstraction. He calls this descent Catabasis. We descend till we get to the minimum of distinct and common being that permits the maximum of possibilities, and there, we confront our Nemesis. Nemesis is that which would block, deny or overcome our tolerance or liberality. And then we have to move up again, to ascend, he calls this ascent Anabasis, to ascend to the common being of our ordinary life again, equipped with what we’ve acquired in the movements of going down or Catabasis, Nemesis confronted and overcome, and Anabasis or coming back up. So these are the words used in the titles of the five « books » of the treatise: letting be, catabasis, nemesis, anabasis, and making poweful]
The inquiry arrives at the formulation of a new, « resistant » metaphysics, that is attached to distinction, equality, and permanent formation of all beings.
[Perhaps one could rephrase this as « a new, resistant » metaphysics that is attached to the distinction, the equality and the permanent formation of all beings. So we’re not going to fall into indistinction, we’re going to maintain distinctions, we’re not going to fall into hierarchies, or hegemonies, we’re going to maintain equality. And nonetheless, we’re going to have forms that are not purely fluid or purely fixed, but somehow both processes and results. That’s the « permanent formation of all beings »]
LETTING BE AND MAKING POWERFUL thus permits a renewed conception of time, of living beings, of political coexistence, and of our manners of being.
That’s the back cover, and it gives us a first approximation, a rough summary of the book. After that, we have the table of contents, in French fashion appearing at the end of the book.
TABLE OF CONTENTS: a noetic voyage
The Introduction, is roughly 50 pages long. It poses the question of how to think being when noone agrees on anything in matters ontological. It posits that underneath the ontological war lies a possible basis for peace, something that is the least constrained and the most common. Garcia gives us no Greek title for the introduction, so I propose « Polemos ».
Book One Letting Be is 80 pages. It sets out the goal of perceiving and thinking and knowing all the possibles. No Greek title is given, I suppose one could call it epoché, but I propose « Lysis ».
Book Two Catabasis is 130 pages, so it is a major movement of the book. That’s where you get to the descent and a criticism of the various possible metaphysical and ontological positions. He says that to each phase of the the descent there corresponds a « degree of being »and a « degree of abstraction », so we can say that each stage corresponds to a degree of ontology. By going down, we go through the different sorts of ontology that are possible, and at each stage of the descent, by examining this ontology, we’ll be able to formulate something that it does not and cannot include, that necessitates descending to a deeper, more inclusive or more liberal ontology.
Book Three Nemesis is roughly 40 pages will. Presumably, after all that preparation and descent we’re now capable of taking on our noetic enemy Nemesis, and dealing with it effectively.
Book Four Anabasis is about 100 pages. It is devoted to a comparative analysis of the two major types of ontology that Garcia distinguishes ‘process metaphysics and result metaphysics) side by side with his own « resistant » metaphysics. Result metaphysics is oriented around the categories of identity, order, and property; process metaphysics around intensity, bond, and expression; resistant metaphysics is oriented around distinction, equality, and formation.
Book Five: Making Powerful is about 140 pages. It contains the practical or concrete conclusions that we can draw from this ontology, after these movements of setting out, descending, confronting Nemesis, and climbing back up again. It is the longest and most « concrete » part of the book, getting into time, life, subjectivity, politics and ethics. There is no Greek title, so I propose Nostos (this is the « Ritorno » that I discussed in my analysis of Alain Badiou’s THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS) and Dunamis (this is the power that Garcia proposes to « render »).
BOOK FIVE MAKING POWERFUL: Nostos and Dunamis
I’ll break down Book Five. It is composed of a brief introduction and four chapters of roughly 40 pages each.
Making is un-numbered, it is an introduction to the rest and contains an analysis of a key term in the title « making » (or « making again », in French « rendre »).
Chapter One – Order and Disorder of Time. Everything is subjected to time and its order, except perhaps subjectivity, but in order to render to time all its power we need a resistant subjectivity: « subjectivity disorders time, this resistant subjectivity disorders its own subjective disorder » (page 430).
Chapter Two – Life without Subjectivity, Subjective Life, and Subjectivity without Life. Against panpsychism, life is that which resists matter, but not all life has a soul or subjectivity. Conversely, not all subjectivity
Chapter Three – Living between Fellow Beings at War. We are surrounded by fellow subjectivities that resemble each other, and that nevertheless are at war with each other, with each side striving for hegemony. To render its power to politics is to construct a « We » non-hegemonic.
Chapter Four – Being Non-Hegemonic. This is the ethical chapter after the political chapter. Being non hegemonic, if I list the subsections, is
ethical power: manners of being; interrupting a hegemonisation; resisting, resisting oneself; without promising oneself the infinite; interrupting oneself.
That’s the project of the book, in its broad outline and movement. I think it looks quite inspiring. We can readily see that although the book is not technically presented, and so from the point of view of style it’s easy to read, all along Garcia is inventorying and confronting the variety of metaphysical currents of thought, and synthesising and alluding to his philosophical predecessors in quite an interesting and intelligent way.
This sort of noetic voyage is not unique to Garcia, and we can see versions of it laid out in the work of Alain Badiou (THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS) and François Laruelle (TETRALOGOS), but it is accomplished in Garcia’s own manner, and may inspire us to set out on our own noetic voyage.
I think the book looks quite promising. So let me know if you are interested in me doing more, in my continuing the analysis. This is a scoop, the book has just come out in French and I’m giving you a live reading of it, starting today, in English. So I hope this is of interest to someone. Please let me know that you’re interested and that will encourage me to go on. Thank you.
terenceblake
I will be live vlogging in English my reading of Tristan Garcia’s new philosophical treatise LAISSER ËTRE ET RENDRE PUISSANT. In this video I give my first impressions of the book, its title and contents, and the summary given on the back cover.
terenceblake
I. The Title: the concept and its figurations
The introduction is titled « You, what have you done with the incommensurable? »
This is an evocative title, and it could almost have been phrased « You, what have you done with your incommensurable? Except that we quickly learn that the incommensurable fissures the unitary subject and its possessivity towards objects, and so the one excludes the other.
The unitary subject is self-commensurable, and self and world co-commensurabilise each other in a vicious circle of reciprocal covering.
The title evokes Paul Verlaine’s famous poem, known by virtually every French schoolchild:
« The sky is, over the roof »
This title is in fact the first line, and the first half of a sentence, which in full reads:
« The sky is, over the roof, So blue, so calme! »
We have here the incommensurable sky soaring above the commensurable roof that covers over the fissures of the real and closes us off from the sky.
The concluding stanza of Verlaine’s poem is even more well-known. It reads:
Oh you, what have you done, you there, Weeping ceaselessly, Say, you, what have you done, you there, With your youth?
The title of the introduction (« »You, what have you done with the incommensurable? ») closely echoes the last two lines of the poem: « you, what have you done…with your youth? »
(Note: both Jullien’s title and Verlaines conclusion echo, no doubt consciously, the Biblical parable of the talents, and the question « what have you done with your talent? » The « talent » being literally a sum of money, and metaphorically the incommensurable gift of life, the gift of the incommensurable.
The substitution of a philosophical concept for a poetic figure or a prophetic image allows us to see both of these latter as figurations of the incommensurable and also to begin to give content to the abstraction as youth and life (Lyotard calls the incommensurable, the « différend », « childhood » in his late writings).
II. The argument: the duplicity of the concept
These preliminary considerations (on Julien’s phases of thought, on the intellectual context of the meta-programme of research of recent French philosophy and on the important role played by the concept of the incommensurable, on Jullien’s creation of the concept of decoincidence, on the poetic and prophetic fgurations of the incommensurable) have prepared us for an attentive, both conceptual and participative, reading of the book as a whole, and of the introduction in particular.
The example of Lyotard prepares us even further. In the quote from Appendice Svelte we see Lyotard give a contextual definition of the « incommensurable » in what we may call its extended sense. He cites deconstruction, disorder, paradox, alterity, nomadism and the encounter as dimensions of this concept. There are many passages in Lyotard that make use of the incommensurable in this extended or general sense.
We know, however, that Lyotard uses the term in a restricted, specific sense to refer to the irreducible heterogeneity between regimes of phrases, such as between the normative and the descriptive regimes. Lyotard moves back and forth between the extended and the restricted sense of incommensurable in his writings, in a sort of pulsation or respiration, just as he moves back and forth between the abstract concept (e.g. the differend) and its concrete figurations (e.g. childhood).
Thus forewarned we can read Jullien’s text with a hermeneutic sensitivity to these shifts and pulsations of meaning, which introduce a duplicity (an incommensurability) into the heart of the concept-image of the « incommensurable ».
The title page of the book is preceded by a first half-title page containing the title « L’incommensurable » in the middle of an otherwise blank page, and followed by a second half-title page containing a question 4/5 of the way down of an otherwise blank page: « Un concept peut-il changer la vie? » (« can a concept change life? »). This question is taken up again in the title of the last chapter of the book.
This disposition in its austerity and in its terms orients us more towards the conceptual pole of meaning for « incommensurable », and reminds us not to take a particular figuration as exhausting the sense of the concept. Figuration is, nevertheless, not wholly excluded here, as the disposition of front matter has the allure of concrete poetry, figuring the orientation of what is to come.
This preliminary orientation shows its usefulness straight away, as we begin with a « crack » or a « fissure » that is presented as potentially the structuring characteristic of « Western » culture, a trait or feature that is both « original » and « originary »:
Could it be a first ideological partisan decision to advance that, in dissociating himself from that which then becomes for him « nature », man has fissured himself inside: original crack, there at the beginning of humanity; as well as originary crack, from which stems the human (page 11, my translation).
This initial figuration of the incommensurable as fissure, crack, dissociation is both dolorist and noetic, binding our consciousness to an original/originary suffering. The duplicity of the origin affects another key term that Jullien introduces here in passing, that of « de-coincidence »:
But that which promoted the human … is that he de-coincided from the heart of the living condition … and that from this dissociation from the rest of life, he remains forever cracked, producing a « himself » that is no longer in direct adequation with the world, nor even, and above all, with « himself » (11)
We may note that in this initial rendering of the incommensurable as « crack », it is negatively connoted and presented as producing and stemming from man’s painful separation from a world that is based on commensurability.
Thus, we may surmise that the argument of the introduction, as foreshadowing that of the book, will be to transmute (without denying) this negativity and to revision the world as itself grounded in, composed of, incommensurables such that our own incommensurability is what unites us with the world rather than separating us from it.
This is indeed the case, as we shall begin to see in the next instalment.
terenceblake
The book is 233 pages long, and contains an unnumbered introduction (6 pages) and 7 chapters (each from 30 to 40 pages long).
Table of contents from L’incommensurable by François Jullien, Editions de l’Observatoire/Humensis, 2022.
You, what have you done with the incommensurable?
I. Drawdown
II. Of the incommensurable
III. Avoidance
IV. There is the incommensurable (enjoyment, the intimate, death)
V. De-commensurabilise
VI. That which is not of this world, but which is not of another world
VII. Can a concept change your life? (the incommensurable unfolds existence)
Comment: to me this has a Feyerabendian/Deleuzian/Lyotardian resonance as we invoke the birth of the incommensurable in childhood and its omnipresence in the real, its fading and repression, its encounter or re-discovery in key experiences, and ethics and heuristics of de-commensurabilising, and ultimately the potential of this concept, or of any philosophical concept worthy of the name, to change us by unleashing the living that has been enclosed in the folds of the commensurabilised life.
Echoing Socrates’ « the unexamined life is not worth living », Jullien tells us in effect:
The commensurable life is not worth living.
A further resonance is with Badiou’s THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS, where he argues against the ideology of the finite and the commensurable, in favour of freeing the incommensurable infinities from their finitist « covering ».
These thinkers provide the context for my non-sinological hermeneutics of Jullien’s text and general project.
terenceblake
I have been reading François Jullien’s work, off and on, for a little over 33 years – since the publication in French of his PROCESS OR CREATION An introduction to the thought of Chinese literary scholars, published in 1989 and still untranslated. His books are quite popular in France and he has published at least 47, many of which are available in cheap paperbacks.
François Jullien is a French philosopher-sinologist, grounded also in Hellenistic studies, who chose to effectuate a long detour from his original formation in philosophy and from the presuppositions implicit in Western philosophy by means of an immersion in Chinese thought, and then proceeded to a return to philosophical creation.
Jullien’s published works can be divided into five stages, representing a chronological evolution:
My interest is in phase 4, François Jullien’s own philosophy and concepts, and their a contribution to the ongoing philosophical dialogue. In other words, I am interested primarily in what he brings back from his travels, not in the first instance in his travels themselves and in its value for Western contemporary readers. Is the voyage worthwhile to us?
I have decided to liveblog my reading of L’incommensurable, published in 2022. This book can be seen as a conceptual culmination of the fifth, or « decoincidence », phase of Jullien’s research.
I have been interested in the concept of the « incommensurable » for over half a century, ever since first encountering the concept in the work of Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn. It is also a key concept in the thought of Deleuze and also of Lyotard. Indeed, Lyotard makes « incommensurability » not only the major concept of his « book of philosophy » (THE DIFFEREND) but also the underlying concept of the forefront of French thought.
Apostrophising Habermas Lyotard in 1982 declares:
« What you call recent French philosophy, if it has been in any manner postmodern, it is in that by way of its reflection on the deconstruction of writing (Derrida), on the disorder of discourse (Foucault), on the paradox of epistemology (Serres), on alterity (Levinas), on the effect of sense by nomadic encounter (Deleuze), it has thus placed the accent on incommensurabilities » (Appendice Svelte, in Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers, my translation).
Thus François Jullien’s recent book is situated squarely within what I have analysed on this blog as the meta-research programme of recent and contemporary French philosophy. It will be interesting to see what contribution he will make to this ongoing meta-project, and how his own project will singularise itself.
terenceblake
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