This abridged version of an interview/text originally appeared in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies entitled Nietzsche and the Inhuman, conducted between Richard Beardsworth and Jean-François Lyotard.
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In this context, your earlier use of Nietzsche’s thought, your later judgements upon, negotiations with, or silence concerning it, chart the changing relations in your work between philosophy, art, politics, capital and technology. The shifts which your thinking in relation to the name of Nietzsche have undergone thus form an interesting point of access for an appraisal of the complexity of these relations and their changing configurations. What are the differences, and what do these differences imply, between a ‘libidinal-materialist’ and an ‘immaterial-materialist’ approach to politics and to technics? I should like to entitle the interview ‘Nietzsche and the Inhuman’.
1.With the recent publication in English of ‘Libidinal Economy’, it is opportune to start with this text. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, Libidinal Economy was often considered by the Left as too Nietzschean, in the sense of being relativist, irresponsible (and therefore unethical and anti-humanist), and ultimately fascist in its apparent ‘aestheticisation’ of the political. These criticisms were launched at much contemporary French thought at the time and were targeted in particular at its concern with écriture. This concern with, in your terms, the ‘unpresentable’ led to it being accused of renouncing valid criteria of intellectual orientation. Libidinal Economy was seen as particularly culpable in this respect, although the book had in fact anticipated this kind of reception.
The following cluster of questions can be said to stem from your anticipation. Libidinal Economy is inspired by Nietzsche’s so-called ‘destruction’ of metaphysics–in the following ways. First of all, the book’s elaboration of a libidinal energetic can be traced back in part to Nietzsche’s understanding of will to power as force, a force in excess of representation or subjectivity, and differentiated in its effects. It following from this that thinking is considered as a particular dispositif of energy and has no ontological nor ethical priority over other dispositifs and that the Nietzschean destruction of morality can be used against the theoretical positions of critique (most specifically the Marxian critique of political economy), in order to reveal the extent to which these positions to be informed by a reactive, nihilist philosophy of resentment (I am thinking, here, of your decisive comments on ‘use-value’, ‘alienation’ and ‘(in)organic communities’ in the entirety of Marx’s work). Finally, the book explicitly calls on Nietzsche by affirming libidinal economy as itself an affirmation of ‘intensities’ and metamorphosis. All these concerns can be grouped together under the work’s major intrigue–its forceful rejection of the axiomatic and politics of representation.
Attempting to forget actively the theatrical position of representation as one of theatrality, what could Libidinal Economy be said to be mourning? By enacting a purge of representation, were you acting out a refusal of representation, thereby repeating the very forms of representation in the act of destroying them? Could one not see your book to be just as desirous (and as nostalgic) as the very desires and nostalgia it wishes to combat? Hence Libidinal Economy’s force, and pain?
2. Libidinal Economy does not simply affirm the libidinal band. (This is where the description of the book as ‘Nietzschean’ is simplistic.) Were it to have done so, it would have returned the book to the very order of thinking from which it attempts to exit. As you repeat in different guises in the work, the ‘affirmative’ is not to be delimited as a region on the libidinal band. Such a delimitation would make your libidinal thinking explicitly normative and ‘critical’. Intensities are in this sense ephemeral, non-phenomenological, and under disguise. Hence your criticisms of Nietzsche’s parody of the prophetic tone, of his opposition between the active and reactive, etc.
These criticisms imply, crucially, a refusal to consider Libidinal Economy in either ethical or political tenns as well as a distance from Nietzsche’s re evaluation of all values and his accompanying desire for a ‘Grand Politics’. The former refusal and the latter distance necessarily work together. And yet, it seems to me that Libidinal Economy is ambivalent concerning this question of the pre political and a-political status of intensity; especially if one reads it with texts close in date such as ‘Capitalisme énergumène‘ (1972 or ‘Notes sur le retour er le capital’ (1972). It is this ambivalence which forms the background to my next question.
At the same time as stressing the dissimulating nature of intensity, you tend to oppose intensity to representational thought and practice, specifically to the exchange-laws of capital. Without an implicit logic of opposition to information in your thought-one which cuts across your elaboration of libidinal indiscernability–how could you say the following for example:
Here are the ‘men of excess’, the ‘masters’ of today: marginals, experimental painters, hippies and yippies, parasites, madmen, the imprisoned. There is more intensity and less intention in one hour of their life than in a thousand words of a professional professor. More Nietzschean than readers of Nietzsche themselves, perhaps? (‘Notes sur le retour et le capital’, Des dispositifs pulsionnels, p.305)
It is undoubtedly unfair to use this quotation in this way, for I am ignoring its humour. It does suggest admirably, however, that intensity can slip in your work from the register of the ‘indiscernible’ to that of the ‘marginal’; that, as a result of this slippage, the libidinal materialist which you are in the 1970s often disguises a political philosopher–one who is addressing his words, no longer, admittedly, to a political subject, but to identifiable instances within the social whole. Opposing one instance to another, your paganism ends up being a disguised form of piety. What would you say to this reading of Libidinal Economy?
3. I wish to pursue my previous question in different terms in order to set the context for your break with Nietzsche in the late 1970s. Libidinal Economy stresses the affirmative side of capitalism quo.de-territorialisation. In so doing, it follows in part Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, and frees capital from the straitjacket of dialectical logic into which Marx’s writings force it. The polymorphous diversity of the libidinal band is brought to light for the first time by the ‘perversion’ of capital- your re-write of Marx’s method of political economy. In other words, the Left has a lot to learn from capital about desire, and desire little to learn from the Left. Capital teaches us a certain inhumanity which you welcome at this stage of your work, given your immediate wish to forget the nostalgia of subjectivity and organicity. However, capital institutionalises energy through the law of exchange, as a result of which this energy is no longer a force or puissance but a regulated figure of ‘displaceability’. Through capital the ‘eventness’ of intensity is transformed into the calculable labour of production. In the culture of capital it is neither being nor reason which repress chance, but production. Capital is thus essentially ambivalent – both liberating and restricting. The negative aspect of capital leads you to theorise two kinds of ‘return’: firstly, that of capital as the return of the same qua repetition (production for consumption for production); secondly, that of eternal becoming which you ally with Nietzsche’s notion of will to power, the Eternal Return of intensities overflowing the capitalisation/commodification of energy.
If what you call the ‘indiscernibility’ of capital can be considered to subside back into an opposition between tense singularities and capital, does this not partly explain why you ceased describing capital in libidinal terms in the mid- I970s? At the end of Libidinal Economy you say: ‘we haven’t begun to describe the libidinal economy of capital‘ (p.237), yet Libidinal Economy has no successor, unlike Anti-Oedipus. The lack of a sequel would seem not only to anticipate your later belief that you had over affirmed the de-territorialising affects and effects of capital in Libidinal Economy; it would also seem to confirm the fact that you could no longer work with the ‘model’ of libido. This model had left you either affirming capital too much or resisting it too much from the margins: this is why Libidinal Economy was then abandoned for what it had been worth – uncoup.What would you say to this account of your later refusal of the libidinal and of Nietzschean affirmation?
4. I should like us now to move to what I consider the second part of the interview.
Your explicit move from Nietzsche to Kant in the late 1970s (from Just Gaming onwards), as well as your decision not to think with both Kant and Nietzsche, testifies to a growing sentiment on your pan that Nietzsche could not help you to elaborate a non-metaphysical account of justice. In Libidinal Economy these questions were suspended with the critical judgement that Nietzsche was unable to mourn fully traditional types of ethical response. Your re-evaluation of Nietzsche is important, allied as it is with other far-reaching re-evaluations to which we will come.
JFL: Your first question addresses two matters: on the one hand, the question of mourning, and, on the other, the hypothesis of an acting-out. On mourning I have had a lot to say since Libidinal Economy, which, while a lively, at times aggressive, somewhat mannered book, is in fact a work of mourning. What is it mourning? Theory, history, politics, Marxism, hope, the future, meaning, love. Let me develop this a little without going into every detail. The ground of the book had been prepared by Des dispositifs pulsionnels, a collection of writings published between 1972 and 1973.
I had been actively engaged in politics for over ten years in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. This group was not Trotskyist, as is still maintained today, but anti-Stalinist and anti-Trotskyist. It set out to define the criteria of what was at the time called modem capitalism, one which was in full resurgence following the successful reconstruction of the Western economies after the economic crisis which ran from the 1930s until the end of the Second World War.
The group made its analyses of modern capitalism in radical Marxist terms, with the hope that the traditional alternative of Marxism to capitalism-namely, the affirmation of an authentic subject in the place of the impostor, capital-would not fail to emerge given the development itself of capitalism. Hence our interest in this development. I resigned from Socialisme ou Barbarie when it was in full crisis. Lefort had already left, Castoriadis’ theses offered a very serious revision of the general schema, arguing that, due to the development of capitalism, the notion of the proletariat had to be revised, that the alternative was no longer the industrial proletariat, as Marx had said a century earlier, but it was the workers (white collar workers as much as manual workers) whose number was visibly increasing. I thought that the description we gave of modern capitalism was right, and I have basically held to it since. I’m saying nothing particularly new in this regard in my recent narratives about the system and development. I’m radicalising the argument, nothing more. I did believe, however, that it was no longer possible to maintain the schema of tragic politics-one in which the alternative to a subject-impostor is a true subject on the stage of history-and that there was no new subject on the horizon. As a result I abandoned my political activities. When the events of 1968 broke out, I was teaching at Nanterre, and with two or three other colleagues (Baudrillard was one), actively participated in politics, although exclusively from my position as teacher. We were all aware, however, that it was not quite the revolution which certain people believed it to be, that it was something very different–extraordinarily hard to define-and that the interpretations of it were over-hasty.
This, then, was the preface to Libidinal Economy.The mourning was for the end of a tragic politics endemic to the West since before the French revolution, since in fact Augustine and The City of God. The process of mourning entailed a re-thinking of history and required me to tackle the aesthetic. I was not aware at the time that this had been the very movement of Adorno when he wrote Aesthetic Theory.This meant ultimately the mourning of a particular kind of theory, not the analysis of capital which, as I’ve said, I believe in its essentials to be correct, but of the Marxist speculation on the course of history, a mode of thinking which is in its origins fundamentally Hegelian.
A mourning, then, of a meaning to history, of the nature of politics, of Marxism, of the hope for a true subject to appear on the horizon; consequently of a particular type of future for the community. Together with this mourning, a very violent and insistent critique (I’ve just re-read several passages of the book) of the notion of representation.
RB: In this text any logic (‘Platonic’, critical, speculative) of the subject is a political logic of nihilism?
JFL: Yes.
RB: A logic of ressentiment?
JFL: Yes and no. Ressentiment is a term which is much more frequently used by Deleuze and Guattari than by me. They are truly inspired by Nietzsche. Re-reading Libidinal Economy, I note that Nietzsche is referred to perhaps twice. He is not really present in this text: Libidinal Economy is predominantly a struggle with Freud.
RB: That the libidinal is affirmed would seem, nevertheless, to be a Nietzschean way of struggling with Freud. Concerning the affirmation of intensities, just think of the end of the book:
We invent nothing, that’s it, yes, yes, yes, yes. One cannot fail to think of Nietzsche.
JFL: One can think of Molly Bloom as well; I did strongly. One can also refer this question of intensity–if one is looking for what was inspiring me, what I was struggling against, with the books I had around me at the time–to Bataille, and in particular to his Inner Experience.I am not a disciple of Bataille. There is at bottom something in his idea of sacrifice, basically all that derives from the Collège de sociologie, that I have always contested, that Libidinal Economy itself contests. And yet, in Inner Experience there is a passage to the limit where jouissance and death are inextricably linked and where the yes assumes this extreme speed which I try to give it in Libidinal Economy. Concerning intensity, Bataille is crucial. So, with regard to the essential tone of Libidinal Economy,I’d prefer to cite Freud and Bataille. By pushing Nietzsche, you are going back to the legacy of Klossowski and his reading of Nietzsche in Le Cercle Vicieux, a text which impressed me greatly.
RB: A work that has a strategic importance in your essay ‘Notes on Return and Capital’ (in Des dispositifs pulsionnels) which works with Nietzsche and Marx.
JFL: Yes, and yet at the same time, very oddly, Klossowski is literally pushed aside in Libidinal Economy.
RB: It is this intensity which interests me. The book spins and spits, and its spitting is affirmative. Your thought and writing is in this respect Nietzschean; we return here, of course, to the whole problem of mourning and acting out. In taking an impossible distance from representation, Libidinal Economy wishes to forget, wishes to kill. Memory is the concept.
JFL: Yes, but with an important qualification. For example, Heidegger and ‘the Jews’ looks as if it is developing the same problematic in exactly opposite terms. But no, memory is precisely a way of forgetting forgetting. When I say demémoriser, this does not mean to forget… To turn now to the second half of the question concerning the hypothesis of an acting out-
RB: –You can see where I want to go. Your desire to dance with the pen whilst saying there is no intense genre, the force of your spitting, your flight into Libidinal Economy, away from Socialisme ou Barbarie, and all that this flight implies – the move against Hegel, against the necessity of the concept. And yet, Libidinal Economy remains a militant text in that it avoids a negotiation with the concept…And therefore, your mourning is an acting-out, and so forth.
JFL: To be militant is not necessarily the same thing as to act out. When you say that there is an acting-out in the very act of destruction within writing, one could agree. Libidinal Economy may even be a hysterical text. That is partly what I wanted: to turn myself into a hysterical body (me faire corps hysterique), in the process of washing my dirty linen in public. But, there is something which Bataille’s Inner Experience alludes to, although it does not really explore the idea, which makes me think of Libidinal Economy here. Let us hold to libidinal economy, to the drives, which Freud also calls the infantile and the sexual(in the very obscure sense which he gives to this term. he does not know what he means by it but he knows that he needs the sexual, that he needs, in fact, metapsychology).
Let us hold to this description of flux, and let us remember at this point that the whole force of capitalism is to allow this flux to circulate everywhere as long as it falls under the condition of the law of value. Let us bear in mind that capitalism derives its force from destroying transcendent obstacles, values, through the law of value. In this scheme of things flux can go anywhere, and so one enters what Marcuse called ‘the permissive society’, where the dictum ‘all is possible’ reigns. We are inheritors of the Dostoevskian tradition of ‘If, God, You do not exist, then everything is possible.’ But, if everything is possible, then we are God. This is the simple idea which makes me think of Libidinal Economy.For, what I find admirable in Bataille, is the idea of the distress of God, of God’s solitude. The true response to mourning is, for me, just that: to give oneself over to the distress of God. My hysteria went so far in Libidinal Economy that it became a question of speaking like God. The book is, consequently, not a negative theology (unlike Inner Experience).
RB: You are right to remind me that Libidinal Economy is also a work on childhood, childhood as energetic desire. Is there not, however, an enormous difference between affirming (in the Nietzschean sense) the drives and working-through (in the freudian sense) the sexual?
JFL: Yes, given what you say, the term acting-out to describe Libidinal Economy is fair; it is not a proper working-through. One last word on this: there was a problem of writing as well. I wanted the book to be a book that was written, I did not want it to be a philosopher’s book.
RB: There is for you an axiomatic difference between philosophy and writing, a difference which you have resorted to more and more explicitly. The nature of this difference is undoubtedly crucial: I shall return to it in the context of your more recent work. Philosophy is, for you, a certain form of knowledge (un savoir),is it not?
JFL: It’s a discourse, perhaps, not a form of knowledge (un savoir).It is a discourse towards knowledge (le savoir), which works necessarily with the concept. By the way, I have nothing against the concept and I say this clearly in Libidinal Economy. Yes, work conceptually! Even invest the concept libidinally! I like philosophers a lot, I’m passionate about them. It’s just that the writing of Libidinal Economy was about something else.
RB: The question, for you, is really that all philosophy is political philosophy; philosophy is always already political.
JFL: Yes, necessarily.
RB: Hence your energy. Your anger and impatience seem to be around the equivalence in your work between subjectivity and political subjectivity. You are mourning the political subject when you write other than philosophically?
JFL: Absolutely (Silence).
RB: Are you still in the tomb of the intellectual (le tombeau de l’intellectual)? Are you still mourning?
JFL: Yes, I find intellectual demonstrations very difficult. I gave my support recently to the ‘Parliament of Writers’ but with extreme reservation. For what was at stake was a refounding of the political on the stifled or silent voice, on the inability to find a voice, on those sorts of themes–and such is a writer: someone caught between a good, hearty communicational economy, basically politics, and pure drives such as terror of the horror and distress of childhood or God. Writing constantly negotiates between the two.
The political was to be refounded on this. I gave my support with the following reservation: one cannot, and must not, turn this tension into a politics. The rights of Man are enough to defend writing. The right to write is one of the rights of Man. People world-wide are censored or imprisoned because they write things which are not permitted. Let’s defend these people. But one cannot defend them in the name of an ontology of writing; one can defend them in the name of the right of people to express themselves.
JFL: Exactly. There is no need to be either a writer or a philosopher to protest when there are injustices. It is enough to be an enlightened citizen; long live Habermas, here. (Laughter) No, seriously.
RB: We’ll return to this difference between writing and politics. Could we turn now to the Question Two?
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JFL: The passage you quote is surely unjust. It’s demagogic. I’ve just re-read it, as I’m 85 in the process of correcting the proofs for a new edition of Des dispositifs pulsionnels.I have forbidden myself to correct the passage, but it surely calls for a protest in the margin.
RB: In the 1980 re-edition of the text, you say that, despite its metaphysics, the book was a move (un coup).Have you said that again?
JFL: I’ve called the foreword Avis de Déluge’ (‘Flood Warning’) just as in weather forecasts there are gale warnings, warnings of heavy seas, etc. Why? There’s a beautiful comparison in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality between the drive and a wandering, erratic river which is looking for its way. The correction consists in saying that one cannot proceed like the erratic river.
RB: The passage I quote was written two years before Libidinal Economy.The latter book is much more ambivalent about affirmation. For example, it radicalises Freud’s inability to disentangle the drives of life and death. It shows that they are inextricable. This is why one cannot dance with the pen or flow like the errant river. Dionysus cannot appear as such–
JFL: —Libidinal economy is also a dance of death, une danse macabre-
RB: -And yet, this passage does show what happens when affirmation becomes discernible as such. It becomes political, political in the very sense which you are wishing to mourn–
JFL: –Yes, the passage is univocal; it’s unilateral. It’s a bit silly. Des dispositifs pulsionnels states many times that there is no party, no intensity as such. And then, there…lapsus.
RB: You clearly say at the beginning of Libidinal Economy that there is no affirmative region on the Moebius strip.
JFL: Yes. There is, nevertheless, a ‘perhaps’ in that passage!
RB: I’m pursuing the point for a reason. Affirmations of this nature have been taken up by many people in the Anglo-American world to serve as a pretext to group you with the Deleuze of Anti-Oedipus. The claim is something like this: ‘French thought, inspired by Nietzsche and a libidinal Freud, ends up affirming what runs, what flees; it is, therefore, irrational, irresponsible, very 60s… ‘ The passage under discussion lends itself, nevertheless, to this simplistic kind of reading. Does it seem very bizarre to you now?
JFL: Yes. Thoroughly bizarre. I simply don’t accept it. It’s a sort of return of the repressed. Return of the political, as designating people with whom one could work. The other Subject in fact. There are even more notorious passages in Des dispositifs pulsionnels, where it is the same problem. Libidinal Economy represents an advance: more careful to finish with what you are situating, quite rightly, as a return to an opposition.
RB: Given your previous foregrounding of Freud, my concern in this question, one with the way in which you gave up an analysis of the social in terms of Libidinal Economy, needs re-thinking. It remains, nevertheless, interesting to ask why there is no sequel to Libidinal Economy.Your move to Kant looks decisive here. And yet, I am aware that you were already working on Levinas from the late 1960s–
JFL: –You know, if one is interested in situating not stages–stages on life’s way!-but passages through, passages via, the passage via was always, ultimately, a great interest in logic in general (contrary to what my Anglo-American colleagues believe) and in paradoxical logics, in paradoxes, in particular. I had begun to work on sophistic logic. The work was fairly precise; I wrote a small text on the Gorgias and started a larger work, which has never been published, in which I borrowed both from the Sophists and from 12th and 13th century Chinese war treatises in which there are remarkable passages on strategic and tactical paradoxes. I also returned to the Hassidic stories published by Buber.
I was constantly amazed at the difference with the Sophists. One finds the same torsion, or retorsion, rather, since the term is from Greek sophistics, and yet there was a crucial difference. It lay, of course, in the simple fact that Judaism is a religion, but is the very opposite of a revealed religion, is not Greek at all in that sense. I began to re-read the Quatre Lectures Talmudiques by Levinas in which there is a commentary on one of the treatises of the Shabbat which takes up the completely paradoxical sentence: ‘We will act before we understand’. I knew that Levinas was very hostile to Hassidism. He is a very traditional rabbinic Jew, and so fears all Hassidic paradoxology. Yet he can accept the paradox ‘Act before understanding’–an extraordinarily powerful paradox which allowed me to revise Heidegger. So, I found myself on a path that led across Levinas, moving back to the idea of a law which is not a written law, which is somebody, if this somebody even exists, who has said something that one does not in the least bit understand; he has made a promise, one doesn’t know whether he will ever keep it; one is, nevertheless, totally responsible for what one does, one has decided what is good and what is bad, and so forth. In other words, I was on the path leading to the question of judgement. There is my itinerary, it is not elusive, as Just Gaming with Jean-Loup Thebaud makes clear.
RB: One can even go so far as to agree with Geoff Bennington who argues in Lyotard: Writing the Event that all your work can be considered as a thinking of the event.
JFL: Yes, he argues that in my work, from the beginning to end, I’ve always said the same thing! In a certain sense, he’s right.
RB: Hence it would be unwise to mark a sort of epistemological break between what precedes Just Gaming and what follows it. Nevertheless, I insist–and my questions are structured by this insistence – that your shift around affirmation is very telling, its consequences very ambivalent. Do not your changing relations to Nietzsche signal this shift?
JFL: As you are aware, Nietzsche in fact plays a not insignificant role. But my relations with Nietzsche have always been a series of beginnings. Of course, 1 re-appropriate him massively.
RB: Perhaps we could now say that, although the name of Nietzsche only emerges twice in Libidinal Economy, the work is a singular appropriation of a Nietzschean thematic. From some moment in the 1970s, it would appear that libidinal intensities no longer offer you an adequate manner of thinking the relations between the concept, capital and technics. There is a change of strategy regarding Freud. The libidinal is no longer affirmed.Intensity becomes an unconscious affect.
JFL: Yes, but, as Freud says, the unconscious affect is always an anxiety, that is to say, something which accompanies jouissance. It’s the impossible, the impossible as ‘lived’. That’s the real problem. So, you are indeed right concerning my relation to Freud, but my relation to Freud is extremely singular.I say ‘concerning’ Freud, because the whole metapsychology, the whole theory of drives, of sexuality–a theory which has little to do with sexual difference–can be considered as affirmative in the sense that it is a metaphysics of energy. For, after all, with Nietzsche affirmation is a metaphysics of energy. This is what Heidegger and Derrida have said. Freud himself says: ‘I call that a metapsychology because, indeed, we have no direct access to the drive; it is always getting itself represented’. Quite simply, there is a moment when intensity, the event, or the touch do not find its representation or anything, even if it is false and illusory, which could serve as representation, and, therefore, where the effect of this touch remains in the form of an affect, which is neither conscious, in the sense that it is not represented, nor unconscious, in the sense that the unconscious works with representations. The effect is like, a small cloud, that wakes us up from time to time.
Now, as I have just suggested, I have an uncertain relationship to this metapsychology, to the affirmation that we are not only machines which discharge energy coming from outside, which transform it and discharge it in order to optimise the system’s relation to the context-an idea that comes to Freud from thermodynamics and, therefore, ultimately, from the British economists (Adam Smith). We are not only this type of machine, we also run on an energy of endosomatic origin, an energy deriving from inside which, in contrast to excitation provoked by external stimulae, is constant. This libidinal energy is what Freud calls the ‘sexual’, and it is permanent. He tells us that the river never stops flowing.
In other words, we are talking about a pocket of energy, so to speak, which has no escape-route, which does not obey the rules of stimulus-response, which does not stop asking for a voice. This is why, as the psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire says, the slightest kiss from a mother on her child’s neck can suffice to open a way out to this permanent ‘store’ of energy and to produce some type of disturbance: a neurosis, an excessive sensitivation, an unexpected eroticisation of a zone of the body, or whatever. All this is pure affirmation. So, it was clear to me that one couldn’t understand anything without a theory of energy.
Here I was a sometime fellow-traveller of Gilles Deleuze who had always been working in this direction, whether he was reading Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Proust, even Kant! Deleuze is a metaphysician of energy in the long tradition stretching from Democritus to Nietzsche and beyond. Yet since he is a metaphysician, I said to myself: ‘How can one proceed on this path whilst avoiding the trap of metaphysics?’
I also began to re-read Kant very closely, paying attention to the notion of Kritik which is precisely a warning-system against metaphysics: ‘Don’t affirm anything that cannot be subject to possible falsification, etc’. At the same time I began to read and re-read Wittgenstein in whom I found a similar decision to keep to what language said and what it did not say in saying what it said, to keep to how language sets about saying and not saying, in view of the fact that language is not a subject speaking, but a process working itself out, making its sentences, and so on. One could not approach these thinkers through metaphysics: they were completely set against metaphysics, just as they were set against any logic that was too substantial, too positivist. It was around this period that I worked on the Case of the Ratman, reflecting upon the unconscious affect, that is, intensity in non-metaphysical terms, in terms, strictly, of sentences.
Re-editing Des dispositifs pulsionnels, having just re-read Libidinal Economy, I found myself recently writing an introduction where I took up this metaphysics of energy again and tried to correct a number of motifs present in both Des dispositifs pulsionnels and Libidinal Economy. Concerning affirmation, energy and the drives, I have my feet, then, in both camps. I know that my task as a philosopher, now and in the future, is to try to elaborate what could be called The Differend II. This would be to elaborate the notion of ‘differend’ in terms of sentences where these bear upon everything that I had left out on purpose in The Differend-that body, the sexual, space, time, the aesthetic, etc.
These things are difficult to treat in terms of sentences, that is, without metaphysics. I know that, if I have the time, that’s what I’ll attempt a non-metaphysical reading of the drive. A reading where it will not have been worth being metaphysical. And yet, at the same time, God knows how difficult it is to forgo metaphysics in the clinical aspect of psychoanalysis. My relation to the problem of drives and affirmation (because that’s the problem) is therefore not equivocal, but uncertain.
RB: This would seem to be the right moment to move to the second half of the interview. Can you be more explicit,
however, concerning your abrupt move away from Nietzsche?
JFL: The question you ask is why, when I speak of Nietzschean ethics the style of Grand Politics; why, rather, don’t I pay attention to ambiguities in Nietzsche’s understanding of justice? The answer is be an ethics of intensity. For intensity does not make an ethics. Prescription may do this or that, it may say, in Kant’s terms: ‘Act in such a way that(so dass). …Prescription may be the occasion of a powerful affect-indignation, anger, a sense of responsibility, engagement, lassitude, or whatever-one still cannot make an ethics of intensity. If one does, either one performs dialectical metaphysics or one is Spinozist or Nietzschean; or one is both, and one will perform schizophrenia.
RB: The question is moving in a slightly different direction. The vita puissance and pouvoir in Libidinal Economy is effaced in your especially of your references to Nietzsche in Inhuman-Reflections on Time. In this text you seem to accept fully Heidegger’s later reading of Nietzsche, when you say that the will to power (la volonte de puissance) is a metaphysics and consequently a form of power (pouvoir). Is this not strange when, elsewhere, you are so impatient with Heidegger?
JFL: I’m not sure that I am so firm as you are suggesting. Concerning Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, yes, I think it’s right. Not because of his interpretation of will to power.
RB: But is Heidegger right to argue that Nietzsche founds his perspectivism on the notion of will to power?
JFL: Yes, will to power as a way of saying Being is still a metaphysics. Heidegger maintains that Nietzsche’s move is like that of the Idea of the Good in Plato. Accordingly, the move turns out to be a Platonist metaphysics. The Nietzschean ontology of Wille zur Macht is a metaphysics: I certainly endorse this kind of reading. Now, concerning the opposition pouvoir I puissance, it’s true that it preoccupies me now a lot less than it used to. For me the matter is closed there’s always puissance, that the event is a flow of puissance-one can always write in these terms. What is intensity, touch, affect, if not an effect of puissance? Again, one can continue to write in such terms. However, I now distrust the word puissance in that it is inevitably linked to a metaphysics of energy, or a psychology of the subject. No effacement, then, just certain reservations. Now, as for pouvoir, that’s politics.
RB: In Libidinal Economy power (pouvoir) is the party, the political Avant-Garde, etc., it’s a conception of time, an anticipation of the future which robs the future of its futurity, just like capital. On the other hand, puissance comprises everything you talked about earlier, unlimited energy that flows erratically. It is permanent, unpredictable displacement.
JFL: Exactly. Pouvoir is what channels this displacement. Libidinal Economy is quite clear on this. The central metaphor of the beginning of the book (the Great Ephemeral Skin) says nothing else.
RB: Let me return to Heidegger’s strategic reading of Nietzsche, for my concern is with the way in which you appropriate it and with the possible consequences of that appropriation for a re-thinking of the notion of will. Heidegger distinguishes between the lectures fascisantes of Nietzsche’s philosophy (a philosophy of life) and his own reading which turns this philosophy into one more philosophy of spirit. In order to do this, Heidegger has to reinscribe Nietzsche within the limits of metaphysics; Nietzsche becomes the last metaphysician. The reinscription is an extremely violent reading which serves to distance Heidegger from his own militant past, but at the cost of making the concept of puissance unilateral and determined.
JFL: We must distinguish here between two things: puissance is a metaphysical concept in Nietzsche, like the Good in Plato or the principle of sufficient reason in Leibniz; but the lectures fascisantes of Nietzsche conflate puissance and pouvoir. Conflating the two terms presupposes, precisely, that puissance is not a pouvoir: that pouvoir is a sort of ignoble cochonnerie, made up of puissance; puissance which has been deflected. Pouvoir is nothing but the channelling of puissance.It is the puissance of ressentiment, in the literal sense of this term, puissance which resents itself or is resentful of itself. To say that Wille zur Macht is a metaphysics of puissance is still correct. So, fundamentally, I have no major disagreement with the Heideggerian reading.
RB: You said earlier that Deleuze’s energetic is a metaphysics of energy. Nietzsche and Philosophy could be seen, nevertheless, as an attempt to escape from a metaphysical determination of force. Deleuze stresses this side of Nietzsche: force is always the difference between forces, puissance is always the difference between puissances–an analysis of force which Derrida picks up on as well in Writing and Difference.There is, in other words, no such thing as puissance.This is hardly metaphysics; wherein Deleuze’s important distanciation from Heidegger’s reading that places Wille zur Macht within the history of Being.
JFL: Deleuze believes that he avoids metaphysics; I think he’s bathing in it. Although Deleuze’s notion of the concept is incredibly cunning, there is always a problem in his elaboration of force and energy. Take, for example, bis recent Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? Especially, the second part “Philosophie, Science Logique et Art”. What is not questioned in this book is the notion of creation, and this absence constitutes the possibility of the work in the first place. Deleuze stresses that scientific dispositifs are created, whether to invent hypotheses or verify them, concepts are created in philosophy, forms are created in art; but what the book does not interrogate is the notion of creation itself. For Deleuze, creation is natura naturans, seen, of course, in predominantly aesthetic terms. For Deleuze, one must welcome all possible forms.
RB: We could talk here of invention. It could be argued that, for Nietzsche, the question of judgement cannot fail to be marginalised as a consequence of his refusal of all law of value. What interests Nietzsche, so the argument goes, is not judgement but the act of mastery which is the condition of any judgement, the mastery of what is inhuman so that a judgement can fall, so that a world can be schematised. Thus, a prioritisation of the problematic of judgement is, for Nietzsche, already too human. This is where you seem to have left Nietzsche and found Kant. My question concerning the relation, for you, between Nietzsche and justice is a prelude to the next question on the role of reflective judgement. The impression which your work gives, from Just Gaming onwards, is that you were only able to find the justice of invention in Kant’s notion of ‘reflective judgement’. For you, invention is not creation, but reflective judgement.
JFL: Yes. It’s not on Deleuze’s terrain that one can grasp Kant. Deleuze says that Urteilskrqft is precisely la puissance, la puissance de juger. There’s the act of mastery, and, therefore, of invention. This is one way of putting it. Kant, however, doesn’t wish this conclusion, and not simply because he’s a true neurotic Concerning your point on Nietzsche and justice, Nietzsche had a moment which I have called ‘Voltairesque’ (Des dispositifs pulsionnels, ‘Notes sur le Retour et le Capital’, para. 16). It comes up in Human, All Too Human when he is curing himself of Wagnerism and the Dionysian, when he is looking for measure, for the classical, for critical form. The question of judgement is undoubtedly important here. But it quickly subsides back into the problematic of puissance, the puissance of judgement. The passage should be re-read.
***
JFL: To your first question: ‘Does this priority which you give to the aesthetic imply an end to politics?’ If you mean an end to tragic politics, then, yes, undoubtedly.
RB: In Libidinal Economy you say that the affirmation of intensities can be compared with the idea of a ‘permanent revolution’. I wanted, again, to highlight the ground covered.
JFL: We’re in fact at the end of the last question to do with the survival of philosophy. For your question concerns écriture.
RB: Let’s pursue both questions then. In The Differend you use the term philosophy to describe the orientation of reflective thinking. A more appropriate term for you to describe this would be écriture, would it not?
JFL: Yes, but writing for me is not the same thing as it is for, let us say, Claude Simon.
RB: In ‘Réponse à la question : qu’est-ce que le postmoderne?‘, poorly translated as ‘Answer to the Question: what is Postmodernism?’”–
JFL: -The translation caused an enormous misunderstanding. I’ve never used the term ‘postmodernism’ except when designating an architectural movement called ‘postmodernist’.
RB: But the term ‘postmodern’ does invite misunderstanding.
JFL: My philosophy immediately became an ‘ism’–so it goes when you’re well-received in the United States.
RB: Certainly. At the end of this article you stress that the ‘postmodern’ concerns time. It reflects upon the temporal modality of the future perfect. This temporality, which is not a horizon, informs all thought and action. It is the temporal movement of reflective judgement, a judgement which you call philosophy at the beginning of The Differend. Here, you call it écriture. Only when one will have written will one be able to determine the rules of this writing. These rules–criticism, institutions, tradition, politics, etc.-take place apres coup, after the event. The event of writing is reflective judgement. It is invention. Writing is, therefore, also about justice, about the remainder (of time). So, is the difference between the ‘aesthetic’ aspect of écriture and the ‘ethical’ dimension of philosophy so clear?
JFL: One can say that the remainder is time, that the very essence of time is what is left over. But that’s too conceptual a way of speaking. If there is a remainder, it’s due just as much to an excess as to a lack. The Differend called this excess ‘the necessity of linkage’. I admit that I cannot simply replace philosophy by writing. That’s Valery: a philosopher is a writer, the truth of philosophy is literature. Valery is almost right. ‘Reflective’ writing is not the same thing as telling a story or stories. It’s why Beckett’s writing is philosophy, but after philosophy-this is why I always feel close to people like Beckett, Joyce, and Claude Simon.
So what is reflective writing? Montaigne writes reflectively, intending to speak of nothing but himself, and ending up not speaking of himself at all. He pillages classical doxography, going nowhere and everywhere, and so he becomes extraordinarily post-modern, in the sense that he refuses to enter into a problematic of ‘the now’, of what’s going on ‘now’, the temporality of the modern. This question of ‘the now’, of the jump into ‘the now’ goes back to Christianity, to St Augustine–the first modem as Auerbach says–even to St Paul.
If there is a beginning, then there will be an end, a redemption which, in secular terms, from the Aufklärung onwards, is called ’emancipation’ or ‘freedom’. This tradition of temporality doesn’t just go back to the Enlightenment: it’s the West’s understanding of time. Montaigne is different. He’s very familiar with this temporality, he just doesn’t enter into it; rather, he uses antiquity against it. Machiavelli does likewise–the only great political thinker, more intelligent than all modern political thought put together, and who is thoroughly contemporary. He is the political thinker of the lesser evil, as Gerald Sfez shows in a great piece of work in progress.
RB: Let’s move to the problem of passibilité.
JFL: ‘Passibilité’ is an idea to which I remain faithful. There exists a type of politics of the concept which is able to decide what is good and what is bad, because it has an idea of an authentic subject, of an authentic thought and of an authentic practice. If one enters a system dependent upon this type of opposition (authentic/inauthentic), then there is no place for judgement because there is no place for reflection. Everything is determined in advance; as a result one ends up with slaughter. The determinations emerging from the French Revolution have caused two centuries of slaughter. Judgement is only possible when you don’t know, when you have to reflect.
Now, why is reflection on passibilité necessary? As you say, it means something anterior to the distinction between the active and the passive and, consequently, to that between intervention and submission. If there is passibilité then there is infantia, which I would also call la Chose. Lacan calls la Chose that which remains, so to speak, both outside and inside the Symbolic – ‘so to speak’, because la Chose is also what contests such oppositions. This passibilité is a wanting-not-to-want (un vouloir ne pas vouloir).
In other words, there are two kind of Other. There is the Other of the Law, of the Symbolic, which does indeed prescribe. The Law wants nothing from you, but it gets you anyway. How you deal with this is your problem; and that’s the Law. This is the ethical dimension, the dimension of ethical reflexivity; namely, the situation where you are in front of something, a text, an act, a situation, and the question is that of ‘how’ to ‘pronounce’ yourself. But there is another Other, that of la Chose which does not prescribe anything to you, but which inhabits you, as Freud says, like a clandestine traveller in a boat who got on before you or at the same time as you, and who creates opacity, who creates a remainder. This remainder is not ethical, it is what all écriture in the widest sense-writing, painting, theatre, cinema, etc.-bas to deal with. This écriture creates a debt with la Chose which la Chose does not solicit. There is an ethics of writing, but it’s not synonymous with ethics. It’s not by fulfilling the debt that one satisfies la Chose or that one is ethically or politically ‘correct’.
Let me take the example of Celine, together with Philippe Bonnefis’ admirable book on him, to elucidate my point. Bonnefis is attempting to locate la Chose and be is not in the least concerned with the antisemitic Celine. He’s both right and wrong because he could have shed light on antisemitism from the perspective of la Chose.
Celine tries to reflect on la Chose and to account for it in a writing that is more and more abrupt, breathless, suspended, if not mad. Claude Simon is concerned with the Chose too, a Chose which he cannot name. And when Beckett says that one ‘goes on’, even if it’s no use and it’s not going to add up to anything, he defines very effectively the place of la Chose. This Chose asks nothing of him. In Beckett, all the changes of proper names, of patronyms, all the incredibly subtle shifts of syntax, everything is concerned with this opacity which gives matter for writing, and will always call forth matter for writing. So, going back to the terms of your question, the end of art is complete nonsense. There is no end to art, there’s only an end to art in a dialectic of the concept, a logic, however cunning, in which art is ultimately only a phase in the self-development of spirit towards transparency, under the name of speculative philosophy–
RB: –You’re very tough on Hegel here–
JFL: It’s clear that I’m not Hegelian, so I won’t repeat my disagreements to you. I’m interested in this opacity which is always there, en reste, requesting nothing. I’m interested in this strange, magnificent madness that produces a metamorphosis of language or of sight, of communication into poetry or of sight into painterly vision. This metamorphosis is due to the inexhaustible Chose.That’s what is about.
RB: Can I return to Hegel because your position concerning Hegel is instructive for an understanding of the relationship in your work between passibilité and the political?
Hegel’s Aesthetics is, in your eyes, a philosophy of art which is unable to reflect upon the sublime due to the placement of alterity within dialectics. The speculative concept is exemplary of the philosophical madness of ‘without remainder.’ Hegel clearly anticipates the end of art as a politically formative experience (of Bildung),and this, for you, seems to be the crucial point. For you, the phenomenological development of recognition (Erkennen) is ‘a tragic politics’: it is this recognition of the other that the end of the 20th century is having to mourn when mourning politics. Recognition is tragedy, tragedy is politics and politics (in this sense) is over. Art requires re thinking because its true concern is not the ethical Other but the Other of la Chose. Tragedy is thus a politicisation of art. It started with the Greeks, continues with Hegel, persists in Nietzsche and Heidegger….One can see why Hegel is important to you. By removing art, however, from the terrain of philosophical negotiation, don’t you risk ending up with an exclusive affirmation of art? A reversal of Hegel, very metaphysical.
RB: I wonder whether your very understanding of matter should not prevent you from making such a clear distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical. For, firstly, attention to matter is also, for you, attention to the limits between the aesthetic and the ethical. These limits exceed the distinction. Secondly, this critical attention which you have just paid to Malraux is ultimately an attention to the ‘event’ of time, to the fact that time must not be swallowed up (as you analyse at length in Inhuman-Reflections on Time).Such attention has an ethical dimension to it, there are questions of justice involved. On two counts, I don’t see the clear ‘cut’ of a distinction.
JFL: The ethical always concerns the relation with others, myself regarding others or, inversely, others regarding myself. It’s the Gemeinsein,(being-together). Even in the maxim of the Kantian categorical imperative, it’s ‘act in such a way that’ (so dass) your decision could be considered as a universal law’, and so it’s also a question of community. Inevitably–and here Levinas is absolutely right-the ethical immediately concerns the Other, the radical Other in the face of the other, always present, there, in the face of another. As for the relation to la Chose in écriture, great painters, great writers are not in the least concerned with others. Total solitude rather, such as with Beckett. One doesn’t write for others, one writes with this unspeakable, infernal Chose, which is at the same time gentle and attentive. One writes for the Other of this Chose, trying to settle one’s accounts with it in solitude. But it takes no account and renders no account. One remains alone.
RB: When you argue that passibilité involves listening to the event of time, I can’t help thinking that the opening to time is also the opening to the other, that temporality is alterity, that, again, your distinction is too neat. Perhaps one needs to re-work Heidegger’s Being and Time in this context. It has certainly been popular to do this with Levinas in recent years.
JFL: Be careful, it is not always true that the other arrives with time. It can happen so, but not necessarily.
RB: We need to define, then, what we mean by the other.
JFL: We need to move from Sein und Zeit to the short text ‘Zeit und Sein‘. The other does not always arrive with the event. My classic example is Cezanne and what he called the ‘colouring sensation’. Note the oddity of the expression–colouring, not coloured. Cezanne waits for three hours in front of the Mont-Saint-Victoire, which he knows by heart, until the event arrives, and the event is a colouring sensation. Other people will, of course, ask what the painting paints. Cezanne is aware that he will be chased from all the salons and academies for trying to put himself straight with his Chose. This Chose is colour, matter-colour. It may well be language for another writer. You can construct a whole book on the event of one sentence in order to try and account for the sentence which has had this effect (qui a fait événement).Now, of course, the book will be published, the painting hung, and the artist will tremble in front of other people, at what they understand, not about his tragedy, but about his drama, about his struggle. Typical of the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is that the aesthetic always implies this remarkable relation, more evident today with painters than with writers, of jealousy.This relation is necessary and ontological. It has nothing to do with any particular jealousy that artists may entertain for each other. The jealousy is of la Chose.
La Chose is absolutely singular. The other wants to settle accounts with this Chose as well; but the Chose is nothing at all, there’s an immediate incompatibility. This is why it’s almost impossible to put several painters in the same room. They cannot be grouped into a community, except at certain moments of history when they work collectively.
***
RB: I agree that the very question of technics forms a metaphysical presupposition which prejudices Heidegger’s thought. Pace Heidegger, there is no thought without technics: hence my last question. Inhuman–Reflections on Time and your very recent Moralités postmodernes maintains that one must behave like a responsible citizen, but that, so doing, one must also be aware that one is part of the process of the system’s increasing complexification. To be a responsible citizen implies a difference within the system which allows this system to become more complicated and, therefore, survive. Like any negoentropic system, the system called ‘development’ needs events to survive. However,–here again my question concerning the logic of resistance unlike écrivains who witness the matter of time, the system eats these events up, it flattens out the ecstatic dimension to temporality, the ‘taking-place’ of time–
JFL: –Yes, the system memorises events, incorporates them, interprets them, translates them into its own grammar. The system is an enormous machine which stocks these events when it doesn’t need them, and when the need arises, it brings them out of its memory-store and thereby counters an event which is threatening it. This is the process of complexification that I am calling ‘development’.
RB: The moral is pessimistic and inhuman. You give little hope to the future.
JFL: It’s very pessimistic. But I believe this pessimism has to be assumed in order to face the expansion of technoscientific positivism across the whole of the realities of today’s human community. It’s saying that thermodynamics stamps with its mark the whole system, including the sub-system humanity which is the human species.
Humanity is a species-remarkable, nevertheless, for its ability to complexify all relationships-constituted through prolonged processes of selection which we call ‘natural’ and which are in fact the processes of a thermodynamic system. This system has proved to be highly adapted to its context; it is now, however, in the process of radically transforming this context itself. Ecology reflects contemporary concern with such a context–a misplaced concern because the context is done with. The system has already begun to untie itself from this world, already it’s invading cosmic space. What’s to be done is to consider the system in such a way that development is bearable for human beings who are the vehicle of this development, but not its author. If you look at the history of discoveries or inventions–one says ‘discover’ for the sciences and ‘inventions’ for technology, but it’s in fact the same; the latin word inventio means both–it is noteworthy just how little relation this history has to human beings. Things are discovered or invented by chance. Reading this history makes clear that inventions are complex moves (‘coup de complexite’) which appear out of the blue, all of a sudden, and fuel a negoentropic process of which humanity is a vehicle.
It’s not even a process.
RB: The term ‘process’ can cause misunderstanding. It sounds systematising, unilateral, as if human beings were simply part of the process–
JFL: –It’s important, firstly, to understand that negoentropic moves (des coups de neguentropie) are highly improbable. The synthesis of life in the form of unicellular systems is utterly improbable. It’s due to the chance meeting of different physical and chemical series which were quite independent of each other. The system has since become so complex that it has interiorised this very process of complexification which started with the move from one order of differentiation (the molecular) to another more complex one (the cellular). Research in development now exists in all countries. It’s inhuman, it’s the other inhuman.
RB: This ‘inhuman’ must be resisted by assuming a relation of passibilité towards the inhumanity of matter, whereas in the 1970s the libidinal was affirmed in relation to the inhumanity of capital. It’s much more complex now?
JFL: Matter is precisely a way of saying that.
RB: As we have discussed, passibilité is also a witnessing of the event of time. In both this advent and in the witnessing of it, when does the other (uncapitalised) arrive? To return to an earlier point that we didn’t take up, this other is not necessarily human; it can be human, but the other is also animal, mineral, technical–
JFL: Of course, the other arrives ‘all the time’. My analysis of development doesn’t imply that one stops caring. One is seized by the event of the other; one has to respond. If one wants the Second World, the former Soviet empire, to get out of the terrifying mess it’s in, or the Third World to overcome its crises, then there is only one solution. One must help them to develop, one must integrate them into the system.
RB: These obligations are those of the citizen and the citizen is part of the system. The system needs the citizen to become more and more flexible, in order to survive–
JFL: -One does one’s work in the system, The system may not do its work very well. Development needs our interventions all the time. It cannot do without us. We are the channels, the vehicles of complexification. The ‘our’ of ‘our interventions’ does not mean intellectuals, however, It means anyone. For the just purpose of making life bearable for thousands of millions of human beings, we intervene. This intervention is, therefore, never for the sake of the system.
Let’s not forget that it’s the system that has completely destroyed, directly or indirectly, the so-called ‘archaic’ systems, it’s the system that has screwed everything up in Africa today or in Latin America. We call it the effect of imperialism. Even the Second World is a result of development, that is, of the West. The Second World was initially constructed against this development, in the name of Marxism, but it has very quickly proved unable to survive. A construction against the system became an overwhelming monstrosity. The system destroys, but the attempt in the twentieth century to bring remedy to its destructive effects destroyed all the more.
If we intervene for the just purpose of making life bearable, we do so to palliate the destructive effects of the system according to the lesser evil. It can be argued that one does this work in the name of Citizenship, of the Rights of Man. Other terms would do just as well; I see no contradiction, however, in calling this obligation the ‘Rights of Man’ so long as one doesn’t forget that doing this work contributes to development, to the complexification of the system.
All kinds of solutions are going to have to be found, if the former Soviet empire is to pull through. If we haven’t the equivalent of the Marshall Plan for the Russians, the Georgians, the Ukrainians, and so on, then these people won’t pull through, and we can expect the worst. The ex-Communist, ex-Fascist movement will continue to grow, and it will become extremely dangerous not only for human life, but also for the system. This alliance of ex-Communists and ex-Fascists is truly reactionary, flying in the face of development. It’s not simply reactionary in relation to human freedoms, it’s reactionary in relation to development itself, as we have had the experience with Fascism and Stalinism. We don’t want to begin again: the system has forewarning of both. The system must take the relevant measures to defy this type of event; in other words, yet more complexification and differentiation. The fall of the Berlin Wall is this enormous event; The Chinese are going to arrive soon as well. There is an immense amount of work to be done! Our work is made all the more complex by the fact that in the developed countries the complexification of the system means less and less work for human beings. There are now two thousand million humans too many for a world that is developed. It’s the Deluge.
RB: The Deluge is also a simple response to these events.
JFL: There are, consequently, many measures to be taken, in all directions, Malthusian demographic measures which must be both ferocious and subtle, because they mustn’t produce the inverse effect. It’s the same thing with the issue of working-hours. More complexity, more suppleness; new social laws, new international laws. It has worked for two centuries, if not more. Is this really pessimistic? My neutral phrase ‘There’s work to be done’ means simply that the political is no longer to be thought or practiced in terms of a tragic politics. Politics may well have its tragic aspects, tragic in the sense that revolutionary wars are tragic, in the sense that all wars in Europe and America for the last two centuries have been civil wars. This notion of war, waged between one principle and another, is basically over. All wars crossed national frontiers even if this frontier often demarcated the violence empirically. We waged war against the Germans because it wanted to be a Reich; the idea of an empire was unbearable to the Republic, and so forth. We wanted to give the Germans their truth, one that they hadn’t recognised. This kind of war was tragedy. One could say as much for Marxism, the capitalists, the Communists, the proletariat, the cops. All this is over. The war with Saddam Hussein was waged in the name of ‘Don’t touch our energy sources–it is simply impossible to do so’. Energy sources are sacred to any system. At the same time there was international law: the simple annexation of Kuwait was too much, it reminded one of another Anschluss. The Gulf War is not tragic: despite the thousands and thousands of deaths, it was the system keeping law and order. The issue is this: the system is going to have to find ways of keeping law and order without waging war, it’s going to have to keep law and order positively by other means. These means will be drastic, will concern financial aid, demography, the complete reform of international relations, they will have to tackle the problem of mass-unemployment, and so on… The GATT is a very good example of the extension of the system, of its complexification, of its growing flexibility: ‘An end to customs duties, they’re completely archaic.. .’ We’re going to eat American–so what? So What? My son is eight years old and that’s what he likes best.
RB: Let’s stop there.
Translation by Richard Beardsworth
ENDNOTES
- Libidinal Economy,tr. lain Hamilton Grant, Athlone Press, 1993.
- In Des dispostifs pulsionnels, Christian Bourgois (1973) 1980.
- Just Gaming, tr. Wlad Godzich, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
- Peregrinations:Law,Form,Event, Columbia University Press, 1988.
- The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, tr. George Van Den Abbeele, University of Minnesota, 1988.
- Heidegger and ‘the Jews’, tr. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts, University of Minnesota, 1990.
- L’inhumain. Causeries surle temps, Galilee, 1988 (trans. lnhuman–Reflections on Time, trs. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Stanford University, 1992); Lectures d’enfance, Galilee, 1991; Moralites posrmodemes, Galilee, 1993.
- Des Dispositifs Pulsionnels, Galilee, 1994.
- E. Levinas, Quartre Lectures Talmudiques,Minuit, 1968.
- G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?,Minuit, 1991.
- In The Postmodern Condition, trs. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester University Press (1984) 1991, pp.71-82 (tr. Regis Durand).
- Philippe Bonnefis, Celine. Le Rappel des Oiseaux, Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1992.
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