Stiegler__Bernard_-_Acting_Out

ACTING OUT,... MERIDIAN Crossing Aesthetics Werner Hamacher Editor Translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan Stanford University Press Stanford California 2009 ACTING OUT Bernard Stiegler Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2009 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. How I Became a Philosopher was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Passer it l'acte © 2003 Editions Galilee; To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Aimer, s'aimer, nous aimer: Du II septembre au 2I avril © 2003 Editions Galilee. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stiegler, Bernard. [Passer al' acte. English] Acting out / Bernard Stiegler; translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan. p. cm.-(Meridian, crossing aesthetics) "How I Became a Philosopher was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Passer al'acte; To love, to love me, to love us was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Aimer, s'aimer, nous aimer." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5868-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8°47-5869-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Philosophy, French-20th century. 2. Individuation (Philosophy) 3. Narcissism. I. Barison, David. II. Ross, Daniel, 1970- III. Crogan, Patrick. IV Stiegler, Bernard. Aimer, s'aimer, nous aimer. English. V. Title. VI. Title: Aimer, s' aimer, nous aimer. VII. Series: Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) B2430.S752S7413 2009 194- dc22 2008006687 Contents How I Became a Philosopher 1 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September II to April 21 37 I The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 39 II The destruction ofthe process ofpsychic and collective individuation and the question ofevil 60 ~ m ~ Index 9I How I Became a Philosopher p The intimacy and secret of my life "How does one become a philosopher in the intimacy and se- cret of one's life?" This is the question Marianne Alphant addressed to me,l and to others, and with it she thrust me (and it was doubtless the same for the others) into an embarrassing position. And in reflecting on it I told myself that, in its apres-coup, becoming-a-philosopher appeared to me in effect and precisely as the secret and intimacy of my life, in the strict sense of these words. Philosophy and vocation Becoming-a-philosopher, I first asked myself: is this a vocation and, if so, does it apply to me? Vocation, according to its original religious meaning, is a name "given to those who 'feel called,'" writes Catherine Clement: "110- care, to call, signifies that all vocations are addressed to the indi- vidual, called by his name, as himself."2 Religious vocation is therefOre individual It happens to the indi- vidual: it is a moment of that which I am about to call a process of individuation. . As for extending the religious sense of vocation to profane pur- I 2 How I Became a Philosopher suits, it designates less the event of a call than the existence of a gift. One thus speaks of the vocations of musicians, of writers, of artists who devote their life to a special gift-in the sense of being something rare. In the philosophical vocation-if such a thing exists-there does not seem to be this dimension of specialty. no one is devoted to philosophy in particular; all of us could be devoted to philosophy, which would immediately constitute a gift, precisely, common to all The philosophical vocation cannot be a determination of such and such individual in particular. All ofus, precisely insofar as we form a we, would be devoted in potential to philosophy, in a way that is not the case for other kinds of knowing. And, reciprocally, though we know certain people are gifted in poetry, drawing, or music, it seems more difficult to say that someone "has a gift for philosophy. " If there are people more particularly "devoted" to philosophy, this would be, then, insofar as they are capable of making the passage to the act from a common potential. This is the first reason why I gave to this lecture, which I dedi- cate to the memory of Gerard Granel, the title Passer al'acte. Be- cause it is here that the individuality of the vocation is marked: in the singularity of the passage to the act of a common gift, the philosopher would, like a monk, essentially be the individual sin- gularity of a name. But how could this happen? If it is as a calling, from who orfrom whatwould such a calling come? And from what circumstances would such a call come to pass and "pass to the act," if it does not issue from a special gift? Philosophizing through acting For philosophy, more than for any other profane activity, one tends to understand vocation in a religious sense, insofar as phi- losophy through acting, as the call of a task, should always be, in the whole of its being, and through all the points of its existence, in accordwith its philosophical "vocation," right down to the "in- timacy and secret" of its existence, even as this intimacy and this secret. How I Became a Philosopher 3 In fact, this inscription of the philosophical at the heart of the very intimacy of the individual is what is testified to by the life and by the death of that proto-philosopher Socrates-with that sacri- ficial dimension which is undoubtedly part of an existence com- pletely devoted to thought. The singularity of Socrates' existence, his individuality, was precisely Anytus' accusation, before the trial that would condemn him. But this inscription of the philosophical at the heart of individ- uality only makes sense insofar as it is indissociably and exemplarily tied to the destiny of this other individuality that constitutes the City. this is what Socrates testifies to and in a way institutes in the course of his trial and during the weeks between the pronounce- ment of the verdict and his execution-as reported in Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. I believe that in order to more closely consider the incommen- surable inaugural impact of the philosophical individuality of Socrates, model of all philosophical existence, we must today ap- peal to the concept of psychic and collective individuation, as forged by Gilbert Simondon. The existential dimension of all philoso- phy, without which philosophy would lose all credit and sink into scholastic chatter, must be analyzed through the question of the relation of the I and the we, in which consists this psychic and col- lective individuation. I andwe in the process ofindividuation That man, as Aristotle says, is a political animal means that I am not human except insofar as I belong to a social group. This sociality is the framework of a becoming: the group, and the indi- vidual in that group, never cease to seek out their path. This search constitutes human time. And if the time of the I is certainly not the time of the we, it takes place within the time of the we, which is itself conditioned by the time of the Is of which it is composed. What Simondon calls individuation intimately ties together these two dimensions of the temporality of the political animal. 4 How I Became a Philosopher Individuation is not individualization. Individualization is the result of individuation, which is itself a process, through which di- versity in general, that diversity which I am and equally the diver- sity which we are, tends to unify and, through that, tends towards the in-divisibility of the in-dividual, that is, its pure adequation to itself. Now, the I can only individuate itself through its contri- bution to the individuation of the group that says we, that is, to the cohesion of that group: this is, firstly, what Simondon's concept teaches and formalizes. But, secondly, it teaches that the tendency toward in-dividuation is asymptotic: I tendto become in-divisible, but I never quite get there. I tend to become myself as indivisible, as pure unity, identity, but I never cease to contradict myself be- cause, in myself, individuating myself in the group that individu- ates itself through me, I never cease to find myself other than my- self I never cease to find myself divided, while at the same time the group alters and divides itself-and it does this because a process of individuation is structurally incapable ofcompletion. From out of this double constraint comes the temporality of individuation. In effect, if every I is inscribed in the we that con- stitutes it, and that it constitutes, if the I and the we are two faces ofthe same process ofindividuation, at the core of which develops their tendency to become-indivisible, ceaselessly projecting their accomplished unity, this projection is never concretized except by default [par defaut], in other words by ceaselessly deferring this completion which, if realized, would be the end of the process of individuation or, in other words, the end of the individual. Hav- ing become himself, completed, no longer changing, a finished individual, achieved, he would be without future. The endis, then, since it can never be realized, ceaselessly fictioned. This is true of the psychic individual that is the I just as much as 3 it is of the col- lective individual that is the we. lt is insofar as they are structurally incomplete and thus fictioned that the I and we are temporal-and this is why they constitute histories in the course of which things come to pass and events happen. The I and the we are two phases of the one process, in the first How I Became a Philosopher 5 place because they share the same preindividual funds, which con- stitute a transindividual horizon. Participation [in the social], for the individual, is the fact ofbeing an eLement in a much vaster individuation, through the intermediary of the stock of preindividuaL reaLity that the individuaL contains, that is, thanks to the potentials it harbors. 4 At the very moment I speak to you, I am in the process of indi- viduating myself: individuating myself means seeking to consti- tute the symbolic coherence of my utterances. But I will only suc- ceed in individuating myself ifI succeed in makingyou individuate yourselves with me. If my individuation succeeds, it will have to have succeeded in you-but not at all in the same manner, because what I am in the course of telling you I understand and interpret as some thing that you understand as some OTHER thing, and this is what is interesting. This is the condition ofthe we, and it is what develops "potentials," powers, or, in Greek, dunameis. However, in individuating the we together, you and I separately, and also you and I insofar as we form a group, we participate as well in the individuation of that which ties us: language, philoso- phy, law, etcetera, that which constitutes for us a preindividual fund. The nonknowledge of individuation and the beginning of philosophizing through acting It is within the framework of such a process that, in all his ac- tivities, Socrates participates in the individuation of the City, and, right up until the end, and therefore to the extreme, he links his in- dividual destiny to collective destiny: right up to his death, which is at the same time the end ofhis individuation and the beginning of the we that is philosophy. Socrates, by tying his death to the City in a certain manner, inaugurates the philosophical attitude that neces- sarily founds all philosophy, as an exemplary relation of the I and the we. Now, this end is also, therefore, an injinitization. When Crito proposes that he escape, Socrates refuses, because 6 How I Became a Philosopher if he did, he says, his children would become orphans-Socrates' children are the City's children, before they are Socrates' children. It is better they become orphans of Socrates than of their own city.5 And this is why, he goes on, either it is necessary "to bring the city around [to my point of view] by persuasion, or to do what it commands," upholding its laws without reserve, as it were "in life and in death." So, this death has the legacy of an obligation: that of continuing to interpret the laws of the City beyondthe death of Socrates, just as much as from that death, a death that becomes also a kind of survival, a kleos, a posterity-even if not, as Plato will incorrectly try to demonstrate, an immortality. In that regard, Socrates' death remains incomplete-charged with "potentials." This is his genius. In contrast to science, philosophy is always the philosophy of a philosopher, and, as Nietzsche said, the first question posed by the philosopher is "who?" This means that at the end of the day, philosophy as the discourse ofthe philosopher is always par excellence the discourse ofan individuation that, insofar as it is always at the same time individuation of an I and individuation of a we, unfolds within its OWNPARTICULAR LIMITS, through the existential singularity of a philosophical individuality, and precisely as un- achievable. Now, this means it is impossible to constatively objectify what individuation is. It is impossible to "know" individuation, writes Simondon, without pursuing this individuation, without trans- forming it, for example in inaugurating thereby a new attitude, which is philosophy through acting. We cannot, in the habitual sense of the term, know individuation; we can only individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in a we; this seizing is thus at the margins of knowledge, properly speaking. This is why Socrates' thought is a nonknowledge. But this also means that the discourse of individuation is performative (in Aus- tin's sense):6 philosophical saying is necessarily also a doing, to the death, and this theoria is always also a praxis-failing which it is How I Became a Philosopher 7 nothing but chatter. The question of philosophy is first of all that of action. As a consequence of this question of the articulation of the I and the we of the philosophers, a philosophical life ought to be ex- emplary: the philosophy of a philosopher only makes sense when it is illustrated through his way of life-that is, of dying. To ar- ticulate his existence and his thought in a manner such that they don't contradict each other: this is a particular experience of the impossible, even though it is also of the truth, and as a truth ofthe impossible. It is an experience not only of mathematical, physical, artistic truth, but of the truth as such: a way of living, if not in the truth (which would evidently be an illusion), at least in the question of the truth, in the call or ordeal of the truth such that it is not reducible to any particular activity, which thus constitutes what Blanchot will call "the question of the whole." Now, straightaway-this is also the beginning of the history of philosophy, and the whole individual history of a philosopher- the question of the truth is that of the truth ofthe origin, the ques- tion of the true origin, which exposes itself for the first time, in its properly philosophical form, in Meno, as the question of the origin ofvirtue and of its exemplarity, which is, precisely, what links the I and the we. The question of the origin and the desire for knowledge The question of the origin is what constitutes the whole of hu- man individuation, that is, the whole of desire: the whole of hu- man being insofar as it is essentially desiring. So philosophy is es- sentially, at least at its beginning, a search for the origin, and it is in this sense that one could say that every human being is philoso- phizing-insofar as it is always and from the beginning unsettled about its origin. This is what Blanchot says in reference to Freud: Freud more or less says that all the questions impulsively posed by children serve as relays for the one they do not pose, which is the 8 How I Became a Philosopher question of the origin. In the same way, we interrogate ourselves about everything, in order to sustain and advance the passion of the ques- tion, but all questions are directed toward one question alone-the central question, or the question of the whole? The question of the origin is immediately an erotic or libidinal question: it is, literally speaking, the question ofdesire-the ques- tion posed by desire, which does not cease to question, and the question that poses itseljfrom the moment when one questions desire, when one asks of desire what it is. In Symposium Plato has Diotima say that knowledge is by nature radically erotic, and that this is why philosophy is the love of knowledge but insofar as knowledge is essentially a lack-just as every object of desire is a lack. Desire is always desire for knowledge precisely in the sense in which I have posited that humanity, as a desiring being, is always potentially philosophizing. And from that point of view, I do not think of myself as having personally a particular philosophical vocation: I think I have the vocation the whole world has for philosophy. I think, and I have always thought, that I am devoted as we all are to philosophy, as we all are insofar as we are. But the question would nevertheless also be, and this is a noticeable shift, to know if we are not thus devoted insofar as we become. Such is the meaning of the question of becoming-a-philosopher posedfrom temporality understood as the process ofindividuation, and this itself as the passage to the act of a potential philosophical vocation common to all the Is that form the we which we are and which we become. The passage to the act as transgression The question of philosophy in potential is that of the passage to the act of philosophy. This is so, even though passer it l'acte is also a psychoanalytic ex- pression. It designates, in the course of treatment, a failure where, says Freud, "instead of remembering" (in the therapeutic frame- work of the transfer of desire), the analysand acts out. This ac- How I Became a Philosopher 9 tion can designate suicide (and Xenophon describes the death of Socrates as a kind of suicide) but also, more generally, one form or another of transgression. Now, we will see that there is also, when it comes to philosophy, on the one hand a neutralization ofaction, which it is tempting to assimilate to the operation of a transfer of desire-permitting the overcoming of a blockage that is a kind of neurotic dimen- sion ofthe City-by a methodical and passionate practice of logos (as dialectic) through which the potential philosopher becomes an actual philosopher. And, on the other hand, the passage to the act ofphilosophy would have a relation to limits, a radical experience of limits of which the first name (but not the only one, nor the last) would be "origin." And, with that, this passage to the act would have a relation to individuation, as already mentioned-be- ing taken in its political sense, and as a vocation for transgression, in a certain way to the limits ofthe law, of which Socrates will be the index and the protophilosophical infinitization, indefinitely inter- pretable. So, this passage to the act of philosophy as politics, where phil- osophical performativity founds saying as doing, leads us also to Marx's words, according to which it is necessary to pursue the in- terpretation of being through its transformation-in becoming. Reminiscence I have not always been philosophizing "through acting"-if I ever have: up to the age of twenty-six I had not ever philosophized; I did not even finish high school. One day, nevertheless, this voca- tion common to all the beings we are in potential, and in which consists all self-interrogation of the origin, revealed itself almost as a necessity-a necessity literally inevitable and inescapable. At the origin of philosophy, with Plato, the question ofthe origin opens itself as the question of reminiscence. Now, the question of the origin was also and first of all presented to me as this question of the origin, essentially through a recollection, which then became 10 How I Became a Philosopher the properly philosophical question of reminiscence, of Platonic anamnesis. When Marianne Alphant proposed to me that I speak of the intimate and secret way in which I became a philosopher, I was extremely uncomfortable, not only because in itself the question is enormous, but also because this way was constituted through a very singular intimacy, and precisely as a secret-all of which took place by accident, which is what still holds me back from speak- ing of myself in terms of a philosophical "vocation," but this also concerns the whole of philosophy, because I came to place the ac- cident at the very heart of philosophy, and perhaps as its unsolvable secret. Marianne Alphant's question put me back (beginning October 10, 2002, when I commenced reflecting on it) in a philosophical posture in which it is not easy to remain, which one has a ten- dency, in everyday life, to forget, and this was precisely the posture of reminiscence-beyond simple recollection. This question con- cerning the intimacy of my becoming-a-philosopher led me to a return to myself, plunged me back into moments that I had, if not effaced from memory, at least forced into the background of my existence, even though these moments concerned an origin: the origin of my passage to the philosophical act, but which inscribed itself in another genre of passage to the act. Reminiscence was at the origin of my entry to philosophy, in such a way as to be essentially tied to a very existential experience of reminiscence, which only came to me as it led me into the phil- osophical attitude, quite by accident, and it is that of which I have had a second reminiscence, of a kind, on the occasion of this reflec- tion on the intimacy of my becoming-a-philosopher that brought me today before you. The necessity of telling the truth When, for the first time, they appeared to me as such, the ques- tions of origin and reminiscence presented themselves to me im- mediately as the question of the truth. In fact, the question ofthe How I Became a Philosopher II origin is the question of the truth of the origin, and as such it is immediately the question of truth itself Reflecting on the oppor- tunity to respond to Marianne Alphant's invitation, I decided to turn and squarely confront this question of the truth, such as I encountered it at a moment in my life in an almost palpable way, as if it had a body, literally as if I could grab hold of it, as one says. Of course I have in fact never really touched it. But it has certainly touched me, in one way or another. The question having been suddenly posed to me of my philo- sophical "vocation," inasmuch as such a vocation exists, it got me thinking that it was time that I reconstitute, through an anamnesis, the question of the truth in the way that, precisely, it constituted itself for me as the question of the truth oftime-it was time that I again posed the question, and that I exposed myself to it, as it had accidentally proposed itself. It seemed to me it was my duty, in a certain way (and it is a heavy word, of which I nevertheless bear the weight), it was my duty to say, if not the truth, at least the ne- cessity of telling the truth, and in the attempt, as far as possible, to get to the bottom of "my truth," the truth of my journey through the question of the truth and, perhaps, as the experience ofthe im- possibility oftelling the truth other than by default, as thefiction ofan apres-coup: in time and as time, as the work oftime. Philosophizing by accident My becoming-a-philosopher through acting, if it has taken place, and I believe indeed it has taken place, was the effect of an anamnesis produced by an objective situation in the acciden- tal course of my existence. The accident consisted in five years of incarceration, which I spent in the Saint-Michel Prison in Tou- louse, then in the Muret Detention Center, between 1978 and 1983-years obviously preceded by a passage to the act, that is, by a transgression. So, these were five years spent in philosophical practice, in exper- imental phenomenology, and in passage to the limits of phenome- 12 How I Became a Philosopher nology, following this "passage to the act" that itself had absolutely nothing to do with philosophy. One must always be ready to philosophize to the death, as did Socrates, and to philosophize in that dying which a life is-but "a life" means here an existence and a facticity, an accidentality. For example, Socrates' being condemned to death is an accident that is necessary. Socrates will make sure that it is necessary, he will make a mistake that he will have had to make. The philosophical vocation, if there is one, gives itself, as in Proust, in the future anterior of an apres-coup, as endurance of the apres-coup. The apres-coup traverses and structures what those five years in prison were for me-but also the following twenty years, which have led me today before you as before the law, years I have conse- crated to consolidating this "necessity," this mistake that will have had to happen. But, at the same time, this question of vocation is that of a voca- tion by default, or by accident, because this vocation is always that ofeveryone, with "everyone" forming the we that the philosopher through acting represents in individuating-by default. Like a flying fish My incarceration in Saint Michel Prison, result of a passage to the act, will have been the suspension of my acts and the interrup- tion of my actions: such is the function of prison. But interrup- tion and suspension, which are also the beginning of philosophy (Socrates' daimon is the one who interrupts), were for myself the occasion of a reflection on what the passage to the act is in general-- and a recollection of all the acts that brought me there. Twenty years after my liberation, it seems to me, moreover, that my journey will never cease to be a circuit between "action" and its suspension by "philosophy in action" ["Philosophie en acte"] , between writing and highly social activity. It would be necessary here to examine the ambiguities of the relation between these words, act and action, with all the prob- How I Became a Philosopher 13 lems posed by the translation into the Latin actus of the Greek energeia. It is Aristotle who forms this couple of act and potential with which I have tried on this very day to think my own life-but which I discovered almost twenty-five years ago, in Hegel's History ofPhilosophy, where he reformulates, in his commentary on On the Soul, the Aristotelian question of dunamis and energeia as the question of the in-itselfand the for-itself In that treatise Aristotle poses three types of souls, according to three modes of animation, three kinds of living movement. the vegetative, sensory, and intellective souls, which form three rela- tions to the "immovable prime mover," to God as the desirable par excellence, as the motive and in that sense the reason of everything that moves. Aristotle explains that a sensory soul, for example, is most of the time sensory in potential and not in acting. It is sen- sory through acting only when it reproduces itself The rest of the time, it remains in the inferior mode of the vegetative soul, which Aristotle also calls nutritive. The same applies to the intellective or noetic soul: it is only rarely in action and remains most of the time in the sensory mode. It is in action only when, participating in the divine, it re-produces the truth. This is what leads Hegel to say that the sensory soul is the in-itselfof the intellective soul and, in a way, its material. The intellective soul is most of the time only in potentiality, and not in action, meaning that it comports itself sensitively rather than intellectively. This account, and the lesson it names, will have guided all my solitary work, since the time of my imprisonment-the question becoming that of the conditions of the passage from potential to act, what Aristotle names participation in the divine. In this regard, reading On the Soul was decisive for thinking movement, motion, and what one might call emotion as desire, that is, the relation to the immovable prime mover, insofar as, for such a passage from potential to act, the consideration of milieu appeared to me to be decisive. Studying the senses, Aristotle underlines in effect that one does not see that, in the case of touching, it is the body that forms 14 How I Became a Philosopher the milieu, whereas, for example, in the case of sight, the milieu is what he calls the diaphane. And he specifies that this milieu, because it is that which is most close, is that which is structurally forgotten, just as water is for a fish. The milieu is forgotten, be- cause it effaces itself before that to which it gives place. There is always already a milieu, but this fact escapes us in the same way that "aquatic animals," as Aristotle says, "do not notice that one wet body touches another wet body" (423ab): water is what the fish always sees; it is what it never sees. Or, as Plato too says in the Timaeus, if the world was made of gold, gold would be the sole being that would never be seen-it would not be a being, but the inapparent being ofthat being, appearing only in the occurrence of a being, by default. Aristotle does not in this treatise examine the noetic milieu (the intellective milieu), giving place to logos (he does this, on the other hand, in the Analytics: such is his logic). Reading Aristotle, it is this same possibility of the existence of such a noetic milieu, as the ele- ment of the everyday life of the intellective soul, on which I medi- tated a great deal in my cell, where I was like a fish out ofwater. There ought to be a milieu of the intellective soul, I thought, just as the senses of the sensory soul have their milieus. Now, it appeared to me that this milieu was that of language. I set myself to reading Saussure and Wittgenstein. Later the milieu became for me that of the artifact, of the supplement in general, of which language (through which is produced the everyday expe- rience of logos) would be one dimension, but of which technical artifacts (consisting of things) would form another dimension. From then on, philosophy consisted of considering the milieu while being able to extract oneself from it, in the same way as a flying fish can leave the water: intermittently. In this extraction, or abstraction, the milieu is brought into view, which is to say, also, here, taken hold oj; and like a wall, by default, as the condi- tion of passage from the potential of the intellective soul to its act, to its for itself From then on, I could not claim that I was in my cell like a fish in water, but, in that cell, where I had been ren- dered radically deficient in the vital milieu ofthe intellective soul, How I Became a Philosopher the world, as the framework ofartifacts fOrming relations sustaining social relations, I had perhaps a chance to consider this world as does a fish flying, above its element-an elementary milieu totally constituted by supplements, where the element, in other words, is always lacking. So, I discovered-and I say this in Platonic terms but from a point of view that opposes me to Plato-that this element was the hypomnesis, as that which gives place to anamnesis. Hypomnesis and mortality Regarding anamnesis, let us recall a scene from Meno. Socrates meets Meno, who is on his way to the house of Protagoras to be taught virtue. Socrates proposes to him that he first of all ask what virtue is fOr himselfi in order to know if it is truly possible to teach it. To this question of knowing what virtue is, Meno responds by proposing examples of various virtues. Socrates tells him this is not answering the question of knowing what virtue is as such: not through such and such particular virtue, but virtue as forming the unity of all possible virtues, or the reason of the series of cases that form the examples, the unity of this series, thus the essence of virtue, that is, the origin of virtue (that through which it com- mences). It is then that Meno responds with his famous aporia, whereby Socrates cannot find what he is looking for because either he does not know it, and so will not recognize it if he finds it, or because he already knows it, in which case he is only pretending to search for it. Socrates responds that in effect he already knew what he was looking for: he knew it at "another time," then he fOrgot it. From then on, cognition is recognition, a remembering-an anamnesis. Phaedrus, as a dogmatic reprise of Meno and a simplification of the meaning of the survival of Socrates in death, on the one hand founds the discourse on the immortality of the soul, in condemn- ing the body as a fall from the origin, a prison of the soul, site of passion, and cause offOrgetting by the soul of its knowledge of the origin, and, on the other hand, opposes anamnesis to hypomnesis: 16 How 1Became a Philosopher the latter, as a technics of memory (and he is concerned here es- sentially with the writing of books), with the same defects as the body, and in the same way a prison, is for Plato what renders the soul forgetful, replacing true memory with artificial memory, and accentuates theforgetting ofthe origin into which the soul has fallen in its descent into the body. Hypomnesis is here, very generally, the figure of artifice, of technics as the dead simulacrum of life-as-immortality. Now, in a much earlier dialogue, Plato had Protagoras undertake a dis- course on prostheticity in general and on the defects of the body, and, through it, of mortals and of mortality properly speaking-of which Protagoras (in the dialogue that bears his name) proposes a genesis, which is also that of the fUndamentally accidental character of mortals, fruits of a mistake by the Titans, an accident proceed- ing precisely from a forgetting: Zeus, having asked Prometheus to bring into the day the living beings that are not immortals, hands him all the qualities, the dunameis, to distribute to the liv- ing. Epimetheus, who is charged with this distribution, forgets to save a quality for man, for which Prometheus tries to compensate by stealing fire, that is, technics-a theft that is a passage to the act, an attempt, in vain, to make up for the lack of a quality, in other words the default oforigin, which from then on afflicts we mortals. This accidental forgetting, generator of prostheses and artifices making up for a lack of origin, is equally the origin of hypomnesis, to which Plato will later oppose the anamnesis of the origin. In opposition to the metaphysics arising in the Phaedrus, the myth of the fault of Epimetheus says that at the origin there is only an originary default oforigin, and man, without qualities, only exists by default. he becomes. The extra-ordinary in the absence of world A passage to the act plunged me accidentally into a profoundly philosophical situation, which was in its turn a passage from po- r How I Became a Philosopher tential to act-a reminiscence through interruption of the action and suspension of the conditions of ordinary life. This was the beginning of an experience of the extra-ordinary. I believe the ex- perience of the extra-ordinary is essential to philosophy: it is the meaning of Socrates' shamanism, of his famous daimon. It is also the reversal of the natural attitude in Husserl's phenomenology. For five years I had this experience of the extra-ordinary because I was confronted with the limits of the conditions of intellective life, being held above the ordinary social surface of those conditions. I almost grabbed hold of the extra-ordinary, as an ordinarily invis- ible milieu suddenly considered as such-but in the night of my ignorance, groping, it appeared to me to constitute those condi- tions of experience that cannot be found in experience, because they condition it. 8 Deprived of an "exterior milieu," my "interior milieu" took on that incommensurable depth and weight sought after by mystics and, more generally, by ascetics. But it is also and just as much in its absence, and in the most intimate and secret hollow [creux] of the "interior milieu," that the "exterior milieu" is constituted as irreducible-and thus I was testing a Husserlian lesson 9 but, as we will see, a contrario.!O Absent, the world reigned in my cloister like "the absence of all bouquet."!! Mter a few months of incarceration I had written, above the small table where I worked and ate, this verse by Mallarme: On no fruits here does my hunger feast, But finds in their learned lack the self-same taste.!2 As the days passed, I was discovering that there is no interior mi- lieu, but only, remaining here in my cell and under their mnesic shape, in a sense in a hollow, the remains, the defaults, the artifices of which the world consists and through which it finds its consis- tence. I no longer lived in the world, but rather in the absence of a world, which presented itself here not only as a default, but as that which is always in default, and as a necessary default [un defaut qu'il faut]-rather than as a lack [manque]. 18 How I Became a Philosopher And, inversely, for want ofthese remains producing a default, there had been nothing else: I was woven only out of these remains. Because, finally, the exterior milieu being interrupted and sus- pended, being in default, in reality there was for me no interior milieu, but rather its reduction to an exterior milieu itselfreduced to an absolute minimum of that which remained of it in my memory, constituting my interminable recollection via the fabric of my memories-what Husserl called secondary retentions-and which would become for me the material not only of a desperate recol- lection but also of an anamnesis, of a work of reminiscence, in the properly philosophical sense of the word. My freedom, hypomneses, and the necessity of the world From these remains of the world, I gathered material for a remi- niscence of the necessity of the world-and, in fact, of its properly irreducible character. This was certainly a reminiscence or a reac- tivation from out of those remains, but, somewhat like Husserl's analysis of the origin of geometry, this reactivation of the world was not possible other than via the intermediary of that which would permit me in a way to figure this world ideally, just as for example Meno's slave figures the geometric ideal in the sand: by relying on the hypomneses ofbooks read and words written. Because the world in which the exterior milieu consisted had not completely disappeared in its very exteriority (or I would have gone mad): I reconstituted it, each day, through what I would much later name tertiary retentions,13 that is, through hypomnesic traces. This exteriority was irreducible, which means I could not reach (myself in) it (the interior is nothing without the exterior, the dif- ference between the two being an illusion-obviously necessary, and even insurmountable), but it was within my power to recon- stitute it. Such were my freedom, my intimacy, and my secret. Very quickly, I had the presence of mind to begin to read and write, secreting around me an intimate hypomnesic milieu (which was nevertheless already on the way to becoming public), at once How I Became a Philosopher secret, cryptic, and yet already publishable: I constituted a world that would become, over the years and beyond the period of my incarceration, my philosophy. If this had not happened, I would have become insane or totally asocial. Because if we are constituted by retentions that remain within us in the absence of the world, these retentions produce protentions that are desires for actions, actual forms of being-in- the-world. I had found the way to suspend these protentions, be- cause I had transferred them to my unceasing effort to consider the element while being myself maintained outside of it-through fabricating that other element which was in the process of becom- ing "my philosophy," a pure fabric ofhypomneses, of which I daily deposited traces on paper, like a snail sliming along a wall. The fragility of freedom Prison is asceticism without end-with the exception of micro- interruptions such as visits and, when the time comes, day-release. I ended up being afraid of (while also desiring) these micro-inter- ruptions to the silence of which asceticism consists. I even avoided, as much as possible, the "promenades" that broke the silence I had learned to love. When one begins to systematically practice the ex- perience of one's preindividuallived milieu (having become acces- sible to oneself beyond the context of the world), as an almost pal- pable milieu (a little like the way in which a hand placed outside the window during high-speed driving causes air to be perceived as a liquid), having thus totally suspended all relation to a meaning- ful milieu other than that which one carries and reactivates within oneself, or other than that toward which one deliberately heads (such as the book one reads, or rather devours, or the book one writes)-now, if one is all of a sudden confronted with micro- interruptions to this asceticism, then, paradoxically, one suffers terribly: one discovers that, in fact, to be "free" is a suffering. It is suffering because, most of the time, it produces itself not as liberty but precisely as alienation. One perceives with astonishment that, in that cell, one is much more free, or at least that liberty is much 20 How I Became a Philosopher more accessible there, much purer, appearing then essentially as fra- gility, as what is intrinsically fragile, that which must be made the object of the whole of one's care, of a veritable cult, of a culture. This culture, which I have named, after Epictetus, my melete. The silence out of which a voice arises My melete was in reality an ensemble of disciplines. I would, for example, throughout those five years, begin each day by reading Mallarme-I arose as soon as I awoke, to avoid those uncontrollable protentions that would occur as the waking reveries of the morning. Reading a poem, or reading and rereading a prose text, usually for half an hour, not so as to learn it by heart but to understand it. More generally, my melete came from readings leading to pro- longed writing exercises in different modes, which came to form veritable reading methods, which consisted in a process by which the texts read were catalogued, then transformed into commentar- ies, and finally consisted of writing, in which these remains of the world were reassembled: thus was producedreminiscence. In the evening, I read novels. I lived only in language, and uniquely in written language. I spoke only very rarely. I did not like it; I didn't like it anymore. I had learned to love the silence through which I could listen to what always arose so long as I knew how to wait: an other voice, a soliloquy in which it was not me who was speaking, but the other me, which I called myself-an-other [moi-I'autreJ, the other of myself, the other that I carried in me, which I became, as if I had been weighed down with what Socrates had ascribed as the task of the maieutician. Language, in abandoning its communicative function, opened itself fully to its significance, or rather as significance, as if it turned itself over to its vocation of signifying, suddenly proliferating. It made signs, literally, sometimes to the point of madness. I listened and tried to take note of everything I heard or read. It happened with an absolute necessity. It signified, almost as if it spoke by it- How I Became a Philosopher 21 self, and, from that point of view, I am obviously tempted to speak of "vocation": it resembled what the tradition considers to be that of which a vocation consists. It was a matter of a voice [vocare]. This impersonal voice, which was not the language of commu- nication, was the language of pure significance of which Blanchot spoke regarding Char in The Beast ofLascaux. When that language began to "speak," to signify, I had the feel- ing of entering into a state of ultralucidity. It was a kind of pas- sion, and it was in these exceptional conditions that I encountered the Greek passion for language and the question of logos that arises there, a passion and a question that were also a state of exception and an origin: ours, insofar as we philosophize today, in potential or in act. But I came to the position that this originary Greek pas- sion was, as well, a default of origin-as Husserl glimpsed at the end of his life, it was hypomnesically constituted by default, by this default that the hypomnesic technique of writing is. Much later, I compared my position with Husserl's thoughts on soliloquy in Logical Investigations. But I did this on the basis of fre- quent preparatory readings of Plato and his discourse on dianoia, dialectic as the dialogue of the soul with itself, in a context where, for me-rigorously experimenting with dian0 ia, understanding it in order to criticize dialectic as Plato wanted to establish it-it was first ofall a matter offighting against the badsoliloquy. the hell lived by those who, as one says, talk to themselves, those whom one sees everywhere these days in the streets, those who have lost their spirit, overcome by the harshness of life. This was, then, how I undertook to practice philosophy, as the experience of a silence in which a voice arose, as a soliloquy sus- tained by the hypomneses of writing, anamnesically reconstitut- ing language as that which does not allow itself to be understood except through the trial of a cloistered asceticism and an absolute solitude, language that is rarely produced in the dialectic of a dia- logue between two, in the social dialectic, which has almost always become, today, unfortunately for us, pure chatter, if not a system of cretinization. In that soliloquy of extremities, on the verge of talking to myself 22 How I Became a Philosopher but just before that point, on the edge of that quasi-madness of extreme thoughts, of final ends and profound roots, hypomnesis was my safeguard. To give place: The invention of locality I thus discovered what one calls in philosophy the phenom- enological epokhe--the suspension of the world, of the thesis of the world, that is, of the spontaneous belief in the existence of the world, which constitutes in Husserl's language the natural at- titude-what I previously called ordinary life. I discovered this philosophical theory and practice by chance and by accident, long before studying it in the works of Husserl: I deduced it from the situation, I practiced it, in a way, empirically and savagely. When I discovered it formulated and theorized by phenomenology, I found myself in a state of unimaginable excitement. I believe that Granel, who accompanied me throughout this adventure, was also enthused, and that he had the impression of witnessing a perfectly singular experience, but at the same time he also found himself at times disarmed: my situation often made me resistant to tradi- tional readings of what he rightly liked to call "the tradition." Then, by chance, thanks to Gerard Granel himself, thanks to the books, the paper, to the knowledge of writing and reading taught to me by the Republic, for which I here give thanks as a child cherishing its mother, through this chance issuing from struggles that were conducted for literacy, notably by philosophers, struggles that would prove one can conduct a politics ofthe passage to the philosophical act, ifyou will by the chance of everything that I will shortly call the already-there, which left me the legacy of that fortunate heritage, I was able to pass from the empirical practice of the epokhe, of the suspension, to a practice that was reasoned, methodical, and to an "apodictic" vocation or pretension. I was able to enter philosophy properly speaking by accident, therefore, but also thanks to the laws ofthe City. the spirit of the laws of the French Republic meant there was a library in this old prison. How 1Became a Philosopher 23 These laws and that which is today, through the state, still pre- served as their spirit will, 1 hope, in the years to come, not find their destruction, but on the contrary their anamnesis, in a sense their renewal. I thus passed into philosophical thought, that is, apodictic thought. Apodictic means without deixis, on the other side of de- ixis, outside deixis, outside context: outside milieu, without here- and-now. Deixis is, in Greek, the here-and-now, it is that which shows itselfas here-and-now, the monstrative site of what Aristotle called the tode ti, the that-which-is-here. The apodictic is the de- monstrative, which does not give itself other than through being torn from context, from local determinations, and, as such, the apodictic already supposes a suspension-if not that of the world, at least that of its here-and-now, its locality. So, in the suspension of the world, and in its apodictic residue, I found first an absence of world, this "learned lack," which, as such (a lack), is rather a fault [defaut] and a necessity [il faut], that which gives and gives place, rather than what "lacks place." The lack, in this case, is the inability to know how to live this absence, in this absence; it does not know how to find the learning necessitated by default, that is, to invent it. In the impossibility, in the unsupport- ability of the absence of world, quite close to the un-world [im- monde], I found the world as irreducible locality, and as locality itself constituted, in all circumstances, but invisibly, just as water is absent to a fish, by default, by the default, and even as default, for example, that default of pronunciation which we hear in a foreign accent. I posed the default as that which every locality expresses, in its guise and according to its place: as originary default of origin, in- asmuch as a locality is always artifactually andprosthetically consti- tuted-and, in my situation then and there, reconstituted by and in that which remained of a "milieu" despite everything, granting me in the end a place still, an ensemble ofremains that I wanted to save and that I therefore reconstituted hypomnesically, fight- ing against the finitude of my memory, against that which I later called, with Derrida, commenting on Husserl, my retentional fini- 24 How I Became a Philosopher tude. With these remains, hypomnesically transformed, I produced a new world, I gave place to another place, where I finally found what I would call the virtue of prison. I discovered, through the apodictic path, a necessity of the world (that which is necessary of the default), an irreducibility ofdeictic- ity or, to put it another way, that which nevertheless could never, without doubt, be apodictically demonstrated-except by default. I believe that to speak of the necessity of the tie that the default is, its" it must' ["il faut"]' is the heart of the question of Socrates' Apology (the default is first of all mortality) and of Crito (where the law is necessary for me to be condemned), even the Phaedo--be- cause that also has to do with "dying and wanting to be dead," as Phaedo says to Socrates in prison, which nevertheless does not at all mean that Socrates speaks of the immortality of the soul: the Phaedo concerns on the contrary the acceptance of mortality, which is piety, which means also and even initially accepting the laws of the City. This is philia as love, to the death, of the City: right up to the hemlock. This by-default is what I experimented with through my me- lete and my dianoia with the Platonic hypomneses that form the Dialogues, against Plato's phantasm of pure liberty, opposed to all alienation and all default, to all default posed as alienation-and I did it while not ceasing to read Plato, in Plato's absence, dare I say it: there, in his absences, such as in the Symposium, is revealed his immense impact after the Platonic evasion that betrays Socrates, and which unfortunately consists in opposing the soul to the body, and anamnesis to hypomnesis, to dogmatize the immortality of the soul, that is, to refuse to accept its being-by-default or, to put it another way, its being-in-becoming. This is, in effect, what gets metaphysics underway, and against which I struggled and fought throughout those five years. The idiom of that which signifies The laws of the City always have this character of locality that marks them as laws of this city, index of contingency and acciden- How I Became a Philosopher tality, from which fact proceeds the Athenian decision to condemn Socrates to death by hemlock. This contingency is that which marks itself and remarks itself, in the first place in the irreducibil- ity of the idiomatic character of language, in that its significance comes solely from signifying and making signs, through which language does not cease to reinvent itself. Whether speaking, even alone or silently, or writing, I am already within that jurisdiction: I always belong to a here and now, to a locality, no matter what. Even when imprisoned, I belong to local-ity by default, and in default as locality, because it is still my language that constitutes me, insofar as it is idiomatic. And all those retentions, which are themselves traces of that which is in default because it is no longer there-it is no longer there as that which must be there, precisely as that which makes sense, idiom, locality, that is, being-there--pres- ent suddenly and completely differently that which is no longer there: the world, not as an unformed, vague, amorphous exterior, nor simply the sum of physical laws constituting things and be- ings. The world, precisely insofar as it signi-fies and can only do so from its local-ity. From then on I tried to isolate the degrees of localities by di- verse imaginary variations and signifjingpractices. There was the most local level of the idiomacity of my soliloquy, which I cultivated and maintained through the artificial reten- tional milieu of my hypomneses, constituting in its isolated factic- ity a here and now where, finally, something always happened and, even, more than ever. This was because I remained temporal in re- maining idiomatic, and thus I never finished becoming. The facti- cal world was my whole world, but in which took place an intense signifying production, a profusion of new enunciations, inherited from the already-there of my knowledge held in memory, by my "secondary retentions," and maintained through the tertiary re- tentions of my reading and of my writing, which substituted for absent things insofar as they themselves give support. And there was the level of what I call the most-ample-locality. mortal-ity as ethos ofall mortals, that is, of the desiring and sig- nifying beings that we are; the locality that for example ties me, 26 How I Became a Philosopher between beasts and immortals, to Lascaux-the giving-place that I share with Lascaux. Between these extremities lie innumerable variations forming so many modes of constitution of the we where we are as 1, idiolects and dialects, but also still unthought networks of new modes of "deterritorializing." This is what led me to the question of the default in general but, more particularly, of the default that the question of prosthe- sis poses, the question of the artifact, and of substitution, and so on. All locality would in fact be constituted from such prostheses, where idiomaticity would be the symbolic but also artifactual el- ementarity of that supplementarity. And in fact I was only able to hold-and continue to have a place-through constituting and reconstituting daily the artificial locality of my writing and my reading. Significance and insignificance The conditions of the constitution of the world appear in the absence of the world in particular as the impossibility of choos- ing--one's clothes, one's home, one's friends, the use of one's time, and so on-and consequently of articulating and arranging. The world is being-toward-the-world-I then began to enter into Being and Time, and to begin building, dare I say it, a soli-loquy [soli- logue] with Heidegger-and this world is the fabric or the frame- work of signifying practices, as well as being that which is framed and woven by these practices. Because finally, in effect, that which ties all those questions that invaded me in the immobility andsilence ofsoliloquy, beginningfrom the first day ofmy imprisonment, is in all its diverse facets the ques- tion ofsignificance and of its combat with insignificance, with itself, in other words, and the experience of this intimate and secret dif- ference, which appears or does not appear, or which disappears, in things and between things, and which changes everything about things. Everyone has had this experience, and in truth has it ceaselessly, How I Became a Philosopher whether consciously or not: one desires or waits for or considers an object, a good, a being; then the object, the good, or the being, being there, effaces itself, becomes indifferent, even oppressive, disgusting, eclipsed-nothing. In prison I permanently and in a kind of pure way had the ex- perience of the remains that framed me and that in the end I am. But if others can cover over this experience, this is so only to the degree that it produces itself-which is what permits one to flee it, as happens in the ordinary world. It was posed there before me and as the very experience of the me: I could not avoid noting that, in fact, it is in me and by me that everything passes and is passed; it is not the thing that is insignificant because, yesterday, it was significant; and since I am alone with it and nothing around us has changed, I cannot ignore it: it is I, as living memory, who have transformed myself since yesterday, while around me everything is still as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow. In prison, that which, today, is very prominent and consistent, laden with meaning and, in that sense, "significant," never fails to become, tomorrow, indifferent, totally insignificant, and the very opposite of what it was-at least insofir as I have not understood that preciselyfrom theseficts comes this otherfict that there is nothing insignificant in itse/j and that what can be insignificant are not the things themselves, or in themselves, but the relation I have or rather that I do not have with those things, such as I articulate and arrange them. In undertaking this ordeal I came to understand that there is no abstract significance-that is, outside of a signifying material and a signifying practice-and that I alone am responsible for whether there is signification or not. From then on I adopted a principled attitude, according to which my task consisted offinding significance in the insignificant. I posed in principle that there is nothing in- significant other than myself when, precisely, I do not want to become myself-another, when I do not want to allow myself to be altered, to allow myselfto individuate, through the signifying of the other (other thing, other me). And I understood that significance demands frequentation, the How I Became a Philosopher frequenting of a practice. One does not arrive at the significance of a language, for example, in which one does not have a sustained relation where one individuates oneself in a language that one does not speak, no more than one arrives at the significance of a music that one does not frequent assiduously-like the poetry of Mal- larme, which gives itself only to the patient. 14 It is thus that I came to impose upon myself and to systemati- cally practice my disciplines, my melete-where I discovered that significance has a part essentially tied to memory. objects and, more generally, the "significants"-the utterances, books, signs and sym- bols, objets d'art, and all that which frames the unity of human milieus-only appear to me as echoes of my memory. It is insofar as they respond to an expectation of my memory, a protention, that they can signi-fy, make signs, make signs to me. From then on it was a question of learning to cultivate high expectations. I understood also that the opposing couple of signifier and signi- fied was not the right question, and that this was what Saussure had got bogged down in-and with him the whole of structural- ism. I encountered, but by a wholly other path, the enterprise of Jacques Derrida, whose OfGrammatology I read avidly. The alter in the ego Thus was constituted the question of my reminiscence. But this quite clearly had another source, that of the memori- ous reconsideration of that which brought me there, leaving me with a unique question: how could I at that point no longer have loved the world, have found it so insignificant, that I had taken the risk, in passing to the act, of finding myself completely removed, immobilized and imprisoned in that cell, with no way out except that of finding in myself the resources that would give me access to such questions, and finding there a sense of things and the desire for this world? It is out of this first question that the question of reminiscence emerged, instructed by the material of my past life, and as the question of signifying practices that it was a matter of reinventing How I Became a Philosopher from out of the insignificance into which I had fallen, to the point of passing to the act, finding myself, presently alone, solely respon- sible for my past and my future. I then understood that signifying practices constitute frame- works, repetitions, which I called texts in the sense of fabrics [tis- sus], in a sense that is thus not only linguistic but grammatical, that is, retentional, and that they are the supports of making-world. The fabric of signifying practices that forms the material of the world, which organizes and programs all social behavior, can obvi- ously weaken, rip, decay: I can perfectly well enter into an attitude of inattention to the world, and thus of insignificance, even of dereliction. And it is to the extent that the world appears insig- nificant to me, and in a way does not appear to me at all, that I am myseiflnsignificant-and I know this, and I suffer from it: dif- ficult freedom. I very often saw this possibility of decay in prison, almost every time I left my cell (and first of all in myself), and I constantly felt it as the danger facing me, myself, at the limit. But I anticipated it above all as the danger to come from refound lib- erty or, rather, from disincarceration. Isolated, I was able to experiment, observe, and note how I was able to adopt an attitude of availability, a disposition, or, on the contrary, to occupy a position and make myself unavailable to that to which I opposed myself, and how I was able to make myself available or unavailable depending on those practices that I did or did not take up in the diverse signifying fields that were mine. With nothing there for me, everything I lacked sent me back to those practices, which, all of a sudden, no longer had any material support. This is how I understood that signifying practices are forms of discipline, more or less perceptible, and that if I did not want to tumble into madness-that is, into a-significance, which is much worse that insignificance-it was necessary that I impose on myselfa melete, not only as an ensemble of rules and maxims but, especially, of practices in signifYingfields. So, the access to the "transcendental" subject, the goal of all epokhe, appeared therefore impossible without the other, that other being itself inaccessible without signifying practices: outside of the 3° How I Became a Philosopher outside. Thus there was no inside. Because what shined brilliantly in the absence of the world was the alterity ofthe other, and in the signifying soli-Iogue I tried to maintain with myself, it was the al- terity that, still there by default, appeared and which I had to find in myselfin altering myself through those practices by which I grasped, little by little, that others in the world are there to give me access, through them, to myalterity, to my future. To my in- dividuation. It was no longer a matter of reaching an alter ego, but the alter without the ego, the alterity of an other that was not constituted from me, but ofwhich I am first constituted, as "myself-an-other" ["moi-autre'1 rather than "my-self" ["moi-meme'l, and to which the outside gives place. This outside was just as much the question of the already-there, concretized through tertiary retention: traces, hypomnesic productions. I am essentially my outside, which is something spatial, and that inevitably means also hypomnesically already-there; but it is therefore also-and since it is constituted in the already, and memorially. In this remainder that in prison cannot cease, even when there is apparently no longer anything else-that is, when time no longer seems to flow-space appeared to me, however, to constitute time or, rather, to reconstitute it, in a kind of originary apres-coup. And that meant I had to learn to think before the opposition of space and time. Much later I discovered that this question of the already-there, which I have learned to formulate through Heidegger, and which I formalized for the first time in 1980 through the concept of id- iotext, was also the question of what Simondon called the pre- individual. My individuation, as becoming-other, can only be the recollection of my retentional already-there, hypomnesically sup- ported, and which, insofar as it is charged with protentions, is also an individuation of the we in which is constituted the alter without the ego. Significance and locality form, ultimately, a single question. I cannot find the virtue ofnecessity other than in the accidents and the contingencies that befall me: virtue is outside of me. It is my How I Became a Philosopher 3 1 outside, the outside. I can onlyfind necessity in a milieu, and only this gives me access to myself which means there is no difference inside/out- side. Having met with this realization, it governed my subsequent reading and comprehension of Of Grammatology, a text that was crucial for me in relation to this question. When I say that the necessity of milieu-that I have to invent it and that I experiment by default with it-cannot be found ex- cept by myself I say the same thing as when I speak ofsignificance and insignificance, which is my pure responsibility. It is only my relation to the thing that gives it significance or not: this is what was shown so well by Barthes, who uncovered in any element whatever of daily life its signifying force in the world, contrary to the insignificance that it ordinarily seemed to constitute. The extra-ordinariness of the world is what is found by one who knows how to go beyond the insignificance of things, things that one had rendered ordinary by tying them up in a nonrelation, forgetting them. We have here returned to the question of anamnesis. The material of spirit-before prison Before I arrived in prison, I had no philosophy, in the sense that I knew practically nothing about it, but nevertheless I had a position, an attitude or a philosophical disposition, which passed precisely through materialism, which was constitutedpolitically--I had been a member of the Communist Party-and which was not therefore philosophical in its origin: I had the conviction that ma- teriality is primary and conditions everything, I therefore considered myself an anti-idealist and, as such, I believed that philosophers were necessarily on the wrong side, to the degree that they are inevitably on the side ofthe interpretation ofthe world and not ofchanging the state ofthings. True philosophy, that is, philosophy in action(s), that was politics; and true politics, that was materialist philosophy. My opponents were those who belonged to idealism, identified through Marx's aphorism condemning the interpretation of the world and appeal- ing for its transformation through acts. 3 2 How I Became a Philosopher I cannot say that today I am a materialist in that sense, but I must say that I remain a materialist, in the sense of a materialism that does not deny the spirit, but which poses that the spirit, while not reducible to matter, is always conditioned by it. "Not reducible to matter" signifies that there is a process, produced in matter but irreducible to physical laws, or even biological ones: there is a play of mnemonic layers that are at the same time biological, psychic, and hypomnesic, and which require formalizations for which the resources of the natural sciences remain irreducibly insufficient. I preserve the word spirit to qualify this process insofar as it concerns a process of return where, in particular, what returns is moved by what I call the unreal consistence of that which, while certainly not existing--for example, justice-is irreducible, and does not cease, therefore, to consist: one cannot renounce it, and it is an essential motor of all human life-and the condition of desire. That which con-sists therefore does not cease to return as in-sistence, legacy of prior generations and responsibility of a heri- tage. Twenty-jive years later I followed this path for five years, in the patient immobility of silence, in what I call the virtue ofprison, to prepare myself, be- tween 1978 and 1983, for a return to the world, more worthy, more necessary, more intelligent. The more time passed, the more I feared falling back into that world, the more I sensed that the world re- found would not be immediately welcoming. And unfortunately, in the twenty-five years that have passed since that epoch, the world has in effect revealed itselfto be appallingly in- hospitable, as if I found myself in front of you having returned to square one. It appeared to me, in effect, as without doubt it does to many among you, that everything seems to be organized to encourage the attitude in which insignificance dominates, or even a-signifi- cance. This is what I call the organization of the loss ofindividua- tion. Now, this is full of terrifying passages to the act, in relation to which one asks if a maieutic is still possible today. How 1Became a Philosopher 33 Twenty-five years after the passage to the act that led me to- ward philosophy through acting-years that reconnected me to those who, alarmed and overwhelmed by life, stupefied by mar- keting and the media, appeared to me so estranged not only from philosophy through acting but from all potential vocation to phi- losophize, that one ends up asking if the unity of a we is still pos- sible-I ask myself what is the unity of my own life, if it has one. In October 2002 Marie Alphant suddenly directed me back to that question of the forgetting ofwhy one does what one does, in suddenly making it necessary for me to say from where comes and from what proceeds, in its accidental sources, the material of what I now call "my thought." So, it became problematic for me to live in the occultation of my past, even if that occultation was part of my existence by choice: I wanted to play the role not of ex-convict but first of all of philosopher, discretely, out of this material, in remaining faithful to it but, in a sense, without citing my sources or resources. Faithful, unfaithful Now, the question of fidelity is an aporia. One cannot be faith- ful to the unity and the identity of what remains constant through- out the alterities of the diverse characters one will have been and played, sometimes without knowing it, without noticing it, and which results from the accidental character of existence. It is therefore perhaps not by chance that around 1995 I set to work on the Critique ofPure Reason, to plough through the Paralo- gisms of the ego and the question of the unity of consciousness. I have had successive lives, if not multiple personalities. I have changed my life several times. But what is it to change one's life? And is it possible? In truth, this is the question of the fidelity of commitments [engagements]. Being-in-becoming, which is our de- fault, immediately opens the question of fidelity, that is, of faith. One must change and, as the saying goes, "Only imbeciles don't change.... " And at the same time one must remain. Be and re- main faithful. Be faithful to what remains; remain faithful to the 34 How I Became a Philosopher remains. Now this is what makes retentional finitude difficult: the fact that memory fails. Being fragile and fallible, memory is un- faithful. This question, to which I have often bound myself-the relation between this question of fidelity to oneself and the infidel- ity of oneself, of the self and its means, precisely, the problem of the means through which is permitted the dulling of retentional finitude-has not yet released me, since it is henceforth a matter for me of also remaining faithful to an experience of what was most near, and as that which is so near to the vile [l'immonde]. The question of time is perhaps, like the question of the unity of consciousness, what has really posed itself to me ever since 1978. It has posed itself in numerous ways: partly as a recollection lead- ing me toward reminiscence; partly as the experience of time as flowing in an eminently variable way according to the conditions into which one is existentially thrown, above all in the unchanging context of incarceration; and, then, as the hypomnesic dimension of anamnesis, as the originarily technical dimension of time; and, finally, as the question of the unity and nonunity of being, which was the subject of the book I published in 2001. 15 From the moment one is in a process of reminiscence, one is in the reconstitution of hypomnesis, and thus in the apres-coup. Now, the apres-coup is the irreducible creator of phantasms and fictions. It is impossible for me not to make fiction in the course of speak- ing. How then to accept this situation of making fiction without accepting lies, that is, infidelity to oneself? That is, equally, how to accept this without accepting it as infidelity to others, to those whom one addresses? Everything I have said to you this evening is subject to this context of the apres-coup. I believe that it is ab- solutely impossible to resolve or reduce these difficulties. I believe the only worthwhile fidelity is one that tackles this problem of the apres-coup head on. In a certain way, the religious do it. The problem is that monotheism does it in the mode of guilt. And this is precisely what must be avoided. Nothing, in effect, above all at this moment, is more conducive of passages to undesirable acts than culpabilization. To the law How I Became a Philosopher 35 My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had sev- erallives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life. I have never philosophized, if I have ever philosophized, other than through the ordeal of this succession of roles I have been able to occupy-and of the vertiginous variety of viewpoints that remain within me. I carry this succession as the very mark of the default of ori- gin-which is necessary-of which these successive and accidental roles are masks, persona that have been needed, that I became as necessary, and that were only justified, if they ever were, in the apres-coup of my fragile liberty, in my fallible fidelity to the default of origin-to the law. To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September II to April 2I I dedicate this lecture 1 to the electors of the National Front, to whom I feel close. I feel close to them because they are people who suffer and who cause me to suffer. They cause me to suffer because in the proximity of their suffering, I feel them infinitely distanced from me-and I feel infinitely far from them. I f e ~ l that this distance is our lost community. This distance is paradoxically the vanishing point of our common suffering and, as such, our proximity. What is common to us is the feeling of absolute separa- tion. But this concerns not only our common suffering, but also the suffering that separates us. If I feel close to those people who suffer while they also make me suffer, if I suffer with them, I do not suffer only because they make me suffer. I suffer also with them from that which makes them suffer. § I The destruction of primordial . . narCISSIsm Narcissism and insecurity The violence and insecurity in which we live-as much as they are exploited to the point of fantasy, or even deliberately manipu- lated-engage above all a question of narcissism, and result from a process of loss of individuation. It is a matter of narcissism in the sense of someone like Richard Durn, assassin of a wt'--to as- sassinate members of a municipal council, the official representa- tives of a we, is to assassinate a wt'--who suffered terribly from not existing, from not having, he said, a "feeling of existing."2 When he looked in the mirror he saw only an immense nothing. This was revealed by the publication of his personal diary in Ie Monde. Durn affirmed that he had a need to "do evil at least once in his life, to have the feeling of existing."3 Richard Durn suffered from a structural privation ofhis primor- dial narcissistic capacities. 4 I call "primordial narcissism" that struc- ture of the psyche which is indispensable for functioning, that part of self-love which can sometimes become pathological, but with- out which any capacity for love would be impossible. Freud speaks of primary narcissism, but that is not what I am referring to. Pri- mary narcissism designates infantile self-love, a precocious phase of sexuality. Freud also speaks of secondary narcissism, which survives 39 4° To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us into adulthood, but this is still not primordial narcissism, which is without doubt closer to what Lacan calls the "mirror phase." Now, there is a primordial narcissism ofthe we just as there is of the 1: for the narcissism of my I to function, there must be a nar- cissism of the we onto which it can project itself. Richard Durn, failing to develop his narcissism, saw in the municipal council the reality of an alterity that made him suffer, that did not return to him any image, and he massacred it. The narcissistic structure of a story The most important theoretical advance has certainly been the appli- cation of the libido theory to the repressing ego. The ego itself came to be regarded as a reservoir of what was described as narcissistic li- bido from which the libidinal investment in objects flowed out, and into which they could be once more withdrawn. 5 This is Freudian energy: the ego is an energetic process having a potential. This potential circulates, and it so happens that when it functions badly, narcissism engenders narcissistic troubles. Freud in fact has a list: early dementia, paranoia, and melancholy. Nar- cissistic conditions that are diverse forms of neuroses also exist. It is, however, in a very specific sense that we live in an epoch of great narcissistic suffering, characterized notably by the suffering of the narcissism of the we, by a kind of sickness ofthe we. I am not an Iother than to the extent that I am part of a we. An I and a we are processes of individuation. As such, as processes of individu- ation, the I and the we have a history. This is not merely to say that each we is a different history; it contains the additional sense that the conditions of the individuation of the we, throughout the course of human history, transform themselves. The conditions of individuation at the start of the twenty-first century are different from those of the fifth century B.C. (the birth of the Greek city), which are themselves different from those of ero-Magnon man, which are in turn different from those at the birth of the primitive horde of which Freud speaks in Totem and Taboo. These processes of individuation and their evolutions The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 4 1 have their own conditions, the conditions for the passage from one phase of the process of individuation to another, of a we, and through it, of the I These conditions for the evolution of indi- viduation are mnemotechnics or mnemotechnologies. Today we are enduring an enormous suffering of this individuation and this narcissism, a collapse of the necessary primordial narcissism of the I and the we, and the I in the we. This suffering occurs insofar as mnemotechnics and mnemo-techno-Iogies (which govern all the processes of human individuation) have passed into the sphere of industrial exploitation. Narcissism, consumption, and passage to the act Industrial exploitation poses problems regarding the limits of what is possible with industry's resources. We are, today, insofar as we are Is, essentially targeted as consumers. Now, a consumer does not have the right to say 1: a consumer is no longer either an lor we, because he or she is reduced to a they.6 the consumer is deper- sonalized, disembodied, in principle and in structure. Consump- tion-as an epoch of the system related to what I call the process of adoption?-tends to confound the I and the we, to annul the differences between them and thus to transform them into a they. The organization of consumption-which consists in synchroniz- ing the Is to the point of annihilating their differences (because after all an 1 is a diachrony, since I can say I only insofar as my time is not your time)-is what tends to annul the love of self, self- love. In effect, if my singularity is annulled by the synchronization ofmy behavior (that is, of my consumption) with the behavior of others (that is, with the consumption of others), this permits the realization of industrial economies of scale. 8 1 am thereby progres- sively annulled and, because of this progressive annulment of my 1, I no longer love myself. Now, if I no longer love myself, I no longer love others, since others are nothing more than the mirror of my self-love: in this consists primordial narcissism. From the moment that I no longer love myself and no longer love others, all 4 2 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us transgression becomes possible: there is no longer any limit to my action, which means my action may become a passage to the act of pure madness. In dedicating this lecture to the electors of the National Front insofar as they suffer-like you and I but perhaps more than you and I-I am saying to you that the unlimited organization of con- sumption is the organization of the liquidation of narcissism (of which these electors are victims), a liquidation that is the organiza- tion ofpure madness, leading inevitably to suicidal behavior, both individual and collective. Becoming and future The liquidation of narcissism, that is to say, ofindividuation, in- tensifies terribly the phenomenon of dis-adjustment that regularly occurs to shake up human societies. Society is always haunted, articulated and worked through by a process of technical transfor- mation, which is at first very slow (lithic industry of the chopper, then, at the rhythm of millions of years, the bi-face tool) but ac- celerates with sedentarization, then with large empires, and finally with the process of permanent innovation characterizing the in- dustrial society in which we live. When a technical system transforms, it dis-adjusts social rela- tions and provokes their dis-equilibrium, but this is generally tem- porary.9 These dis-equilibriums translate into crises punctuating history, which may be more or less violent. But when these pro- cesses of dis-equilibrium linked to technical evolution combine with a loss ofindividuation engendered by the liquidation of the narcissistic potential of the I (which has only happened in our own epoch), dis-adjustment attains a limit. We are talking here prospectively: this prospective is a ques- tion of collective intelligence of the future-and therefore of the understanding of the question of time. This is a matter of hu- man time, not the time of the stars. Human time relates to stellar time, yet they are different. Stellar time is entropic, the time of the physical becoming of the expansion of the universe. Human time The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 43 is negentropic in an extreme sense. 10 It is not only the biological structure of humankind that, as is the case for all living beings, is negentropic. Cultural structures are too, in principle. Human language is therefore constitutionally idiomatic (we will come back to this point). Confounding stellar time with human time reduces negentropic time to entropic becoming, which is contradictory- except in posing the possibility of the "end of times," that is to say, the end of the future (which is far more complex than becoming and also, therefore, more fragile). The possibility of the future is fragile: this is why the end of the future is far more probable than the end of becoming. It is because the future cannot be reduced to becoming (but must on the other hand negotiate with it) that we must fight against all scientism. The reduction of the future to becoming would be its liquidation-it would be the "end of times"-and this is indeed possible. Those who do not want to hear talk of such a possibility do not know how to discern that which, in becoming, constitutes the possibility of the future without confounding it with this becoming. The articulation of the I and the we Human time articulates the I with the we. I am human only insofar as I am part of a social group. The time of the I is not, however, the time of the we: it has its place in the time of the we, which is conditioned by the time of the Is that compose it. The difficulty consists in this tension-and this complexity makes dif- ficult what one calls collective intelligence (which reason a priori poses as possibility and necessity). The question of the articulation of the I and the we is overde- termined by that of technics. This has always been the case, but in the past it was not perceived. It became perceivable in the nine- teenth century and above all in the twentieth, when industrial ob- jects appeared systematically in the form of new objects dedicated to replacing preceding ones. This is what we call consumption [consommation]. Now, each day, hundreds of patents are lodged 44 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us around the world, from which result innumerable new objects, which must be adopted and which make us adopt them. Marketing, the media, systems of behavioral synchronization, which serve to more or less artificially "sustain" consumption, are technologies of adoption: they make us adopt a new toothpaste, a new washing powder, a new type of mobile phone, a new optional standard in cars. We must consume in order for the economic machine of the global we to function. Psychological techniques are developed to make us adopt new products because, a priori, we don't want them. Societies have no spontaneous need for new products. As a general rule, they want to remain as they are, yet they must also transform themselves to survive. Today, the specific and specifically miserable trait of our epoch is that the articulation of the 1and the we is hegemonically submit- ted to the imperative to adopt the new, according to the mode of consumption. The process of adoption and what we want The adoption of new products has grafted itself onto the general process of adoption, at the heart of which the social is constituted. Techniques of adoption, such as marketing, can develop only be- cause of the generally hidden and forgotten fact that society is already a process of adoption. The occlusion of the knowledge that there is always adoption can even take the form of burying thousands and even millions of individuals in mass graves. Ernest Renan, Paul Valery, and Andre Leroi-Gourhan, in particular, high- lighted the process of adoption. Ernest Renan explains in "What Is a Nation?" that all societies are constituted by immigrants who arrive but do not form part of a we, so that one must say that the we does not literally exist. ll Leroi-Gourhan showed this regard- ing China: China is made up of thousands of different ethnicities that have shaped the past of a we that never existed, yet which, in permitting the projection of this phantasmic past, also made pos- sible the projection of a common future. Tocqueville, speaking of America, established that all society is created in this way. But this The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 45 fictive creation must be hidden because, to be able to adhere to the past, I must believe that I belong to this phantasmic past we, and therefore make this past mine. Last year I gave, during the colloquium "Modernity: The New Map of the Times,"l2 the example of my personal case: I am a French citizen, my children are French citizens, but we are called Stiegler, like my paternal grandfather-and my maternal grand- father was called Trautmann. In other words, I recognize in the sans-culottes the representatives of my past, and this remembering elevates the narcissism of the we, even if the past of my grandpar- ents is not that of the sans-culottes. I adopt my past by integrat- ing the lessons of places of adoption-school and certain other structures-conceived to enable me to adopt it. A common past with you who are French permits me to construct with you a we projecting a future, permitting us to say together, "Our future: we want this, we want that." Until a recent epoch, this process of adopting a past-which is artificial but at the same time permits me to adopt a future-was concealed. Nevertheless, the question of adoption is posed more and more explicitly from the time of the industrial revolution on- ward, as new objects appear without interruption and with in- creasing speed, and as the framework of daily life incessantly trans- forms itself. For social structures to absorb this incessant novelty, adoptive techniques must be put in place. The problem of adoption is posed as such from then on, and social organization explicitly becomes the organization of adoption or, in other words, the organization of consumption. Calendarity, cardinality, and fiction Adoption is that which is presupposed by the constitution of a we in general. A we is always constituted by calendarity and cardi- nality. For us to be able to say we, we must share the same calendar system and the same cardinal system. If we cannot refer to the same calendar, that is, if we do not share common time, and if To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us we do not have a common representation of the spatial world in which we share systems of orientation-for example, if we cannot read street names, maps, or road signs-we amount to strangers. We have no sense of familiarity with a we other than on condition of such a sharing. Today, however, calendarity and cardinality are submitted to the control of global cultural industries. Calendarity organizes the coming together of the we. Sunday was originally a sacred day for Christianity, a day of rest in com- mon. The mass media has turned it into a day for a televisual ren- dezvous. What is true of days is true of hours. Everyone today recognizes what we call"20 Heures," news-time on television. The television channel TFI has recently seen its share price fall because it purchased at very high cost the broadcast rights for a Zinedine Zidane football match. This star of the French team was supposed to guarantee the channel and its advertisers a record audience, but he injured his knee and his participation in this global sport- ing encounter became uncertain. TFI, like all TVstations, derives its value from its capacity to control calendarity---and the football World Cup is a major rendezvous on the global calendar. To con- trol access to the consciousness of consumers at such events con- stitutes a fundamental advantage: it ensures in principle very high audience ratings. Yet one can sense the fragility of such a system (if not its absurdity) in the fact that the weakness of a footballer's knee may threaten it. Submitted to the control of cultural industries, calendrical and cardinal systems are in the process of disintegrating-and this provokes a loss ofindividuation as a consequence of the resulting destruction ofprimordial narcissism. A calendrical system and a car- dinal system direct us to something beyond the calculable-and, moreover, in sport, one still exploits a kind of adoration of the inestimable, of the exception, of the unique event. The calendar even directs us back to the divine, or even to the exceptional foun- dational event of politics, or even to both at the same time, and in any case to an exceptional event that stands above the present as an excess. The power of belonging to a group requires the projec- tion of an always fictive unity of this group, and this is always a The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 47 fiction that narrates an exception. The power of saying we requires that I "fiction" a past that is not mine, and this allows me to fic- tion a future that I hope will belong to us-me, those close to me [mes proches], my children, and, from one to the next [de proche en proche], you. Desire and infinity This future that I fiction-that is, which I desire and fanta- size-I will without doubt never see: it will very probably never happen. But I need that which will never take place in the mode of a fiction, in which I propose that, despite everything, it will be, in the form of an absolute future: a future that will always remain still to come, a sort of pure future. This fiction is called, for ex- ample, the messiah. It is only possible infinitely: it involves desire, individual desire, which is indissociably from the we and of the we, indissociable from the desire for a we, desire for the possibility of saying we. Desire is structurally related to infinity. Freud tells us, correctly, that libidinal energy is limited. But for that limited libidinal energy to function, it is necessary that I fantasize my en- ergy as unlimited. This is merely a fiction, but without this fiction there would be no desire. What I love I love without limit, without condition: I cannot love it other than in a manner that is (phan- tasmatically) unlimited. That which I love and those whom I love, you, that is, us insofar as we are capable of forming a we--all this I love, and I love it (and I love you) infinitely. I love to the infinite. I love only to the infinite, as one says, "to the infinitive." Without which no we is possible. This is nothing but a fiction. There is no infinite love-no we as the origin of an I-that is not a phantasm. But I repeat: without this fiction (that is, without the default oforigin that is the fiction of desire), the we is impossible. We become less than "barbarians," beasts and, worse than beasts, a pure destructive power. We be- come, literally, diabolical. This is what the question of philia in the Nicomachean Ethics teaches and means. 13 And if I had the time, I would show you how and why, as a result of what I have just said, To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us the we, like the 1, must be capable of a primordial narcissism: how it needs symbols, that is, auto-erotic fetishes, in which it can be reflected, precipitate itself "in a primordial form ... in a fictional direction, which remains always irreducible."14 Cardinality and calendarity provide the framework for such fetishes. "Fight!": The final finality of the consumption of a herd-society Contemporary global calendarity and cardinality, controlled by the cultural industries-not only television and radio but also the Internet and the integrated system of telecommunications, infor- matics, and the audiovisual, the product of the convergence of electronic technologies-form a system that functions according to a finality submitted to a calculation, that is, according to a fin- ishedfinality, one that is manifestly exhaustible. This system engenders herd behavior and not, contrary to legend, individual behavior. To say we live in an individualis- tic society is a patent lie, an extraordinarily false delusion, and, moreover, extraordinary because no one seems conscious of it, as if the efficacy of the lie was proportional to its enormity, and as if the lie was nobody's responsibility. We live in a herd-society, as comprehended and anticipated by Nietzsche. Some think this society individualistic because, at the very highest levels of public and private responsibility, but also in the smallest details of those processes of adoption stamped by marketing and the organization of consumption, egotism has been elevated to the pinnacle of life. But individualism has no relation to this egotism. Individualism wants the flourishing of the individual, this being always and in- dissociably a we and an 1, an I in a we or a we composed of Is, incarnated by Is. To oppose the individual and the collective is to transform individuation into social atomization, producing a herd. The violence of which I spoke at the beginning-the violence of those one calls "little savages" ['sauvageons'1, 15 for example-is kindled by today's hegemonic discourse, according to which life is the struggle for life, which is legitimated by the need to "get The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 49 by through any means." "Fight!" is the maxim of such a point of view. This pseudo-individualist discourse, degraded and degrad- ing-these are the males of the herd who attack each other-pro- motes ultra-egotistical behavior, which, combined with the loss of narcissism, that is, the loss of the understanding of limits, opens the door to all transgressions. "The family" and ruin The calendrical and cardinal system, insofar as, until now, it or- ganized the memory of an immemorial event-a founding fiction, exceptional mirror of the absolute future, forming itself an abso- lute past that is necessarily mythic-was what permitted the com- monality required for the constitution, precisely, of any accord. Calendarity opens commonality: philia, love, desire. As Vance Packard 16 clearly showed, cultural industries aim to produce such a commonality of desire by capturing and channeling the libidinal potential of consumers, who form audiences for advertisers man- dated by producers of consumer objects. We arrive here at a totally integrated ensemble, where the symbolic and mnemotechnical sys- tem, calendrical and cardinal, combines with the technical system for the production of consumer goods, integrates with this system, and submits to it. All this is articulated in a single system where the organ of television is called to fuse with the organ of tele-action. In the end television will become an access terminal that will permit a viewer, while watching the program, to order a product, and this will in turn set in motion a "reassorting" (a resupplying of stocks), and, in setting this "reassortment" in motion, a command will also be issued for the production of the product, and so on. This tele- action terminal, which I can use at home to consume while watch- ing television, will be found again in my business as a tool serving to direct, for example, a production line. On the map of the his- tory of social structures, this evolution consists in the integration of the technical system of production with the mnemotechnical system sharing out calendarity and cardinality. This integration constitutes a ruin of crossed narcissisms (aiming 5° To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us at the one in the other) of the I and of the we. This ruin consists in the organization of what I call hypersynchronization. 17 A calendar is a system of synchronization. It defines the rendezvous of the we. A rendezvous, in a synchrony of the we, makes possible, however, diachronic possibilities. On the other hand, the development of cultural industries leads to a hypersynchronization that eliminates diachronization and paradoxically engenders a hyperdiachroniza- tion-that is, a rupture with the symbolic milieu, a decoupling of individual and collective time, a de-composition of the diachronic and the synchronic. The destruction of modes of collective life means that, for example, an adolescent who returns to the family home at 7 p.m. eats from the fridge, that the father does the same at 8 p.m., and nobody eats with anyone else, the only meeting point being, eventually, the television news. What organizes calendarity is neither local, nor familial, nor national, nor religious-because it is no longer a we--rather, it is the great televisual consumption sys- tem, a system that, in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 45I (based on Bradbury's novel) was called, indeed, "the family." Now, here in the present, we see the arrival of political "reality- TV" programs, or programs of "political reality," where, precisely, a man of politics is invited to stay, beneath the gaze of the cam- eras, with a family: TF1 has announced, on Wednesday, 27 August, on the occasion of its press conference for the new season, the launch of a new program "which would like to bring closer together the man ofpolitics and the citi- zen." Provisionally baptized 36 Hours, this program, hosted by Ruth Elkrief, wants to "immerse a man ofpolitics" for close to two days in the private and professional everyday life of a French family. This show is produced by 2P2L, which had produced "The Eyes in the Blues," dedicated to the French football team of 1998.18 Deception This hypersynchronization engenders a hyperdiachronization, insofar as hypersymbols (synchronization is operated through sym- bols) engender hyperdiaboles-dia-bolization, social atomization, The destruction ofprimordial narcissism a total disconnection. This happens because hypersynchronization provokes a loss of libido in relation to the system of synchroniza- tion. This loss of libido, this disenchantment, is shown in a para- doxical fashion in research undertaken into the relation between publics and their medias: "I don't believe it anymore. I watch TV but I hate it." This is how interviewees respond. If you ask people what they think of the programming on TFr, they respond in gen- eral that they don't like it, that Arte is better, yet they admit to watching TFr anyway. Others say it's all bad, that Arte has become as bad as the others, and yet admit watching both Arte and the other channels. As for these apparent paradoxes-symptoms of what I very gen- erally call ill-being [mal-etre]-analysts, experts, and commenta- tors mostly fail to comprehend the main thing, even though the situation seems clear enough. For example, to follow what happens in the political landscape with the vote for the National Front, one must watch TFr. There's no choice. One doesn't want to watch this channel, but one has to. I don't want to say that TFr is the cause of the National Front: it is the calendrical ensemble that constitutes the TV program industry-of which TFr is in France the premier representative-and that forms a new system of or- ganization of the we, the development of which is deceptive. And this deception is a primary and essential element of the vote for the National Front. Even if it is not the only one, it conditions all the others. The audiences produced by the cultural industries do not form a we that produces philia, that creates desire. This "we," if it exists, would on the contrary tend to produce hate and disgust, and above all self-disgust. Who has not at some time felt, after having sat in front of the television, the whole time thinking there must be something better to do, that disgust with oneself? This is the sense in which, if we can still say we, it is truly by default. 19 The destruction of time In analyzing hypersynchronization, and in denouncing its rav- aging effects, one must not, nevertheless, oppose synchrony and To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us diachrony-and this is a question of method. It is necessary to rea- son not by opposition but by composition. The terms I have em- ployed-I, we, diachrony, synchrony-designate entities one must distinguish without opposing, and which are always in the process of composing. Language, for example, is a synchronic milieu (as Saussure taught us) in which there is diachrony. If I speak and you listen to me, it's because I am not in absolute synchrony with you; but if I can speak to you, it is because my diachrony tends to syn- chronize with you. Language is the articulation of the diachronic and the synchronic, that is, the composition of two tendencies that are also forces, a composition that produces a dynamic pro- cess. And a language dies when these tendencies decompose. What I call the "becoming-diabolical" of symbols is the result of such a decomposition. We tend naturally to oppose things rather than to compose them. Well beyond this seemingly obvious natural inclination, however, there is also the industrial exploitation of time-through the cardinality and calendarity of the cultural industries-which tends structurally and organically to decompose the synchronic and diachronic, in the sense one intends for the word decomposi- tion when it is a matter of necrosis. In other words, this industrial "calendarity" destroys time. Or, in other words, the industrial ex- ploitation of time (the time of consciousness become a market) is entropic: it eliminates the difference between becoming and future [devenir et avenir]. This produces a profound ill-being, a disgust, symptom of a liquidation of desire-what I have called elsewhere "disbanding" ["debandade'j. 20 Industrial temporal objects I try in a general way to reason in terms of tendencies, with reference to Bergson, Freud, and Nietzsche. One must not oppose synchrony and diachrony, for the same reasons that led Freud to propose that the pleasure principle is constituted by the principle of reality, which is, however, on first analysis, its "opposite." The The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 53 pleasure principle knots and unknots itself in the principle of real- ity, and these verbs denote that what is at stake is a process. This process of the destruction of the synchronic and dia- chronic, that is, the de-composition of the I and the we (or the collapse of the I and the we) through consumption-that is, by the systematic exploitation of instruments for fabricating the de- mand for consumption-leads to an exhaustion of libidinal en- ergy. When we watch television, we consume an economic good that belongs to the class of what Husserl called temporalobjectr-in this case an industrial temporal object. As a general rule, a temporal object is an object of time-consciousness, the flow ofwhich occurs simultaneously with the consciousness of which it is the object-be- cause this consciousness itselfflows. This consciousness is itself es- sentially temporal: it never ceases to flow; it has, like all temporal objects, a beginning and an end, and, between this beginning and end, it is nothing but temporal flux. Now, when you who are con- sciousnesses watch a broadcast or a film, your time-consciousness passes into the broadcast or into the film, adhering to the temporal object that is the object of your consciousness. If it is a television broadcast (rather than a cassette in your VCR), the World Cup, for example, then hundreds of millions of people watch it at the same moment as you, and you synchronize yourself with those con- sciousnesser-you are in the same time-consciousness. Now, this synchronization enters tendentially into opposition with all possible diachronization. This is how the decomposition of the synchronic and diachronic operates. It is necessary here to deepen the notion of the temporal object, to understand the speci- ficity and force of industrial temporal objects and how they make possible a synchronization of minds,· that is, the exhaustion of dia- chronicity and thereby of libidinal energy. With Husser!, then, I call an object "temporal" if its flow coincides with the flux of the consciousness of which it is an object, which is itself essentially a flux and only ever constitutes itself along the course of time as flow. The melody is paradigmatic. A temporal object is a tissue of retentions and protentions. Now, this protentional and retentional process also frames the temporality of consciousness generally, and 54 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us temporal objects permit in one blow the modification of the pro- cess of consciousness and, up to a certain point, influence and even control this process. It is in music that these processes are best formalized (in its military or religious functions, for example). In the "now" of a melody, in the present moment of a musical object that flows, the note that is present can only be a note, rather than merely a sound, insofar as it retains within itself the preceding note, which remains present-a preceding note still present, which itself retains the preceding one, which in turn retains the preced- ing one, and so on. One must not confuse this primary retention belonging to the present of perception with secondary retention, such as, for example, the melody I heard yesterday, which I can hear again in imagination by the play of memory, and which constitutes the past of my consciousness. One must not confuse, says Husserl, perception (primary retention) and imagination (secondary reten- tion). Before the invention of the phonograph, it was absolutely im- possible to hear the same melody twice. Now, since the invention of the phonogram, which is itself what I call a tertiary retention (a prosthesis of exteriorized memory), the identical repetition of the same temporal object has become possible, and this permits a bet- ter comprehension of the retentional process. Because when the same temporal object is produced twice in a row, it engenders two different temporal phenomena, and this means that primary reten- tions vary from one phenomenon to the other. Retentions of the first audition, in becoming secondary, playa selecting role in the primary retentions of the second audition. This is true in general, but the tertiary retention-the phonogram-makes it obvious. On the other hand, tertiarized temporal objects-that is, objects either recorded or converted into a controllable and transmissible signal (such as phonograms, but also films, and radio and tele- vision broadcasts)-are materialized time, which overdetermines the relations between primary and secondary retentions in general, thus, in a certain sense, permitting their control These industrial temporal objects are increasingly today what give rhythm to and frame the flux of consciousness that we are. The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 55 Moreover, with the mutations of technology currently underway, we pass from an industrial level to what we might call the hy- perindustrial, which integrates the world of culture and spirit in its totality at the heart of a vast techno-industrial system, where the tools for producing material goods and those for creating and diffusing symbols and other "spiritual nourishment" have become the same. And when the television antenna becomes a terminal of tele-action, it will not only permit the viewing of programs, but also make possible remote actions based on those programs, such as purchasing, production, and many other functions of the indus- trial global production/consumption system. The standardization of secondary retentions as the reign of symbolic misery When ten million people watch the same broadcast-the same audiovisual temporal object-they synchronize their flux. Of course, their criteria for selecting retentions vary, and, therefore, they do not perceive the same phenomenon: they don't all think the same thing about what they watch. But if it is true that second- ary retentions form the selection criteria in primary retentions, then the fact that the same people watch the same programs every day necessarily leads each "consciousness" into sharing more and more identical secondary retentions, and thus to selecting the same pri- mary retentions. They end up being so well synchronized that they have lost their diachrony, that is, their singularity, which is to say their liberty, which always means their liberty to think. The de-composition of the synchronic and the diachronic is the de-composition of idiomaticity and of sign-making in general, of signi-fying insofar as it is the non-insignificant. The liquidation of primordial narcissism, leading to a loss of self-esteem (the self, los- ing its diachrony, can no longer inspire in itself the desire for self), authorizes all transgressions, insofar as it is also the liquidation of the we as such, which becomes a herdlike they, and which in turn produces the great political catastrophes of the twentieth century. The suffering of Richard Durn will have been above all that of not To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us having the power to signifY. He writes in his diary that everything seems insignificant to him, and that he himself cannot signify.21 He cannot participate in individuation, cannot individuate him- self. To individuate is to exist, ex-sistere, to experience the consis- tence of individuation, that is, the necessity and the convergence of that and of those who exist within the same process-a process that fundamentally arranges, however, as projection of the future of the we as one, difference and multiplicity. From that moment, Rich- ard Durn had truly found what we must call a-significance-the limit of significance, beyond insignificance and as an unbearable limit-to the point where it leads to an act of massacre. Such is the consequence of symbolic misery, to which the liquidation of significance leads-and from which no one, in the end, escapes. It weighs or hangs like a phantom over so many dinners, for ex- ample, during which there is no longer anything to say. The loss of symbolic participation as the destruction of individuation and April 21, 2002, in France Leroi-Gourhan developed the concept of loss of participation- which is close to what I describe here as the loss ofindividuation, which consists in the destruction of the capacity for narcissistic projection, that is, of the libido-and which would reach its limit in what he called the appearance of the mega-ethnic. Mega-ethnic- ity and the disappearance of aesthetic participation (which corre- sponds to the phenomena of exteriorization and the specialization of human symbolic faculties in the industrial system) are incom- prehensible if separated: "Thus figuration appears ... indissociable from those social events that maintain ethnic continuity," that is to say, from the psychic and collective individuation of the we, insofar as it is a process through which the I individuates itself as well, as we will see in the second chapter. From this aspect, the degree of figurative participation coheres with the group's techno-economic characteristics. Figurative specialization The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 57 and the separation between actors and spectators attain a maximum in the modern mass, where the majority of individuals are no longer required to play roles as social figures, but where all occasions for prestige have been reduced by television to a state of pure spectacle. 22 Now, symbolic creativity is the condition of individuation as cir- cuit, where individual memory (that is, psychic individuation, the singular point of idiomatic differentiation) comes back to collec- tive memory (that is, to collective individuation, which is pro- duced as the consistence of individual singularities). This is the condition by which collective individuation renovates itself and continues on, and it is this symbolic creativity that finds itself threatened by the horizon of the mega-ethnic, threatened in its essence by specialization: It is evident that human development is heading in the direction of mega-ethnicity-a global unit of measurement rather like the "mega- deaths" devised to express the destructive power of atomic weapons. We therefore might well ask ourselves what continuing means of es- cape the zoological flux will have at its disposal-for complete de- humanization would eventually become prejudicial to the efficacy of the social machine, and it must therefore be kept in a sufficiently "sapient" state. In other words, we may wonder whether yet another process of exteriorization-this time the exteriorization of social sym- bolism-might not be taking place. In fact the process is already so advanced that we can clearly see the direction it is taking.... The time is not far off when all our manufactured iron will be processed in a small number of centers by entirely automatic methods; this has already happened in the case of oil, where the diversity of products is not great enough to hamper the development. We can see the time coming when government will no longer have to call upon the uncer- tain services of artillery, and the megadeaths will instead be processed indirectly from electronic control panels. This is in fact already fea- sible. 23 And this is indeed how the Gulf War will in effect have taken place. The automated management of production or destruction affects the present, as a process of exteriorization of symbolic ex- change in general, even if, as Leroi-Gourhan says, in its most vital To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us core it seems irreducible, that is, as the constitution and stabiliza- tion of the familial cell aimed at in the courtship display, thereby ensuring the reproduction of the species. This would still necessi- tate a direct aesthetic participation by individuals-insofar as their libido must pass into action in one way or another: As for the social sphere, modern audiovisual techniques, imperfect as they are, already provide a most convenient staging-post. The age we live in is still filled with survivals from the past. The city worker still goes out to watch a soccer game, catch a fish, or attend a parade, and still has a life of responsiveness, restricted it is true, but one that may stretch to taking part in the activities of a club. If we exclude the vital cycle, activities involving direct response are increasingly confined to adolescence and the pre-conjugal period, when direct participation is necessary to collective survival. Until we get to the stage already reached by the species of domestic animals that are best suited to pro- ductivity-the stage of artificial insemination-it would, for the time being, seem that a modicum of social aesthetics will continue to sur- round our years of social maturing. In insect societies, by the way, that is the only period when the reproductive minority shows some independence of behavior. 24 It must be noted that this text was published in 1965, and that since then there have appeared technologies of procreation, with the first in vitro fertilization taking place in 1977. Just as sexual reproduction can now become passive (without recourse to the eminently complex aesthetic sequence which in the past preceded and followed it, but with all the potential for frustrations that this engenders) so too can the loss of aesthetic participation (be it intellective, such as I have described here as the setting to work of singular secondary retentions, or be they corporeal, carnal, or manual, such as in the analyses of Leroi-Gourhan) lead to a liter- ally catastropic insensibilization: The loss of manual discovery, of the personal encounter between human and matter in the exercise of a craft, has closed one of the doors to individual aesthetic innovation. At a different level artistic popularization (vulgarisation] enables the masses to live passively on The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 59 the planet's cultural stock. But art will eventually go the same way as adventure, and Chinese paintings and Mayan sculptures will pall like the cowboys and the Zulus simply because a minimum of participa- tion is necessary in order to feel. The problem of this modicum of the personal in art is as important to the future of Homo sapiens as that of the deterioration of human motor function. 25 "A minimum of participation is necessary in order to feel," and the insensibilization resulting from the global organization of con- sumption, and the hypersynchronization in which it consists (as negation of all diachrony), produces immense suffering, to the limit of suffering, of what is bearable, an extraordinarily danger- ous quasi-insensibility, an immiseration of sense, an impossibility of signi-fying, that is, of existing, which is the profound meaning of the vote of April 21, 2002, in France-but also of all desperate behavior in the world today, of which the murderer Richard Durn will have been one individual expression at the extreme of this loss of individuation. § II The destruction of the process of psychic and collective individuation and the question of evil The they where there is no longer any witness Cultural industries serve to create markets. Audiovisual tempo- ral objects permit the diffusion and mass adoption of behavioral models through which consumers adopt new products. Marx said it already: capitalism is essentially the creation of needs. Today, this industrial fabrication of behavior has become truly dangerous: it is an entropic process, which raises questions of cultural ecology, as Jeremy Rifkin! and Naomi Klein 2 have shown on other grounds. And Andre Gorz recalled recentl y 3 that it was Freud's nephew, Ed- ward Bernays, who invented marketing as the technology of the phantasm-as Vance Packard already understood by 1950.4 The industrial exploitation of the power of temporal objects will end in the exhaustion of conscious desire, which is founded on sin- gularity and narcissism as an image of an otherness of myself. Such is disbanding-the coming slowdown of consumption, caused by the consumer's disgust [degout]-which is the pure and simple de- struction ofone's taste [gout]. If I spend fifty-two minutes in front of a television program, my consciousness has lived those fifty-two minutes in the time of the temporal object. At the cinema I am not in my chair-I am in the screen. My consciousness passes into the temporal object. I interiorize all these times as secondary reten- tions I share with the other spectators. So what retentional criteria 60 Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 61 does the television industry rely on when deciding what programs to produce? It is always the same marketing agencies that define standards: The Loft of television channel M6 immediately finds its homologue on TFI. This is why the diversification of offerings (which in itself is an interesting fact) barely affects the dominant tendency. The criteria put forward by channels regarding the constraints of marketing are inevitably interiorized by the public. From the mo- ment you adhere temporally to the same channel of information every day, "meeting" at the same time, you adopt the same history of events as everyone who watches these broadcasts-and with whom, without knowing it, and in a singularly strange way, you have "had a rendezvous." And that difference of analysis, which was originally your own in relation to these "neighbors" (because your past was not the same as theirs), finds itself, little by little, and in an asymptotic manner, reduced. Your past, the support of your negentropic singularity, slowly, progressively, but definitely and systematically, becomes the same conscious past as that of the viewing they. Your "analyses," originally different, tend to become identical or, in other words, tend to cease to be an analysis. Normally, if I witness the occurrence of an event and you wit- ness the same event, we see two different things in the one event. Take, for example, a traffic accident: somebody gets hurt, there are three additional witnesses, and finally there is the driver. The three witnesses give three different versions of events. Spontaneously, one might tend to think that the reason each has understood the causality of the event differently is because each one saw things from a different location. And this is no doubt partially true, but I think above all this difference of viewpoints leads rather to the conclusion that the witnesses each have their own past, and there- fore do not witness in the same way-in the first place because a past grounds expectations, forms horizons ofexpectation that areproper to the past and that receive events and render them sensible to those to whom they happen. One sees on the basis of a competence, formed by memories and correlative expectations, retentions and proten- dons, a "competence" that enables a "performance" (to speak like 62 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us certain linguists), for example, a given event that I have witnessed and that will be verbalized in the form of a police statement. But if, little by little and asymptotically, everything that comes to consciousness is identical to what strikes my "neighbor's" con- sciousness, then there is simply no longer any witness. The I is confounded with the we:. they disappear in the they where there is no longer any witness. Thus the television news can "virtualize" a Gulf War, such that there is no longer anyone to denounce the horror, which is nonetheless broadcast live. Such is the product of cultural industries. And this is true for other channels, even the ones you don't watch. The channels use the same sources and, increasingly, the same commentary. There is an entropic integra- tion of the channels themselves, for reasons similar to those that lead to the asymptotic liquidation of the diachrony of the Is, of "consciousnesses." All this engenders what has been called "pensee unique'S in reference to the thought of "elites," but this is noth- ing but the reflection, at the level of supposed "elites," of a more global process whereby industrial synchronization tendentially sus- pends all diachronizing difference in the appropriation of what I watch on television. Response-the cult object When I go to mass, to the temple, the synagogue, or the mosque, the officiator addresses me as a singularity responsible for who I am. He tries to install me in my responsibility, to diachron- ize me. And, from that point of view, the cult poses in principle that we, insofar as we synchronize ourselves, are good and ami- cable people only insofar as we install our synchrony within a dia- chrony ofprinciple, that is, those who can synchronize in principle are those who are primordially diachronic. And the very goal of a synchronizing rendezvous is to intensify diachrony, that is, re- sponsibility-I speak here of the responsibility of a response. The word responsibility is doubtless cumbersome for qualifying all these religious cults, but I nonetheless believe that it is something like a response (which is also a musical form), such that a respondent in Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 63 response-who must respond quite faithfully (beyond what is the case in Catholic liturgy)-is centrally at stake in all cults. This is what in Christianity will be called conscience: one has a conscience, one is responsiblefor the other, alone, absolutely alone facing God. The global audience Our "consciences/consciousnesses" ['consciences'] are bom- barded mediatically by the cultural industries, whose newspa- pers are, within "the media," less and less differentiable-and the honor of the noble profession of the journalist will be measured in the future against the shadow of the capacity for one or another to distinguish themselves. So our consciousness is also "bombarded," insofar as it is the consciousness ofour body, and insofar as our bodies consume. It is a matter, in view of realizing the industrial economies ofscale that mass markets make possible, of synchroniz- ing the behavior of these bodies, insofar as they are traversed by those consciousnesses forming an industrial material available for sale-which Thierry Gaudin has, for fifteen years now, referred to as "audiences." These audiences have a price: they constitute metamarkets. The market-for toothpaste, mobile phones, and optional extras on cars-passes through the metamarket of audi- ences. If you want to install a product on the market, the problem is not so much achieving good industrial productivity, nor hav- ing a truly innovative product, but rather having access to a mar- ket where you can augment your margins thanks to economies of scale. It is a matter of gaining ever-larger audiences, because in the current state of economic war, to amortize industrial investments one must aim at global markets, and that is why calendarity inexo- rably conforms to the systems of global synchronization. This is the historical meaning of the football World CUp, 6 one of the first truly global events, which has become over recent decades a typi- cal event within the apparatus of consumption, all in the name of that ancient practice-preeminent with respect to the primordial narcissism of the we--that sports were in the past. TO Love, to Love Me, to Love Us Narcissism, diachrony, and incommensurability This becoming of calendarity (and the shipwrecked press that has allowed itself to be engulfed-those organs previously devoted to the constitution of public opinion but now submerged in the "mass audience" fabricated by marketing) thus engenders loss of desire insofar as desire depends on primordial narcissism, and insofar as this in turn depends on primordial diachrony (that is, in prin- ciple, the elementary tendency of the composition of time insofar as it is not reducible to becoming while nevertheless always hav- ing to reckon with it). I cannot love myself except insofar as I know myself to be absolutely singular, for without this knowledge I may be overcome by anguish and despair; I may attach myself to a herd. My time is absolutely unique, irreducible to the time of others. I would prefer also that, phantasmatically, my time be reducible to the time of others: I search originarily for the fusional element that I phantasmatically project in "oceanic"7 feeling, as in rapturous love, where, "against all the evidence of the senses, lov- ers will uphold that I and You are one."8 But this desire to rejoin an original fusional milieu is founded in my primordial narcissism, that is, in the intimate knowledge that I am singular, that I am not the other. I am nothing but de-synchronized in relation to the other-in diachrony, the condition of harmony, just as in music, where one needs (in the modern sense starting with counterpoint) several instruments or voices, or (in the Greek sense) several inter- vals forming a mode. Consumption, on the other hand, engenders an archi-synchronization in which I am not-where I am targeted no longer as an I but as a consumer, according to the viewpoint of Benjamin Franklin, for whom the best index of God, if not its representative, had become the dollar. 9 It is necessary to respect everybody, even the lowest of the low, so long as a cent remains in his pocket: as a consumer he has a right to respect. It is, of course, starting not from consumption that Franklin proposes that "time is money," but rather from labor Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 65 as the obligation to earn. His sermons make the pursuit of pecuni- ary interest a duty and, in a sense, the sole guarantor of God. But as earnings are not possible without exchange, that is, a market, the intensification without limit of earning (which is here the in- dex of the infinity of God) implies the extension without limit of markets, that is, the wholly unlimited intensification of consump- tion. One can thus ask oneself if, in the world of Franklin, some- thing or someone can exist and have value if it is not measurable, commensurable, calculable, and capable of being added up, that is, synchronizable in totality. Now, God is reputedly essentially incommensurable and is, as such, the guarantor of the incommensurability of everybody in relation to each other. He is, otherwise put, the synchronic insofar as it responds to the diachronic. Disgust and discredit The system of synchronization put in place by the cultural in- dustries (which aim at the adoption of consumer products through a system of integrated marketing) leads to de-diachronization, that is, to disbanding through the loss of love of self, and thus leads- through the loss of love, by all and of all, and hence the loss of all faith and all credit-to ruin, here including in the pecuniary sense, in the generalized reign ofdisgust, that is, of the diabolical. 10 All this makes possible the mad cow and all the phenomena of re- jection of consumer products: these processes are the symptoms of a primordial suffering, if I may put it like this-a suffering of primordial narcissism-which leads to no longer wanting to con- sume, and thus to grabbing onto a certain number of alibis to justify this refusal to consume, alibis that correspond moreover to evident realities (the prion is not a phantasm). It concerns cata- strophic phenomena in the strict sense: in a single blow, extremely dangerous rejection behavior proliferates, testifying to the fact that the unlimited exploitation of consumption engenders a refusal to consume that is itself unlimited (but in another relation to the unlimited, called the infinite). To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us Narcissism, diachrony, and incommensurability This becoming of calendarity (and the shipwrecked press that has allowed itself to be engulfed-those organs previously devoted to the constitution of public opinion but now submerged in the "mass audience" fabricated by marketing) thus engenders loss of desire insofar as desire depends on primordial narcissism, and insofar as this in turn depends on primordial diachrony (that is, in prin- ciple, the elementary tendency of the composition of time insofar as it is not reducible to becoming while nevertheless always hav- ing to reckon with it). I cannot love myself except insofar as I know myself to be absolutely singular, for without this knowledge I may be overcome by anguish and despair; I may attach myself to a herd. My time is absolutely unique, irreducible to the time of others. I would prefer also that, phantasmatically, my time be reducible to the time of others: I search originarily for the fusional element that I phantasmatically project in "oceanic"7 feeling, as in rapturous love, where, "against all the evidence of the senses, lov- ers will uphold that I and You are one."8 But this desire to rejoin an original fusional milieu is founded in my primordial narcissism, that is, in the intimate knowledge that I am singular, that J am not the other. I am nothing but de-synchronized in relation to the other-in diachrony, the condition of harmony, just as in music, where one needs (in the modern sense starting with counterpoint) several instruments or voices, or (in the Greek sense) several inter- vals forming a mode. Consumption, on the other hand, engenders an archi-synchronization in which Jam not-where I am targeted no longer as an I but as a consumer, according to the viewpoint of Benjamin Franklin, for whom the best index of God, if not its representative, had become the dollar. 9 It is necessary to respect everybody, even the lowest of the low, so long as a cent remains in his pocket: as a consumer he has a right to respect. It is, of course, starting not from consumption that Franklin proposes that "time is money," but rather from labor Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 65 as the obligation to earn. His sermons make the pursuit of pecuni- ary interest a duty and, in a sense, the sole guarantor of God. But as earnings are not possible without exchange, that is, a market, the intensification without limit of earning (which is here the in- dex of the infinity of God) implies the extension without limit of markets, that is, the wholly unlimited intensification of consump- tion. One can thus ask oneself if, in the world of Franklin, some- thing or someone can exist and have value if it is not measurable, commensurable, calculable, and capable of being added up, that is, synchronizable in totality. Now, God is reputedly essentially incommensurable and is, as such, the guarantor of the incommensurability of everybody in relation to each other. He is, otherwise put, the synchronic insofar as it responds to the diachronic. Disgust and discredit The system of synchronization put in place by the cultural in- dustries (which aim at the adoption of consumer products through a system of integrated marketing) leads to de-diachronization, that is, to disbanding through the loss of love of self, and thus leads- through the loss of love, by all and of all, and hence the loss of all faith and all credit-to ruin, here including in the pecuniary sense, in the generalized reign ofdisgust, that is, of the diabolical. 10 All this makes possible the mad cow and all the phenomena of re- jection of consumer products: these processes are the symptoms of a primordial suffering, if I may put it like this-a suffering of primordial narcissism-which leads to no longer wanting to con- sume, and thus to grabbing onto a certain number of alibis to justify this refusal to consume, alibis that correspond moreover to evident realities (the prion is not a phantasm). It concerns cata- strophic phenomena in the strict sense: in a single blow, extremely dangerous rejection behavior proliferates, testifying to the fact that the unlimited exploitation of consumption engenders a refusal to consume that is itself unlimited (but in another relation to the unlimited, called the infinite). 66 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us To this rejection of and disgust for industrial society as con- sumer society corresponds the rejection of political discourse and representation, forms that have never ceased to incorporate the facts by renouncing the exigency of a difference between facts and norms, adapting their action and inaction to the constraints of the system-struggling, for example, against inflation by collud- ing with the marketing of mass distribution, and thus sinking into discredit. The theater of individuation and the memories of man Simondon, in L'individuation psychique et collective,11 shows that for the I to individuate itself, my individuation must participate in the process of collective individuation, that is, in the individuation of a we where, insofar as I am an 1, I have always already found myself inscribed. I do not exist other than in a group: my indi- viduation is the individuation of my group-with which neverthe- less I am not confounded, and, moreover, I may belong to several groups, which may be in disharmony. This is what Jouvet says: "The same man can at the same time be a good father, a judge in court or commander of infantry, Cath- olic, Protestant, or atheist, all of these in a succession of person- ages, but it is not this that makes a person. It is impossible to draw the traits from each of these roles and put them all together. Are we in accord? There are within this person continuous ways of passing from infantry commander to communist or to the MRp'12 and this in turn creates problems. This series of personages do not simply succeed one another, and even have conflicts between them. Perhaps the commander of infantry will have difficulties with the Catholic."13 I can thus endlessly adopt different personages, which may op- pose one another, and thus I may be in opposition with myself. Now the possibility of such a multiple belonging, which intensi- fies the inadequation of the I to itself, lies in the fact of the default of origin, in primordial inadequation as originary default of the Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 67 process of individuation. And this fact is itself the origin of the original adoptive situation of man, in which consists his technic- ity, that is, his originary articulation with the prosthesis (the tech- nical object), which constitutes his primordial milieu as well as his default of origin. Hominization, the appearance of the living being that we our- selves are-we, that is, "Man" (who disgusts god) 14_is the appear- ance of a being constituted not by two memories (where Weis- mann identifies the germ and the soma as being the two sources of memory that constitute a living sexed being), but rather three, the third memory being that of the technical milieu essential to that living being. From Weismann to contemporary molecular biol- ogy, the living sexed being is constituted by two memories: species memory, which is replayed each time one has a fecund sexual life and which recombines chromosomes, thus remixing the genetic patrimony of the species (and each living being is a carrier of that memory), and the individual nervous memory of that living sexed being. Animals have an individual memory, which is what makes it possible for them to be trained: chimpanzees, poodles, but also annelids, sea snails, great pond snails; one can submit them to an apprenticeship, through the work of conditioning. There is a plasticity of individual animal memory, and the farther one heads toward the higher animals, the greater the plasticity. But from the annelids to the great apes-the great ape being an outer limit-the apprenticeship of the individual cannot be transmitted to the species. This is why acquired characteristics are not inherit- able. The negentropic potential of the nonhuman life form relies on the structural impermeability between genetic memory-the germ-and somatic memory, that is, the nervous memory of the individual animal. The evolution of species through the contin- gent recombination of chromosomes-which is independent of the individual goals of each animal-is what produces the negent- ropic diversification of life. Nevertheless, millions of years ago a life form appeared that, to guarantee its viability, needed to give itself prostheses. As Le- roi-Gourhan says, it is naked, deprived of a viable natural defense 68 TO Love, to Love Me, to Love Us system. And it surrounds itself with fabricated objects-with flint cutting tools, and then with the billions of objects of mass con- sumption produced by industrialization. In a certain manner, technological diversification has today become more important than biological diversification. This is the appearance of the third memory, which I name epi- phylogenetic. Genetic memory, which is transmitted from genera- tion to generation, combines with the epigenetic memory of indi- vidual experience, which becomes transmissible through technical objects. This third memory is also that of the third person-that is, what we must name the he,15 condition and bond of the I and the we. When I inherit an object, a flint cutting tool, for example, I inherit through it its mode of use, that is, the gestures, the mo- tor behaviors that lead to the production of the flint cutting tool. With the appearance of technical objects, a new stratum of mem- ory is constituted, which permits the transmission from generation to generation of individual experience and permits mutualization in the form of what we call a we. This permitted me to say to you earlier: "I, Bernard Stiegler, of German parents, am nonetheless French." This is only possible because I inherit traces of a we-for example, the sans-culottes, which form part of the fictive past of France-which I have appropriated, forming an artificial reten- tional milieu, a mnemotechnical milieu that I adopt and that per- mits me in this way to individuate myself in a we called "France." And today's question is to know how to fabricate the we of Eu- rope. A provisional response, and one by default: certainly not by reproducing the American machine for the liquidation of the we. This third memory, as the "third person," and as the he, is also the condition of the Book that speaks the He, that is, it is what sends us back to the absolute past, toward that which accumulated memory sends us as the utterly immemorial, as what Blanchot called the "awfully ancient," and which the Old Testament des- ignates as "Eternal Father."16 The Book, as third memory, is that which therefore supports the cult-with the rosary that, as Pascal notes, sustains faith. That is to say, also, credit. Between the two world wars, and above all after the second, an Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 69 important mutation is produced in the history of spirit, that is, in the history of epiphylogenesis, of the third person, of the he, and which is the "death of the He," which Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche designate as the death of God: industry takes hold of that which becomes the premier metamaterial-consciousness. Our conscious- nesses. Our times ofconsciousness. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that consciousness is a pri- mary material, since it is "on the side of" spirit and not the body. The epiphylogenetic character of human time, however, directly af- fects consciousness, which is the very reality of human time. Con- sciousness is materially overdetermined and originarily constituted by the fact that the flesh which incarnates and supports it is itself in movement-that is, moved-and supported by the process of exteriorization, the results of which I described as epiphylogenesis, that is, as the system of prosthetic supports of which the electronic technologies controlling time-consciousness are the most recent epoch. But, equally, consciousness is essentially memory (of the past), itself inscribed in imagination (of the future). Now, the epi- phylogenetic stratum in which technical objects consist is a mate- rial retentional milieu that fundamentally affects retentional and protentional activity (that is, the phenomena of expectations, of protentions, engendered by retentions, by "memories") of con- SClOusness. This is why in the course of the twentieth century, with the ap- pearance of mass media, which are retentional technologies, the mind can be targeted and commercialized as a mode ofaccess to the market. "The market" is essentially a mass of consciousnesses, inhabiting the mass of consuming bodies. To launch a new tooth- paste it is necessary to pass through these markets of time-con- sciousness that the mass media are. TFr sells time-consciousness to advertisers, and the price is easily calculated. Consider the fact that an hour's worth of prime-time advertising on TFr returns 500,000 euros. If the station attains an audience of fifteen million con- sciousnesses for one hour, the price of an hour of consciousness on that channel is approximately three cents. This is not expensive. When we watch TFr, our consciousness is not worth very much. To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us When America Online and Time Warner merge, it is to "get" con- sciousness at a "better price" on the global market. This industrial fusion, which is also that of program catalogues and data files of subscribers, has the goal of creating economies of scale, that is, "productivity gains," reaching daily not just dozens but hundreds of millions of consciousnesses. This operation may founder-the frenzy of speculators in this field has never been so great in indus- trial history. This mimetic madness nevertheless has causes which concern the very limits I am trying here to discern in the peren- niality of the process. When the mass media target consciousnesses insofar as they are metamarkets, spectators constitute a "primary material" for sale, the clients are the advertisers, and through them, industry tends to cause the adoption of behavior. The "primary material" is what one calls the audience, a mass of consciousnesses controlled by systems and processes for diffusing signals-that is, material states incorporated by the said "consciousnesses" (because the informa- tion is not "immaterial," it is a transitory material state)-and these consciousnesses are mental states engendering in their turn motor behaviors. When audiences of this kind are synchronized, they tend, asymptotically, to no longer constitute a we but rather a they. I don't want to say that when you (that is, your consciousness) watch television (and you necessarily watch it with others, at the same time as others), you are led immediately to think the same thing as others. I mean to say that television is a process that tends to make you conform progressively to an average. In that average!? the difference between I and we is diluted, giving the they, that is, the loss of individuation of both the I and the we, at the heart of which alone can one individuate oneself. The absorption of the he Mnemotechnologies put to work by cultural industries are nothing but the industrial exploitation of the fact that memory is always artifactually produced. In the twentieth century, memory becomes the object of systematic industrial exploitation because Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 71 markets become accessible through the metamarket of conscious- ness. This epiphylogenetic stratum constitutes the time of con- sciousness. It is the milieu common to all consciousnesses that industry wishes to grasp and exploit-it is this that is absolutely new. Until the nineteenth century there was a structural separation between the world of producers, entrepreneurs, those who produce material goods, and, on the other hand, those who, going by the name of "clerics"-ecclesiastical or lay-were in charge of religion, law, politics, knowledge, art, in essence the "spiritual." There were two separate worlds. With the integration of mnemotechnologies into the sphere of production-which tends to guarantee the syn- chronization of production and consumption, to minimize lead time, to make production work ''just in time"18-these two worlds became fused: the he, the great third that constitutes authority as such, beyond the I and the we, has been integrated, has become immanent, that is to say, in principle, dia-bolical. All incommen- surability-that transcendence which up until then had been ex- pressed by the fact of the separation of the clerics-has been sup- pressed. This incommensurable third could also be called, if we want to speak the language of Lacan, the big Other (already in Aristotle the infinite cause of desire). With the absorption of this third, disbanding begins-which is also the reign of the in-signifi- cant, such that it tends toward the a-significant. 19 If "God is dead," the "devil" is still alive and well. This is what remains for thought-as that which is contained in the remains, that is, in the traces of the he that has become, in its death, the primary material of consciousness commensurable on the marker. The combat of becoming and the future: Conjugating, disconnecting, inventing, excepting oneself The integration of technical and mnemotechnical systems is a fact, a very long-term process that it would be deluded to "resist." Leroi-Gourhan summarizes this tendency with a concept that I have myself taken up: exteriorization. Nevertheless, this process 7 2 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us opens alternative possibilities. It is not a blind determinism and, in that framework, questions of political economy are suggested that are still poorly identified, because of a failure to distinguish what is related to becoming, the process, and what is related to time, that which we make of the process. Now, this process requires that we make choices, that is, differences, there where it seems at first to consist, as mere becoming, in an elimination of general differ- ences, what I call hypersynchronization. The production of differ- ences cannot take place other than through a critique ofwhat in the process condemns the process itself The pragmatic that I use to treat these questions consists in pro- posing that there are conjunctions and that, to intervene in the real, one must take account ofthe conjunctivity ofproblems. A problem is never purely technical: it is also legal, economic, sociological, psychological, and so on-to be brief, it is anthropological. Even if technics is constitutive of anthropology, and, in that sense, man is a prosthetic life form, he is nevertheless not only technical. If one day he becomes entirely technical, then he will no longer be called man-a transformation, moreover, perhaps already partly accom- plished as the transformation of life in biotechnology. But then, for the process to continue, it would be necessary to find another supportfor diachronicity and desire other than man-thus the ques- tion remains. 20 This hypothesis notwithstanding, it is necessary to compose the problem of conjunctivity. Rather than thinking through opposition, it is preferable to proceed through composition. We must negotiate, because this conjunctivity is traversed by ten- dencies that concern what we call becoming. But negotiating does not mean renouncing or adapting. It is a matter neither ofadapt- ing nor resisting. it is a matter of inventing. And such invention is nothing other than combat, which is itself nothing other than radical critique. Becoming is a process we never master. This is why contemporary philosophy denounces the Cartesian discourse of mastery. From the nineteenth century, at least from Nietzsche's time, modern thought begins to admit that one cannot master becoming. One can only negotiate with it, which is another thing entirely. Becom- Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 73 ing is a movement that one must understand in order, eventually, to inscribe it in impulsions, that is, to operate disjunctions, on the condition, however, of not being able to control the effects. Reality is conjunctive, a complex movement where each one tries to "find one's place." Without us, this complex is nothing. So, we are the dynamic inadequation of this complex: insofar as we can say we, on the condition that we can say we, such that this we is precisely not a they, we stand, if not before or after this process, as least as that which in the process is at the same time its delay and its advance. As such, we exceed this process, we are even the exception that can unsettle the process-through disjunctions. This means that I decide, that I am capable, eventually, of opposing my- se/fto this process, of temporarily "resisting," on condition that I do not reason by simple oppositions, and that, composing with the process, I am at the same time capable of putting it to work through my capacity for invention-and thus, well beyond my capacity for "resistance." I cannot resist by protesting: I must have intelligence about it, that is, be in excess of it, and by that same fact already be, in advance, inventive. There are decisions to make: micro-decisions (for example, I buy toothpaste X rather than toothpaste Y) and macro-decisions (I vote for a candidate for the presidency of the Republic or decide to press a red button to destroy a population with atomic weap- ons-or I send an armed force to Iraq). Some are very small, while others are enormous, inconceivable. But there are always choices to make. Time is the question of that choice, of deliberation and action. The question of evil and the thought of tendencies For someone who does not know how to reason in terms of ten- dencies, the question of evil is a dangerous question, a bad ques- tion-it is in a certain sense the evil itself, the menacing question or the question that Nietzsche considers to be the villain. To think in terms of tendencies is to think that that against which one fights 74 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us is necessary. That is, if one fights against a tendency, insofar as that tendency tends to become hegemonic (and in fact all tendencies tend toward hegemony against another hegemony), and if one op- poses there a countertendency, one must know that the tendency against which onefights is the condition ofthe tendencyfor which one fights. Consequently, it is not a matter of eliminating the tendency being combated but of composing tendencies. From this point of view, thinking through tendencies excludes seeing in the adversary an enemy who is the cause of evil. The adversary is not an enemy who is the cause of evil-in other words he is not the evil-but is caught in a hegemonic tendency of which he has become the vector, the spokesperson, most of the time without having any impression of harboring bad intentions. The obvious difficulty of such a manner of thinking and acting is that it seems to take one back to the discourse of the golden mean. Not that of Aristotle's ethics but, in modern language, the discourse of reformism and adaptation, the discourse that system- atically ignores radical questions (which are the only true ques- tions, those that produce major improvements, as Simondon says, while the minor improvements of the reformists hide the necessity for "quantum leaps" in that becoming which individuation is). In reality, nothing is more radical than a critique that prohib- its itself from diabolizing the adversary or the tendency-because the counterpart of the thought of the process as the irreducibility of one tendency to another is the thought that what permits the (re)com-position of tendencies in the process of individuation is the exception: that which is neither the average, nor adaptation, nor the mass, nor consensus. This is what puts dissensus, getting out of phase [dephasage], and disadjustment-what the ancient Greeks named eris- at the very heart of becoming (such is the Simondonian theory of quantum leaps) and as its very possibility. It is the spirit of this eris, which designates emulation and compe- tition, that the organization of consumption degrades in the com- mensurability of all diachronies, that is, in total calculability in the service of the greatest possible and most immediate profit, that is, Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 75 in the service of "just in time," and the reactivity that inclines the tendency toward hypersynchronization. A building site These are the networks of communication and information that diffuse industrial temporal objects and constitute the infrastruc- ture of hypersynchronization, which decomposes the social fabric and exhausts desire in opposing synchronization and diachroniza- tion, by rendering the diachronization of consciousnesses impos- sible through the control of mass retentional processes. A mutation has been produced in the world of networks since 1992, with the appearance of the Internet. This network of net- works, unified by the TCP-IP protocol, has manifestly changed the organizational setup of the program industries. And there is no doubt that this transformation of industrial technology, via the digital, renders new perspectives conceivable. These must be sys- tematically explored; they constitute a privileged terrain of combat and a field for social invention that could be extremely fertile. I believe more than anything else in the necessity of acting in this domain. 21 For so many, the critique that must accompany invention, if this is even possible-and, I repeat, it is only possible as combat, at the same time economic, geopolitical, and ecological (it is a matter of an ecology of the milieus of spirit)-this critique must analyze in every detail the manner in which the rupture that makes imaginable and possible a technological mutation of the digital (as the possibility for demassifying the diffusion of information and industrial temporal objects) has already been invested in and con- trolled by the industrial retentional system placed into the service of consumption and hypersynchronization, and is still reinforcing it, contrary to appearances. The question of the network, as Jeremy Rifkin has shown well, is access. What is important is the filters. The search engines that permit the ranking of information charge those whom they refer- ence. This is always a question of selection. The Google search To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us engine, for example, is a system that requires the "people meter" [audimat]: it proposes to you that which has been most in de- mand, thus systematically reinforcing social mimetism and herdish behavior. Another access and navigation technique, user profiling, 22 consists in identifying your search behavior in order to propose something to you before you even have the idea of asking for it. If this is not a programming of consciousness, it is conditioning and reinforcement, in the Pavlovian sense of these terms. You are locked into your synchronicity, prevented from changing, and, through this, what is pursued amounts to hypersegmentation, a marketing strategy for identifying ultraprecise niches. This is how behavior is standardized, reduced to socio-professional categories or "tribes," identifiable through "markers" that are much more interesting to marketing than is political society. The media deploy industrial technology for the exploitation of consciousness, and do so through the imposition of retentional criteria. This control of retentional systems where consciousness is a market, where an hour of consciousness is worth the sum of the advertising receipts divided by the number of viewers, has the ef- fect of homogenizing secondary retention. And this is an essential cause (if not the only cause) of what I call ill-being. The control of retention implies the loss of identity, that is, of difference. Ni- etzsche saw very clearly this lost capacity to produce a difference and the tendency of societies falsely named "individualistic" to deny the exception. Our supposedly individualistic societies are in reality perfectly conformist. Singularity in the process of individuation What Simondon called the trans-individual is constituted by the epiphylogenetic domain of technical objects that I inherit. Indi- viduation is not individualization. Individualization is the result of individuation. This is the manner in which the diverse in general unifies itself asymptotically in an indivisible way. I tend to become indivisible-but I never get there. I tend to become myself-"me" as indivisible, as pure unity-but I never get there, because pro- Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 77 cesses of individuation are never finished. Or, when they are fin- ished, they have not reached their goal: having ended, they have run aground. A process of individuation is that which structur- ally cannot be completed ... unless it carries on through a process of transmission, through which this I that individuates itself, and which has come to the end of its individuation-it is dead-may eventually become a source for a new process of individuation for its descendants: for we who inherit from this I that individuated itself by default, that came to its finish by default. In other words, every process of individuation is dynamic, to the degree that it is always inadequate to itself-which is the in- scription ofits diachrony in its synchrony. I aim to individuate my- self, to become indivisible, but in the asymptotic quest for my indivisibility, I alter myself I reveal myself as other, because I am inhabited by an inadequation that is my diachrony. I am always out of phase with myself: I am never in a pure present. I can only attain the pure present when I am dead-but upon dying I will no longer be there, and thus I will never succeed in individuating myself properly speaking. Being dead, however, I can become an ancestor who leaves traces, objects, works-where by "works" I do not mean my "complete works" but rather perhaps the library I bought, the garden I cultivated, all sorts of things: those objects in which, or the phrases, acts, or gestures by which, in one way or another, something of my singularity is inscribed-"something of my singularity" meaning my inadequation with myself that is, with the group. Insofar as I belong to a group, I am, within the group, a singularity that nourishes the group in alterity. Milieus of the we A process of individuation always puts in playa tension harbor- ing a potential. Individuation is the syn-crystallization of a mother liquid, of a potential that can catalyze, crystallize, take the form of a crystal, with the qualification that psychic and collective indi- viduation (of the I in the we) is a syn-crystallization that structur- ally fails, whereas a crystal succeeds in congealing completely. Life TO Love, to Love Me, to Love Us is a crystal that does not reach crystallization, caught in a process of metastable equilibrium. The potential of the I and the we is the legacy of this metastability (equilibrium at the limit of disequi- librium) that I inherit through traces. These traces are the monu- ments of the dead, the library that is here behind bars, the chateau at Cerisy with its phantoms, all these memories. 23 It is also TFI. It is everything transmitted to me that is memorable. And these memories I share with others-more or less. Obviously, if I was a practicing Jew in Israel, I would not share the space of Jerusa- lem with practicing Muslims in the same way as would another Muslim. There are conflicts over sharing, over heritage. There are localizations in the capacities for appropriating the preindividual potential that open common scenes of individuation forming pre- cisely the we. The epiphylogenetic preindividual milieu is the theater of in- dividuation of which Simondon speaks. 24 And thus individuation has a history: one does not individuate oneself in the Australopith- icus epoch in the same way as in the Cro-Magnon epoch, as Greek citizens or during the industrial revolution. And the they does not individuate itself today-in the hyperindustrial epoch-as dur- ing the industrial revolution: the epiphylogenetic milieu has been transformed, and the conditions of individuation are transformed by the evolution of technics. The chance of a we Nevertheless, for the I to individuate itself, it is necessary that my individuation take part in the individuation of a we to which I belong-and which has a part in this individuation. At this mo- ment, as I am speaking to you, I am in the process of individuat- ing myself. I propose a new argument, even if it is not completely new-I have already spoken of these things in this very place. 25 But at that time, April 21 had not yet taken place. Now that it has taken place, I reread my proper preindividual ground, and I reindividuate, at the very moment that I speak to you: individuat- ing myself means seeking to constitute the symbolic coherence of Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 79 my discourse. But I will only succeed in individuating myself ten- dentially (to reinforce my "potential" for individuation) ifI succeed in makingyou individuate yourselves with me. If my individuation succeeds, it will have to have succeeded in you-but not at all in the same manner, because what I am in the process of telling you I hear and interpret one way while you hear it ANOTHER way, and this is why in a moment we could perhaps have a debate, which we hope will befecund-this is the condition ofa we. Because in my discourse something is still inadequate, remains to come, is open to the future, and this is the object of our discussion. Only here can there be the chance for a we: that we might understand each other, in spite of this inadequation and because of it-in this fact lies the possibility and necessity of affirming that, yes, the future lies in this very inadequation itself. Colloquium at Cerisy: Metastability Cerisy is a group. The goal of a decade at Cerisy is to give our- selves the means, through an appropriate calendarity, for the mo- bilization of a preindividual ground, which we share in psychically and collectively individuating through conferences to form such a group. It is a metastable process precisely in that it is not stable: if it was, it would be a totally ossified crystal, without future or temporality; if it was totally unstable, it would lead to an explo- sion of the group-atomization, pulverization, entropy, absolute disequilibrium. A group is always between equilibrium and dis- equilibrium, neither in equilibrium nor in disequilibrium, but rather always at the border of both: at the border of pure equi- librium, which is called pure synchrony, the crystal being purely synchronic; and of disequilibrium, that is, of pure diachrony, total atomization, completed diabelein. Disequilibrium exists in groups, and it is called madness. Madness is at the heart of the process of individuation: it is the energy itself of individuation, but it is an energy that must be, precisely, calendarized and cardinalized to be channeled and to form something that creates movement with- out leading to disintegration. Metastability produces movement. 80 To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us Pure disequilibrium is the collapse of movement. Pure equilibrium is immobility preceding movement. Between these two is fragile metastabiiity. Calendar and cardinal systems are the stabilizers that serve to create the metastatic-the technics of space and of time. One can analyze these in a precise and historical way: hence the emergence of the Egyptian calendar from its conditions of appearance, linked to the conditions of the flooding of the Nile, primitive accumu- lation, things well understood by archaeologists. These are the technical concretions of the relation to space and time through calendar and cardinal systems, which permit the metastabilization of the potential for madness that the group always contains. Das Man Calendarity, for millennia, has meant that I have the feeling of belonging to a we, because I share with others, with other Is, a common calendar, which refers to moments of prayer, festival, singing, fetishes in general, moments of concelebration, which are not necessarily religious-and fetishes that will lead to both Marxian and Freudian fetishism (Marx conceived of commodities essentially as fetishes). When they are integrated in an epiphyloge- netic industrial system-where there is no longer any distinction between the spiritual world of the clerics and the world of produc- tion in the new world of consumption-the calendrical and car- dinal systems lose their efficacy. When I watch the television news each day at the same time with around fifteen million people in France, a synchronization of the 1is produced that is no longer the care of an lor of an ensemble of Is in the interior of a we, but the confusion of the Is and the we: totalitarianism as the elimination of the differences of the 1and the we, in what a German has called "das Man," the they-he himself fell into this they. Six years after having announced the danger of das Man he wore the swastika. I point this out not to condemn the memory of Heidegger (the heritage and inadequations of which are at the heart of all of these questions) but to remind us of a certain prudence and modesty: Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 81 it is not by denouncing the they that one avoids the risk of falling into it, and perhaps the opposite is true, as is often seen in times of great reactivity. Collapses: September II, March 26, April 21 The commodification of consciousness is essentially synchronic, whereas you listen to me because I am a diachronic conscious- ness-and I can only speak to you because you are diachronic consciousnesses. You only listen to me because you think I have something to tell you. You don't know it: you hope that I am in structural diachrony in relation to you (hoping that I thus promise a synchrony to come-but to the infinite). And if I speak to you, it is because I think I have something to tell you. But at the same time, I can only speak to you because I think that a synchrony between us is possible, for otherwise I would say nothing to you. I argue that this diachronic tension-which is the condition of the individuation of a we, that is, of a synchrony that remains always to come, this inadequation between I and we that is the condition of the existence of the I and the we--in the present epiphyloge- netic epoch, that is, in the epoch of the industrial exploitation of mnemotechnical supports, collapses. From then on, absolute atomization and suicidal behavior is produced-such as that of April 21, Osama bin Laden, Richard Durn, George W. Bush, or other forms of toxicomania. The spirit consists in states of matter, whether it be the flint cut- ting tool at the beginning of hominization or material states at the order of the pico-second, when it concerns information. Informa- tion is not immaterial but is rather a flux of material states, which circulate extremely quickly, bombarding our consciousness and conditioning our mental states. If we do not enact an ecological critique of the technologies and the industries of the spirit, if we do not show that the unlimited exploitation of spirits as markets leads to a ruin comparable to that which the Soviet Union and the great capitalist countries have been able to create by exploiting ter- ritories or natural resources without any care to preserve their hab- To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us itability to come-the future-then we move ineluctably toward a global social explosion, that is, toward absolute war. The "diabolical," critique, invention, and combat We spoke already of these questions and these threats a year ago, just after September II, here at Cerisy. Since then, April 21 has taken place, that is, the problem has come into greater focus. I fear that all this is merely the beginning of a long and arduous path. On this path one must cast all doubt aside to fight the im- minent possibility of the total atomization of the we. This path passes through a critique of what spirit is today, and thus through an analysis of the conditions in which metastability can again be- come metastable, that is, not fall into equilibrium or disequilib- rium-which is the same thing: pure equilibrium creates absolute disequilibrium-but rather produce new movement. Pure equilib- rium is the loss of desire that creates atomization. Hypersynchro- nization creates hyperdiachronization, that is, the decomposition of the social. Such is the veritable "diabolical" that is masked by the demonizing [diabolisation] of supposedly rogue states suppos- edly linked to an "axis of evil." What more than anything is evil is 0 UR renunciation ofthought in favor ofthe denunciation ofevil. What is evil is the we, disquieted about the future of the we, that renounces critique and invention or, in other words, combat. Notes How I Became a Philosopher 1. This text was delivered on April 23, 2003, at the Centre Georges- Pompidou, at the invitation of Marianne Alphant, whom I thank, in the context of the "Les Revues Parlees" lecture series. The topic was: "Philos- ophers reflect on their path: Why and how has one come to philosophy? Why does one become a philosopher? Why does one remain a philoso- pher? This series, which proposes to reinscribe the philosophical project in the intimacy and secret of a life, can touch on themes sometimes outside of the philosophical 'mode'-such as God, Being, Humanism, What is thought?-considered from a perspective that sees the defense of philosophy as one of the urgent contemporary civic principles." 2. Catherine Clement, "Vocation," article in Encyclopaedia Univer- salis. 3. Even if this "just as much as" is not an "as"; on this point, cf. Stiegler, La Technique et Ie Temps, 3. Le temps du cinema et fa question du mal-etre (Paris: Galilee, 2001), p. 147. 4. Gilbert Simondon, LIndividuation psychique et collective (Paris: Au- bier-Montaigne, 1989), p. II. 5. Plato, Crito 53e. 6. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with WOrds (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1962). 7. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. II-U. 8. They are found not in experience but rather in extraordinary ex- periences and at the limit ofthe social-as that which delimits the social, practices that suspend the these are experiences of reli- gious life, of thought, of painting (such is the extra-ordinariness of Mont 83 Notes Sainte-Victoire), oflistening, of dance, of writing, music, literature, and so on, each forming as many modalities of flight beyond the element. 9. Which finds the possibility of the world constituted by the tran- scendental ego, that is, by the constituting subjectivity. 10. Because I will propose that the hypomnesic supplementarity of the world is constitutive, and that this world, as accidental facticity, is therefore irreducible. II. Stephane Mallarme, Oeuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor & G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 368. 12. Stephane Mallarme, Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 84; the original is in Mallarme, Oeuvres completes, p. 76. 13. I develop this concept, in relation to the Husserlian concepts of primary and secondary retention, in Technics and Time, I: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), part 2, ch. 3; La Technique et Ie Temps, 2. La desorientation (Paris: Galilee, 1996), ch. 4; and La Technique et Ie Temps, 3, chs. 1-2. 14. The difference between significant and insignificant is the concrete but always changing reality of great differences that take place in the his- tory of thought, of which the most recent, formulated by Heidegger, is the difference between being and beings-which never ceases to be for- gotten as we tend always to reduce the significant to the insignificant, a reduction toward which our terrible idleness does not cease to seduce us. 15. Stiegler, La Technique et le Temps, 3. TO Love, to Love Me, to Love Us, Part I 1. This book takes up and develops the text of a lecture delivered at Cerisy-Ia-Salle, at the invitation of Edith Heuregon and Josee Landrieu, at the opening of the colloquium "Of the I and the We: Working To- gether in the City. Prospective IV," on June 9, 2002. 2. On March 26, 2002, Richard Durn murdered eight members of the Nanterre city council. He committed suicide on March 28, 2002. The crime of Lance Corporal Lortie in Canada immediately springs to mind, which Pierre Legendre analyzed in Le crime du caporal Lortie: Traite sur le pere (Paris: Fayard, 1989). 3. Le Monde, April 10,2002. 4. On this matter, and from another viewpoint, Michel Schneider speaks of Durn's "narcissism of death" in Esprit, May 2002, and Le Notes Monde, November 12, 2002. Vincent de Gaulejac also gave a very inter- esting presentation analyzing Durn's passage to the act during the col- loquium "Llndividu Hypermoderne," September 8, 2003, at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Paris. 5. Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalysis," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological "W{}rks ofSigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 249, translation modified. 6. I have developed this concept of the they in La Technique et Ie Temps, 3, p. 156. 7. Ibid., p. 138. The process of adoption is consubstantial with the process of individuation. 8. An economy of scale permits, through the production of a series of the same object, the reduction of production costs. Thus a prototype au- tomobile costing a million euros to make can see its price in the market reduced to 20,000 euros through economies of scale. But this presumes the constitution, for this product, of a market of global dimensions and the organization of consumption through pressure applied to the entire world's consumers, whose modes of life are therefore, through this ob- ject, synchronized. 9. This is what I examined in the first two chapters of Technics and Time, I. IO. This is because human time exceeds the process of negative en- tropy by which Schrodinger and Brillouin characterized the living, by inscribing negentropy outside of this living, and as characteristic of the human's vital milieu and what I call its epiphylogenetic memory in Tech- nics and Time, I, pp. 139-40, 175-77. II. Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" in The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, trans. William G. Hutchison (London: Walter Scott, 1896), pp. 61-83. 12. Fran<;ois Ascher & Francis Godard (dir.), L'Aube (2003). 13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. See the translation by Jean Lauxe- rois of books VIII and IX, entitled L'amicalitt, and his epilogue, "A titre amical" (Paris: A Propos, 2002), which concerns, writes Jean Lauxerois, "thinking today the default as bond of self to self and as the site of all possible community" (p. 88). Now, this default is that which makes mis- takes in the fictional character of the self as much as of the commu- nity-producing so many histories. The default is what modern philoso- phy does not know how to think, and Lauxerois demonstrates this also in his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus the IJrant, and in "Le pied de la 86 Notes lettre," his magnificent epilogue (Paris: A Propos, 2001). I myself have for a long time explored this question of default, which will be the title of La Technique et Ie Temps, 5. Le difaut qu'ilfaut [The necessary default]. Now, Lauxerois seems to suggest that the inability to cope with the de- fault leads to narcissism (pp. 90-91). He thinks narcissism according to the habitual notions that take it as pathological. For all that, what I am trying to suggest here is that primordial narcissism is precisely the default that we must think-beneath (on this side of) and beyond the "petit narcissism" of "petites differences," which is the subject of pages n8-20 of L'amicalid. 14. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W W Norton, 1977), p. 2. 15. Translators' note. The literal definition of sauvageon is a child who will not submit to any kind of discipline, but it is also a word that has been taken up in French political discourse. It has been used, for in- stance, by the French minister of the interior, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, and is an expression typical of a certain leftist populism, a populism tending to attribute individual, psychological, if not racial, characteris- tics to behavioral problems. 16. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay, 1957). 17. Cf. La Technique et Ie Temps, 3. 18. Le Monde, August 29, 2003. 19. And the question is then to think the default oforigin that con- stitutes the we: such is the constant intention of the five volumes (of which two are yet to appear) of Technics and Time. See note 13 above (on Aristotle) and Comme si nous faisons difaut [As if we were lacking], forthcoming from Editions Galilee. 20. See Bernard Stiegler, La mecreance et discredit I. La decadence des democraties industrielles (Paris: Galilee, 2004), p. 87. Translator's foot- note: Literally, debandade means the disbanding of a group that results when it loses its unity and its members drift apart. Disbanding captures Stiegler's reference here to his discussion of the breakdown of the d y ~ namic of individual and collective individuation. The characterization of this debandade as a "symptom of a liquidation of desire" is elaborated in relation to Freud's notion of libidinal energy in the following section. 21. On the question of the significant and the insignificant, permit me to refer to pp. 26-28 of this volume. Notes 22. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 356, translation modified. 23· Ibid., p. 358. 24. Ibid. 25· Ibid., p. 397. To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us, Part II 1. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age ofAccess: The New Culture ofHypercapital- ism Where All Life Is a Paid-For Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam, 2000). 2. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000). 3. Andre Gorz, L'immateriel: Connaissance, valeur et capital (Paris: Galilee, 2003), p. 64 and following. 4. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders. 5. Translators' note. Pensee unique is a French term developed as part of a critique of certain political tendencies in France and elsewhere. It refers to the convergence of mainstream political discourse around what is broadly referred to as neoliberalism and to the feeling that there is in fact less and less difference to be found between ostensibly "opposed" political parties. 6. The World Cup was created in 1930 with an essentially sporting goal in mind. But it has become, with television, an essential vector of global calendarity in the service of consumption. The annual global turnover from football today is 200 billion euros. 7. Cf. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 6+ Freud cites someone who responds by letter to his book on religion as an illusion, agreeing with the judgment but offering his own account of the true source of religious sentiment: "This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in mil- lions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded-as it were, 'oceanic.' This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular chan- nels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may, he thinks, rightly 88 Notes call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion." 8. Ibid., p. 66, translation modified. 9. Cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), pp. 48-50. 10. And in this regard one must reflect on the remark of Pope John Paul II: "God does not reveal much, seeming to hide in his heaven, in silence, seemingly disgusted by the actions of humanity." Cf. Massimo Cacciari, La Republica, December 12, 2002. I thank Patrick Talbot for having brought this article to my attention. II. Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective. 12. Translators' note. The Mouvement Republicain Populaire, a de- funct French political party. 13. Louis ]ouvet, "Cours au Conservatoire National d'Art Drama- tique, 1949-1951," Revue de fa Societe d'Histoire du ThM,tre. 14- See above, note 10. 15. Translators' note. What is being translated here as "the he' is, in French, "le il," which of course could also be translated as "the it," and thus contains a reference to the artifactual, prosthetic, or technical basis ofwhat Stiegler calls the "third" (person). If we prefer to retain the sense of the masculine rather than the artifactual in this translation, this is because the text elaborates on this "third" in terms of God and of Lacan's symbolic order (also termed by Lacan "the name of the father"), the masculinity of which Stiegler is referring to in what follows. Of course, both senses are important to Stiegler, and it is the relation between them that he is attempting to think. 16. On the ii, the he, c£ Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 71; on the "aw- fully ancient," cf. Blanchot, The Space ofLiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 229. 17. On the hegemony of the average, one can read with profit Gilles Chatelet, lIivre et penser comme des porcs (Paris: Exils, 1998). 18. In English in the original. 19. I distinguish between in-significance and a-significance above, pp. 26-30, and in La Technique et le Temps, 4. Symboles et diaboles, ou la guerre des esprits, forthcoming from Editions Galilee. 20. I outlined this in "Ce qui fait defaut," Cesure (September 1995). 21. I personally explored these questions as well when I was director of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) and at the University Notes of Compiegne, and continued to do so at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). See notably "La numeri- sation des objets temporels," in Cinema et dernieres technologies (INNDe Boeck University, 1998); and "Societes d'auteurs et semantiques situees," in Christian Jacob (dir.), Des Alexandries 2 (BNF, 2003). 22. In English in the original. 23. The lecture on which this text was based was delivered in the li- brary at the chateau of Cerisy-la-Salle. 24. Simondon did not himself propose this epiphylogenetic dimen- sion of the preindividual of psychic and collective individuation. On this question, see also Bernard Stiegler, "Technique et individuation dans l'oeuvre de Simondon," Futur Anterieur (Spring 1994); reprised in an- other version under the title "Temps, technique et individuation dans la pensee de Simondon," Intellectica (1999). 25. In September 2001, here in Cerisy, in the colloquium "Modernity: The New Map of the Times," under the direction of Frans:ois Ascher and Francis Godard. Q Index accidentality, 10-12, 16, 22, 24-25, 30, 33, 35 adoption, 41, 44-45, 48, 60-61, 65- 68 ,7o,85 n ·7 Alphant, Marianne, I, 1O-II, 33, 83 n .I anamnesis, 10, 15, 18, 23-24, 31, 34 Anytus, 3 Aristotle, 3, 13-14, 23,47,71,74 artifact, 14, 26 asceticism, 19, 21 Austin, J. L., 6 Barthes, Roland, 31 Bergson, Henri, 52 Bernays, Edward, 60 bin Laden, Osama, 81 Blanchot, Maurice, 7-8, 21, 68 Bradbury, Ray, 50 Brillouin, Leon, 85n.1O Bush, George w., 81 calendarity, 45-46, 48-52, 63-64, 79- 80 cardinality, 45-46, 48-49, 52, 80 Char, Rene, 2I Chevenement, Jean-Pierre, 86n.I5 Clement, Catherine, I composition, 52, 72-74 consistence, 32, 56-57 consumption, 41-46, 48-50, 53, 59- 60, 63-65, 71, 74-75, 80, 85n.8 Crito, 5,24 culture, 20, 43, 55 default, 4, II-12, 14, 16-18, 21, 23-24, 26, 30-31, 35, 47, 51, 66, 77, 85 n . I 3 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 28, 31 desire, 7-8, 32, 47, 49, 51-52, 60, 64,75,82 Diotima,8 disadjustment, 42, 74 disbanding, 52, 65, 71, 86n.20 Durn, Richard, 39-40, 55-56, 59, 81, 84n.2, 84n.4 Epictetus, 20 Epimetheus, 16 epiphylogenesis, 68-69, 71, 76, 78, 80, 85n.1O, 89n.24 epokhe, 22, 29 evil, 73-74, 82 extraordinary, 17, 31, 83n.8 9 I 9 2 Index 4 fiction, 4, II, 34, 44-48, 68, 85n.I3 fidelity, 33-35, 62-63, 68 forgetting, IO, 15-16, 31, 34 Franklin, Benjamin, 64-65 freedom, 18-20, 29, 35, 55 Freud, Sigmund, 7-8, 39-40, 52, 64, 86n.20, 87n·7 Gaudin, Thierry, 63 Gorz, Andre, 60 Granel, Gerard, 2, 22 Gulf War, 57, 62 Hegel, G. W F., 13, 69 Heidegger, Martin, 26, 30, 80, 84 n . I 4 Husserl, Edmund, 17-18, 21-23, 53-54 hypomnesis, 15-16, 18, 21-22, 24- 2 5, 30, 34 ill-being, 51-52, 76 individuation, I, 3-6, 27-28, 30, 32, 39-42,46,48,56-57,59,66-68, 7°,74,76,79, 81, 85n.7, 89n.24 industrial temporal object, 52-55, 60,75 Jouvet, Louis, 66 justice, 32 Kant, Immanuel, 33 Klein, Naomi, 60 Lacan, Jacques, 40, 48, 71, 88n.I5 Lascaux, 21, 26 Lauxerois, Jean, 8sn.13 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, 44,56-59, 67,7 1 locality, 23-26, 30 logos, 14, 21 Lortie, Denis, 84n.2 love, 24, 28,47,49,64-65 Mallarme, Stephane, 17, 20, 28 Marx, Karl, 9, 31, 60, 69, 80 materialism, 31-32 melete, 20, 24, 28-29 Meno, 7, 15, 18 metastability, 78-80, 82 milieu, 13-15, 17-19, 23, 28, 31, 52, 67, 71, 75, 77-7 8 mnemotechnics, 41, 49, 68, 70-71, 81 mortality, 16, 24, 25 narcissism, 39-42, 45-46, 55-56, 60, 63-65, 8s-86n.I3 National Front, 38, 42, 51 negentropy, 42-43, 61, 64, 67, 85n.IO Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 48, 52, 69, 7 2 -73,7 6 Packard, \!ance,49, 60 Pascal, Blaise, 68 passer al' acte, passage to the act, 2, 8-9,12,16,28-29,32-34,42 performativity, 6, 9, 61-62 Phaedo,24 phenomenology, II-I2, 17, 22 Plato, 8-9, 14-16, 21, 24 Prometheus, 16 Protagoras, 15-16 protention, 19-20, 28, 30, 53-54, 61,69 Proust, Marcel, 12 reminiscence, 9-10, 16, 18, 20, 28, 34 Renan, Ernest, 44 responsibility, 29, 31, 62-63 retention, 18-19, 25, 29-30, 53-55, 60,67-69,75-76 retentional finitude, 23, 34 Rifkin, Jeremy, 60, 75 Index 93 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14, 28, 52 Schrodinger, Erwin, 85n.IO significance, 20, 25-31, 84n.14 Simondon, Gilbert, 3-6, 30, 66, 74, 7 6 , 7 8 , 89 n . 2 4 singularity, 41, 55, 57, 60-62, 64, 7 6 -77 Socrates, 3, 5-6, 9, 12, IS, 17, 20, 24- 2 5 Sophocles, 85n.13 soul, 13-16, 24 spirit, 22, 32, 55, 69, 7 1 , 74-75, 81-82 suffering, 19, 38, 40-42, 55-56, 59, 65 symbolic misery, 56 synchronization, 41, 44, 50-53, 55, 59, 63-65, 70-72, 75, 80, 82, 85n.8 technics, 16, 43, 72, 78, 80 television, 49-51, 53, 60-62, 69-70, 87n.6 tendency, 4, 52-53, 70, 73-76 time, 3-4, II, 30, 42-43, 52, 69, 7 2 -73 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 44 Truffaut, Fran<;:ois, 50 truth, la-II Valery, Paul, 44 virtue, 15, 30, 32 vocation, 1-2, 9-12, 21-22, 33 Weismann, August, 67 witness, 61-62 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 14 Xenophon,9 Zeus, 16 Zidane, Zinedine, 46 ,... MERIDIAN Crossing Aesthetics Werner Hamacher Editor Daniel Ross.Translated by David Barison. and Patrick Crogan Stanford University Press Stanford California 2009 . ACTING OUT Bernard Stiegler . David. Series: Meridian (Stanford. 1970III. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means. nous aimer. or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. To Love.-(Meridian. Bernard. to Love Us was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Aimer. to love me. ISBN 978-0-8047-5868-0 (cloth: alk. VII. English. Daniel. How I Became a Philosopher was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Passer it l'acte © 2003 Editions Galilee. nous aimer. To love. translated by David Barison. Daniel Ross. Aimer. archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stiegler. cm. crossing aesthetics) "How I Became a Philosopher was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Passer al'acte. Crogan." Includes bibliographical references and index. to love us was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Aimer. V. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free. Barison. p. IV Stiegler. II. Narcissism. paper) I. I. electronic or mechanical.Stanford University Press Stanford. Title. nous aimer: Du II septembre au 2I avril © 2003 Editions Galilee. including photocopying and recording. paper) ISBN 978-0-8°47-5869-7 (pbk. VI. and Patrick Crogan. Patrick. s'aimer. : alk. Bernard. French-20th century.S752S7413 2009 194-dc22 2008006687 . All rights reserved. Philosophy. Ross. English] Acting out / Bernard Stiegler. California English translation © 2009 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. 2. Calif. s'aimer. Individuation (Philosophy) 3. s'aimer. Title: Aimer. [Passer a l'acte. s'aimer. to Love Me. nous aimer.) B2430. to Love Us: From September II to April 21 I The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 1 37 39 II The destruction ofthe process ofpsychic and collective individuation and the question ofevil 60 ~m ~ Index 9I . to Love Me.Contents How I Became a Philosopher To Love. How I Became a Philosopher . . And in reflecting on it I told myself that."2 Religious vocation is therefOre individual It happens to the individual: it is a moment of that which I am about to call a process of individuation. . and with it she thrust me (and it was doubtless the same for the others) into an embarrassing position. in the strict sense of these words. I first asked myself: is this a vocation and.p The intimacy and secret of my life "How does one become a philosopher in the intimacy and secret of one's life?" This is the question Marianne Alphant addressed to me. as himself. if so. As for extending the religious sense of vocation to profane purI . does it apply to me? Vocation. Philosophy and vocation Becoming-a-philosopher. to call. signifies that all vocations are addressed to the individual. becoming-a-philosopher appeared to me in effect and precisely as the secret and intimacy of my life. called by his name. is a name "given to those who 'feel called.'" writes Catherine Clement: "110care. according to its original religious meaning. in its apres-coup.l and to others. 2 How I Became a Philosopher suits, it designates less the event of a call than the existence of a gift. One thus speaks of the vocations of musicians, of writers, of artists who devote their life to a special gift-in the sense of being something rare. In the philosophical vocation-if such a thing exists-there does not seem to be this dimension of specialty. no one is devoted to philosophy in particular; all of us could be devoted to philosophy, which would immediately constitute a gift, precisely, common to all The philosophical vocation cannot be a determination of such and such individual in particular. All of us, precisely insofar as we form a we, would be devoted in potential to philosophy, in a way that is not the case for other kinds of knowing. And, reciprocally, though we know certain people are gifted in poetry, drawing, or music, it seems more difficult to say that someone "has a gift for philosophy. " If there are people more particularly "devoted" to philosophy, this would be, then, insofar as they are capable of making the passage to the act from a common potential. This is the first reason why I gave to this lecture, which I dedicate to the memory of Gerard Granel, the title Passer a l'acte. Because it is here that the individuality of the vocation is marked: in the singularity of the passage to the act of a common gift, the philosopher would, like a monk, essentially be the individual singularity of a name. But how could this happen? If it is as a calling, from who orfrom whatwould such a calling come? And from what circumstances would such a call come to pass and "pass to the act," if it does not issue from a special gift? Philosophizing through acting For philosophy, more than for any other profane activity, one tends to understand vocation in a religious sense, insofar as philosophy through acting, as the call of a task, should always be, in the whole of its being, and through all the points of its existence, in accord with its philosophical "vocation," right down to the "intimacy and secret" of its existence, even as this intimacy and this secret. How I Became a Philosopher 3 In fact, this inscription of the philosophical at the heart of the very intimacy of the individual is what is testified to by the life and by the death of that proto-philosopher Socrates-with that sacrificial dimension which is undoubtedly part of an existence completely devoted to thought. The singularity of Socrates' existence, his individuality, was precisely Anytus' accusation, before the trial that would condemn him. But this inscription of the philosophical at the heart of individuality only makes sense insofar as it is indissociably and exemplarily tied to the destiny of this other individuality that constitutes the City. this is what Socrates testifies to and in a way institutes in the course of his trial and during the weeks between the pronouncement of the verdict and his execution-as reported in Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. I believe that in order to more closely consider the incommensurable inaugural impact of the philosophical individuality of Socrates, model of all philosophical existence, we must today appeal to the concept of psychic and collective individuation, as forged by Gilbert Simondon. The existential dimension of all philosophy, without which philosophy would lose all credit and sink into scholastic chatter, must be analyzed through the question of the relation of the I and the we, in which consists this psychic and collective individuation. I and we in the process ofindividuation That man, as Aristotle says, is a political animal means that I am not human except insofar as I belong to a social group. This sociality is the framework of a becoming: the group, and the individual in that group, never cease to seek out their path. This search constitutes human time. And if the time of the I is certainly not the time of the we, it takes place within the time of the we, which is itself conditioned by the time of the Is of which it is composed. What Simondon calls individuation intimately ties together these two dimensions of the temporality of the political animal. 4 How I Became a Philosopher Individuation is not individualization. Individualization is the result of individuation, which is itself a process, through which diversity in general, that diversity which I am and equally the diversity which we are, tends to unify and, through that, tends towards the in-divisibility of the in-dividual, that is, its pure adequation to itself. Now, the I can only individuate itself through its contribution to the individuation of the group that says we, that is, to the cohesion of that group: this is, firstly, what Simondon's concept teaches and formalizes. But, secondly, it teaches that the tendency toward in-dividuation is asymptotic: I tend to become in-divisible, but I never quite get there. I tend to become myself as indivisible, as pure unity, identity, but I never cease to contradict myself because, in myself, individuating myself in the group that individuates itself through me, I never cease to find myself other than myself I never cease to find myself divided, while at the same time the group alters and divides itself-and it does this because a process of individuation is structurally incapable ofcompletion. From out of this double constraint comes the temporality of individuation. In effect, if every I is inscribed in the we that constitutes it, and that it constitutes, if the I and the we are two faces ofthe same process ofindividuation, at the core of which develops their tendency to become-indivisible, ceaselessly projecting their accomplished unity, this projection is never concretized except by default [par defaut], in other words by ceaselessly deferring this completion which, if realized, would be the end of the process of individuation or, in other words, the end of the individual. Having become himself, completed, no longer changing, a finished individual, achieved, he would be without future. The end is, then, since it can never be realized, ceaselessly fictioned. This is true of the psychic individual that is the I just as much as 3 it is of the collective individual that is the we. lt is insofar as they are structurally incomplete and thus fictioned that the I and we are temporal-and this is why they constitute histories in the course of which things come to pass and events happen. The I and the we are two phases of the one process, in the first right up until the end. or. in individuating the we together.How I Became a Philosopher 5 place because they share the same preindividual funds. inaugurates the philosophical attitude that necessarily founds all philosophy. you and I separately. therefore. law. The nonknowledge of individuation and the beginning of philosophizing through acting It is within the framework of such a process that. This is the condition ofthe we. this end is also. an injinitization. philosophy. he links his individual destiny to collective destiny: right up to his death. it will have to have succeeded in you-but not at all in the same manner. and. that is. that which constitutes for us a preindividual fund. thanks to the potentials it harbors. I am in the process of individuating myself: individuating myself means seeking to constitute the symbolic coherence of my utterances. in Greek. However. dunameis. etcetera. When Crito proposes that he escape. which is at the same time the end ofhis individuation and the beginning of the we that is philosophy. we participate as well in the individuation of that which ties us: language. through the intermediary of the stock of preindividuaL reaLity that the individuaL contains. because . and it is what develops "potentials. and therefore to the extreme. because what I am in the course of telling you I understand and interpret as some thing that you understand as some OTHER thing. But I will only succeed in individuating myself ifI succeed in making you individuate yourselves with me. If my individuation succeeds. by tying his death to the City in a certain manner. Socrates. Now. in all his activities. which constitute a transindividual horizon. as an exemplary relation of the I and the we." powers. Socrates participates in the individuation of the City. and this is what is interesting. 4 At the very moment I speak to you. Socrates refuses. Participation [in the social]. for the individual. and also you and I insofar as we form a group. is the fact ofbeing an eLement in a much vaster individuation. and precisely as unachievable. without transforming it. and individuate in a we. In that regard. as Nietzsche said." This is his genius. writes Simondon. either it is necessary "to bring the city around [to my point of view] by persuasion. his children would become orphans-Socrates' children are the City's children. a posterity-even if not. We cannot. in the habitual sense of the term. a kleos. which is philosophy through acting. this seizing is thus at the margins of knowledge. insofar as it is always at the same time individuation of an I and individuation of a we. he says. It is impossible to "know" individuation. It is better they become orphans of Socrates than of their own city.5 And this is why. as it were "in life and in death. this death has the legacy of an obligation: that of continuing to interpret the laws of the City beyond the death of Socrates. we can only individuate. to the death. without pursuing this individuation. this means it is impossible to constatively objectify what individuation is. Socrates' death remains incomplete-charged with "potentials. through the existential singularity of a philosophical individuality. and. know individuation. individuate ourselves. philosophy as the discourse ofthe philosopher is always par excellence the discourse ofan individuation that. as Plato will incorrectly try to demonstrate. just as much as from that death. before they are Socrates' children. Now. or to do what it commands. properly speaking. a death that becomes also a kind of survival. philosophy is always the philosophy of a philosopher. he goes on. the first question posed by the philosopher is "who?" This means that at the end of the day. unfolds within its OWN PARTICULAR LIMITS. an immortality." upholding its laws without reserve. and this theoria is always also a praxis-failing which it is . But this also means that the discourse of individuation is performative (in Austin's sense):6 philosophical saying is necessarily also a doing. In contrast to science. This is why Socrates' thought is a nonknowledge. for example in inaugurating thereby a new attitude." So.6 How I Became a Philosopher if he did. precisely. and the whole individual history of a philosopherthe question of the truth is that of the truth ofthe origin. at least at its beginning. So philosophy is essentially. in its properly philosophical form. but of the truth as such: a way of living. a search for the origin. It is an experience not only of mathematical.How I Became a Philosopher 7 nothing but chatter. if not in the truth (which would evidently be an illusion). in the call or ordeal of the truth such that it is not reducible to any particular activity. The question of the origin and the desire for knowledge The question of the origin is what constitutes the whole of human individuation. of dying. at least in the question of the truth. which exposes itself for the first time. and as a truth ofthe impossible. To articulate his existence and his thought in a manner such that they don't contradict each other: this is a particular experience of the impossible. the question of the true origin. which is. This is what Blanchot says in reference to Freud: Freud more or less says that all the questions impulsively posed by children serve as relays for the one they do not pose. the whole of desire: the whole of human being insofar as it is essentially desiring. a philosophical life ought to be exemplary: the philosophy of a philosopher only makes sense when it is illustrated through his way of life-that is. even though it is also of the truth. what links the I and the we. that is. straightaway-this is also the beginning of the history of philosophy. and it is in this sense that one could say that every human being is philosophizing-insofar as it is always and from the beginning unsettled about its origin. in Meno. The question of philosophy is first of all that of action." Now. which is the . which thus constitutes what Blanchot will call "the question of the whole. physical. As a consequence of this question of the articulation of the I and the we of the philosophers. as the question of the origin ofvirtue and of its exemplarity. artistic truth. as we all are insofar as we are. Such is the meaning of the question of becoming-a-philosopher posedfrom temporality understood as the process ofindividuation. and I have always thought. the analysand acts out. In the same way. and the question that poses itseljfrom the moment when one questions desire. that I am devoted as we all are to philosophy. and this is a noticeable shift. says Freud. or the question of the whole? The question of the origin is immediately an erotic or libidinal question: it is. even though passer it l'acte is also a psychoanalytic expression. which does not cease to question. Desire is always desire for knowledge precisely in the sense in which I have posited that humanity. to know if we are not thus devoted insofar as we become. And from that point of view. a failure where. But the question would nevertheless also be. I think. and this itself as the passage to the act of a potential philosophical vocation common to all the Is that form the we which we are and which we become. In Symposium Plato has Diotima say that knowledge is by nature radically erotic. we interrogate ourselves about everything. and that this is why philosophy is the love of knowledge but insofar as knowledge is essentially a lack-just as every object of desire is a lack. This is so. when one asks of desire what it is. This ac- . the question ofdesire-the question posed by desire. literally speaking. as a desiring being. "instead of remembering" (in the therapeutic framework of the transfer of desire). I do not think of myself as having personally a particular philosophical vocation: I think I have the vocation the whole world has for philosophy. in order to sustain and advance the passion of the question. The passage to the act as transgression The question of philosophy in potential is that of the passage to the act of philosophy.8 How I Became a Philosopher question of the origin. It designates. in the course of treatment. but all questions are directed toward one question alone-the central question. is always potentially philosophizing. How I Became a Philosopher 9 tion can designate suicide (and Xenophon describes the death of Socrates as a kind of suicide) but also. essentially through a recollection. leads us also to Marx's words. And. of which Socrates will be the index and the protophilosophical infinitization. the passage to the act ofphilosophy would have a relation to limits. I did not even finish high school. according to which it is necessary to pursue the interpretation of being through its transformation-in becoming. this passage to the act of philosophy as politics. and in which consists all self-interrogation of the origin. the question ofthe origin opens itself as the question of reminiscence. we will see that there is also. At the origin of philosophy. which it is tempting to assimilate to the operation of a transfer of desire-permitting the overcoming of a blockage that is a kind of neurotic dimension ofthe City-by a methodical and passionate practice of logos (as dialectic) through which the potential philosopher becomes an actual philosopher. Reminiscence I have not always been philosophizing "through acting"-if I ever have: up to the age of twenty-six I had not ever philosophized. Now. more generally. So. One day. one form or another of transgression. this passage to the act would have a relation to individuation. indefinitely interpretable. and as a vocation for transgression. in a certain way to the limits ofthe law. revealed itself almost as a necessity-a necessity literally inevitable and inescapable. the question of the origin was also and first of all presented to me as this question of the origin. as already mentioned-being taken in its political sense. when it comes to philosophy. nor the last) would be "origin. nevertheless. on the one hand a neutralization ofaction." And. with Plato. with that. Now. a radical experience of limits of which the first name (but not the only one. where philosophical performativity founds saying as doing. on the other hand. this vocation common to all the beings we are in potential. which then became . they appeared to me as such. because I came to place the accident at the very heart of philosophy. at least forced into the background of my existence. I was extremely uncomfortable. and this was precisely the posture of reminiscence-beyond simple recollection. but also because this way was constituted through a very singular intimacy. which only came to me as it led me into the philosophical attitude. even though these moments concerned an origin: the origin of my passage to the philosophical act. In fact. and precisely as a secret-all of which took place by accident. 2002. not only because in itself the question is enormous. of Platonic anamnesis. the question ofthe . The necessity of telling the truth When.10 How I Became a Philosopher the properly philosophical question of reminiscence. and it is that of which I have had a second reminiscence. to forget. quite by accident. Marianne Alphant's question put me back (beginning October 10. When Marianne Alphant proposed to me that I speak of the intimate and secret way in which I became a philosopher. plunged me back into moments that I had. of a kind. for the first time. in everyday life. if not effaced from memory. when I commenced reflecting on it) in a philosophical posture in which it is not easy to remain. but which inscribed itself in another genre of passage to the act. Reminiscence was at the origin of my entry to philosophy. in such a way as to be essentially tied to a very existential experience of reminiscence." but this also concerns the whole of philosophy. which one has a tendency. the questions of origin and reminiscence presented themselves to me immediately as the question of the truth. and perhaps as its unsolvable secret. on the occasion of this reflection on the intimacy of my becoming-a-philosopher that brought me today before you. This question concerning the intimacy of my becoming-a-philosopher led me to a return to myself. which is what still holds me back from speaking of myself in terms of a philosophical "vocation. But it has certainly touched me. I decided to turn and squarely confront this question of the truth. and as such it is immediately the question of truth itself Reflecting on the opportunity to respond to Marianne Alphant's invitation. such as I encountered it at a moment in my life in an almost palpable way. between 1978 and 1983-years obviously preceded by a passage to the act. The question having been suddenly posed to me of my philosophical "vocation. then in the Muret Detention Center.How I Became a Philosopher II origin is the question of the truth of the origin." inasmuch as such a vocation exists. that is. as it had accidentally proposed itself. in one way or another. of which I nevertheless bear the weight). perhaps. in a certain way (and it is a heavy word. these were five years spent in philosophical practice. precisely. as one says. at least the necessity of telling the truth. in experimental phenomenology. and that I exposed myself to it. was the effect of an anamnesis produced by an objective situation in the accidental course of my existence. Of course I have in fact never really touched it. it got me thinking that it was time that I reconstitute. if not the truth. The accident consisted in five years of incarceration. which I spent in the Saint-Michel Prison in Toulouse. So. it was my duty to say. as the experience ofthe impossibility oftelling the truth other than by default. and in the attempt." the truth of my journey through the question of the truth and. Philosophizing by accident My becoming-a-philosopher through acting. and in passage to the limits of phenome- . as if it had a body. literally as if I could grab hold of it. if it has taken place. It seemed to me it was my duty. through an anamnesis. by a transgression. as the work oftime. as the fiction ofan apres-coup: in time and as time. and I believe indeed it has taken place. as far as possible. the question of the truth in the way that. to get to the bottom of "my truth. it constituted itself for me as the question of the truth oftime-it was time that I again posed the question. as endurance of the apres-coup. at the same time. One must always be ready to philosophize to the death. The apres-coup traverses and structures what those five years in prison were for me-but also the following twenty years. gives itself. an accidentality. as did Socrates. Socrates' being condemned to death is an accident that is necessary. he will make a mistake that he will have had to make. moreover. The philosophical vocation. Twenty years after my liberation. because this vocation is always that ofeveryone. But interruption and suspension. that my journey will never cease to be a circuit between "action" and its suspension by "philosophy in action" ["Philosophie en acte"] . which are also the beginning of philosophy (Socrates' daimon is the one who interrupts). with all the prob- . For example. or by accident. act and action. and to philosophize in that dying which a life is-but "a life" means here an existence and a facticity. will have been the suspension of my acts and the interruption of my actions: such is the function of prison. were for myself the occasion of a reflection on what the passage to the act is in general-and a recollection of all the acts that brought me there. Like a flying fish My incarceration in Saint Michel Prison. It would be necessary here to examine the ambiguities of the relation between these words. Socrates will make sure that it is necessary. it seems to me. if there is one. years I have consecrated to consolidating this "necessity. between writing and highly social activity. result of a passage to the act." this mistake that will have had to happen. with "everyone" forming the we that the philosopher through acting represents in individuating-by default. this question of vocation is that of a vocation by default. as in Proust.12 How I Became a Philosopher nology. following this "passage to the act" that itself had absolutely nothing to do with philosophy. But. in the future anterior of an apres-coup. which have led me today before you as before the law. where he reformulates. its material. the vegetative. and intellective souls. what Aristotle names participation in the divine.How I Became a Philosopher 13 lems posed by the translation into the Latin actus of the Greek energeia. since the time of my imprisonment-the question becoming that of the conditions of the passage from potential to act. It is sensory through acting only when it reproduces itself The rest of the time. the Aristotelian question of dunamis and energeia as the question of the in-itselfand the for-itself In that treatise Aristotle poses three types of souls. will have guided all my solitary work. it is the body that forms . as the motive and in that sense the reason of everything that moves. Aristotle explains that a sensory soul. This is what leads Hegel to say that the sensory soul is the in-itselfof the intellective soul and. in a way. meaning that it comports itself sensitively rather than intellectively. Aristotle underlines in effect that one does not see that. and what one might call emotion as desire. that is. in the case of touching. three kinds of living movement. participating in the divine. It is Aristotle who forms this couple of act and potential with which I have tried on this very day to think my own life-but which I discovered almost twenty-five years ago. and the lesson it names. which Aristotle also calls nutritive. the consideration of milieu appeared to me to be decisive. motion. reading On the Soul was decisive for thinking movement. according to three modes of animation. In this regard. in Hegel's History ofPhilosophy. sensory. is most of the time sensory in potential and not in acting. The intellective soul is most of the time only in potentiality. the relation to the immovable prime mover. it remains in the inferior mode of the vegetative soul. The same applies to the intellective or noetic soul: it is only rarely in action and remains most of the time in the sensory mode. for such a passage from potential to act. This account. it re-produces the truth." to God as the desirable par excellence. insofar as. for example. Studying the senses. and not in action. in his commentary on On the Soul. It is in action only when. which form three relations to the "immovable prime mover. Now. but this fact escapes us in the same way that "aquatic animals. I thought. and like a wall. There is always already a milieu. Or. whereas. but of which technical artifacts (consisting of things) would form another dimension. just as the senses of the sensory soul have their milieus. the milieu is brought into view. on which I meditated a great deal in my cell. There ought to be a milieu of the intellective soul. gold would be the sole being that would never be seen-it would not be a being. in the case of sight. I could not claim that I was in my cell like a fish in water. In this extraction. Aristotle does not in this treatise examine the noetic milieu (the intellective milieu). on the other hand. here. as Plato too says in the Timaeus. it is what it never sees. it appeared to me that this milieu was that of language. if the world was made of gold. . of which language (through which is produced the everyday experience of logos) would be one dimension. where I had been rendered radically deficient in the vital milieu ofthe intellective soul. it is this same possibility of the existence of such a noetic milieu. in that cell. or abstraction. Reading Aristotle. by default. is that which is structurally forgotten. also. The milieu is forgotten. because it effaces itself before that to which it gives place. philosophy consisted of considering the milieu while being able to extract oneself from it. From then on. giving place to logos (he does this. where I was like a fish out ofwater. as the element of the everyday life of the intellective soul. by default. because it is that which is most close. the milieu is what he calls the diaphane. taken hold oj. in the Analytics: such is his logic). which is to say. to its for itself From then on. but. of the supplement in general." as Aristotle says. appearing only in the occurrence of a being. but the inapparent being ofthat being. "do not notice that one wet body touches another wet body" (423ab): water is what the fish always sees. Later the milieu became for me that of the artifact. just as water is for a fish.14 How I Became a Philosopher the milieu. in the same way as a flying fish can leave the water: intermittently. And he specifies that this milieu. as the condition of passage from the potential of the intellective soul to its act. I set myself to reading Saussure and Wittgenstein. for example. " then he fOrgot it. in which case he is only pretending to search for it. From then on. or because he already knows it. I discovered-and I say this in Platonic terms but from a point of view that opposes me to Plato-that this element was the hypomnesis. site of passion. in other words. where the element. Meno responds by proposing examples of various virtues. who is on his way to the house of Protagoras to be taught virtue. as a dogmatic reprise of Meno and a simplification of the meaning of the survival of Socrates in death. whereby Socrates cannot find what he is looking for because either he does not know it. Socrates tells him this is not answering the question of knowing what virtue is as such: not through such and such particular virtue. but virtue as forming the unity of all possible virtues. So. thus the essence of virtue. as that which gives place to anamnesis. Socrates meets Meno. is always lacking. cognition is recognition. and cause offOrgetting by the soul of its knowledge of the origin. Socrates proposes to him that he first of all ask what virtue is fOr himselfi in order to know if it is truly possible to teach it. To this question of knowing what virtue is. on the one hand founds the discourse on the immortality of the soul. Phaedrus. the origin of virtue (that through which it commences). I had perhaps a chance to consider this world as does a fish flying. or the reason of the series of cases that form the examples. Hypomnesis and mortality Regarding anamnesis. It is then that Meno responds with his famous aporia. and. Socrates responds that in effect he already knew what he was looking for: he knew it at "another time. let us recall a scene from Meno. in condemning the body as a fall from the origin. a remembering-an anamnesis. and so will not recognize it if he finds it. as the framework ofartifacts fOrming relations sustaining social relations. that is. a prison of the soul.How I Became a Philosopher the world. above its element-an elementary milieu totally constituted by supplements. the unity of this series. on the other hand. opposes anamnesis to hypomnesis: . which was in its turn a passage from po- . who is charged with this distribution. only exists by default. which from then on afflicts we mortals. Hypomnesis is here. of mortals and of mortality properly speaking-of which Protagoras (in the dialogue that bears his name) proposes a genesis. for which Prometheus tries to compensate by stealing fire. an accident proceeding precisely from a forgetting: Zeus. to which Plato will later oppose the anamnesis of the origin. and. fruits of a mistake by the Titans. generator of prostheses and artifices making up for a lack of origin. with the same defects as the body. an attempt. which is also that of the fUndamentally accidental character of mortals. forgets to save a quality for man. is for Plato what renders the soul forgetful. Epimetheus. in a much earlier dialogue. and accentuates the forgetting ofthe origin into which the soul has fallen in its descent into the body. is equally the origin of hypomnesis. and in the same way a prison. through it. to make up for the lack of a quality. the dunameis. in other words the default oforigin. Plato had Protagoras undertake a discourse on prostheticity in general and on the defects of the body. replacing true memory with artificial memory. The extra-ordinary in the absence of world A passage to the act plunged me accidentally into a profoundly philosophical situation. of technics as the dead simulacrum of life-as-immortality. having asked Prometheus to bring into the day the living beings that are not immortals.16 How 1 Became a Philosopher the latter. Now. the figure of artifice. to distribute to the living. This accidental forgetting. in vain. without qualities. technics-a theft that is a passage to the act. very generally. and man. the myth of the fault of Epimetheus says that at the origin there is only an originary default oforigin. he becomes. that is. as a technics of memory (and he is concerned here essentially with the writing of books). hands him all the qualities. In opposition to the metaphysics arising in the Phaedrus. This was the beginning of an experience of the extra-ordinary." that the "exterior milieu" is constituted as irreducible-and thus I was testing a Husserlian lesson9 but. the world reigned in my cloister like "the absence of all bouquet. But finds in their learned lack the self-same taste. and as a necessary default [un defaut qu'il faut]-rather than as a lack [manque]. the remains. but as that which is always in default. For five years I had this experience of the extra-ordinary because I was confronted with the limits of the conditions of intellective life. the artifices of which the world consists and through which it finds its consistence. But it is also and just as much in its absence. remaining here in my cell and under their mnesic shape. It is also the reversal of the natural attitude in Husserl's phenomenology. I was discovering that there is no interior milieu. it appeared to me to constitute those conditions of experience that cannot be found in experience. groping.!2 As the days passed. this verse by Mallarme: On no fruits here does my hunger feast. of his famous daimon.!O Absent. and in the most intimate and secret hollow [creux] of the "interior milieu. more generally. . I believe the experience of the extra-ordinary is essential to philosophy: it is the meaning of Socrates' shamanism."!! Mter a few months of incarceration I had written. as an ordinarily invisible milieu suddenly considered as such-but in the night of my ignorance. as we will see. being held above the ordinary social surface of those conditions. the defaults. because they condition it. in a sense in a hollow. I almost grabbed hold of the extra-ordinary. I no longer lived in the world." my "interior milieu" took on that incommensurable depth and weight sought after by mystics and. 8 Deprived of an "exterior milieu.r How I Became a Philosopher tential to act-a reminiscence through interruption of the action and suspension of the conditions of ordinary life. but only. by ascetics. which presented itself here not only as a default. above the small table where I worked and ate. a contrario. but rather in the absence of a world. inversely. just as for example Meno's slave figures the geometric ideal in the sand: by relying on the hypomneses ofbooks read and words written. and even insurmountable). this reactivation of the world was not possible other than via the intermediary of that which would permit me in a way to figure this world ideally. This exteriority was irreducible. and my secret. but it was within my power to reconstitute it. at once . through hypomnesic traces. Such were my freedom. of a work of reminiscence. finally. each day. Because the world in which the exterior milieu consisted had not completely disappeared in its very exteriority (or I would have gone mad): I reconstituted it. Because. My freedom. there had been nothing else: I was woven only out of these remains. secreting around me an intimate hypomnesic milieu (which was nevertheless already on the way to becoming public). but. and the necessity of the world From these remains of the world. for want ofthese remains producing a default. being in default.18 How I Became a Philosopher And.13 that is. This was certainly a reminiscence or a reactivation from out of those remains. the difference between the two being an illusion-obviously necessary. through what I would much later name tertiary retentions. which means I could not reach (myself in) it (the interior is nothing without the exterior. in fact. I gathered material for a reminiscence of the necessity of the world-and. the exterior milieu being interrupted and suspended. somewhat like Husserl's analysis of the origin of geometry. I had the presence of mind to begin to read and write. Very quickly. of its properly irreducible character. but rather its reduction to an exterior milieu itselfreduced to an absolute minimum of that which remained of it in my memory. my intimacy. in the properly philosophical sense of the word. hypomneses. in reality there was for me no interior milieu. constituting my interminable recollection via the fabric of my memories-what Husserl called secondary retentions-and which would become for me the material not only of a desperate recollection but also of an anamnesis. my philosophy. over the years and beyond the period of my incarceration. one suffers terribly: one discovers that. as an almost palpable milieu (a little like the way in which a hand placed outside the window during high-speed driving causes air to be perceived as a liquid). most of the time. or the book one writes)-now. I would have become insane or totally asocial.How I Became a Philosopher secret. or other than that toward which one deliberately heads (such as the book one reads. I even avoided." a pure fabric ofhypomneses. one is much more free. One perceives with astonishment that. the "promenades" that broke the silence I had learned to love. in that cell. then. because I had transferred them to my unceasing effort to consider the element while being myself maintained outside of it-through fabricating that other element which was in the process of becoming "my philosophy. actual forms of being-inthe-world. in fact. these retentions produce protentions that are desires for actions. Because if we are constituted by retentions that remain within us in the absence of the world. or rather devours. I had found the way to suspend these protentions. I ended up being afraid of (while also desiring) these micro-interruptions to the silence of which asceticism consists. to be "free" is a suffering. as much as possible. When one begins to systematically practice the experience of one's preindividuallived milieu (having become accessible to oneself beyond the context of the world). it produces itself not as liberty but precisely as alienation. It is suffering because. having thus totally suspended all relation to a meaningful milieu other than that which one carries and reactivates within oneself. of which I daily deposited traces on paper. day-release. and yet already publishable: I constituted a world that would become. when the time comes. cryptic. like a snail sliming along a wall. if one is all of a sudden confronted with microinterruptions to this asceticism. paradoxically. or at least that liberty is much . The fragility of freedom Prison is asceticism without end-with the exception of microinterruptions such as visits and. If this had not happened. I didn't like it anymore. almost as if it spoke by it- . appearing then essentially as fragility. the other of myself. I lived only in language. my melete. This culture. which I have named. after Epictetus. More generally. literally. as if I had been weighed down with what Socrates had ascribed as the task of the maieutician. in abandoning its communicative function. that which must be made the object of the whole of one's care. I spoke only very rarely. throughout those five years. as if it turned itself over to its vocation of signifying. It happened with an absolute necessity. of a veritable cult. which came to form veritable reading methods. the other that I carried in me. The silence out of which a voice arises My melete was in reality an ensemble of disciplines. my melete came from readings leading to prolonged writing exercises in different modes.20 How I Became a Philosopher more accessible there. usually for half an hour. for example. and finally consisted of writing. of a culture. or rather as significance. opened itself fully to its significance. I had learned to love the silence through which I could listen to what always arose so long as I knew how to wait: an other voice. as what is intrinsically fragile. or reading and rereading a prose text. not so as to learn it by heart but to understand it. Language. suddenly proliferating. in which these remains of the world were reassembled: thus was produced reminiscence. but the other me. then transformed into commentaries. I would. begin each day by reading Mallarme-I arose as soon as I awoke. sometimes to the point of madness. and uniquely in written language. a soliloquy in which it was not me who was speaking. Reading a poem. I listened and tried to take note of everything I heard or read. which I became. much purer. which I called myself-an-other [moi-I'autreJ. which consisted in a process by which the texts read were catalogued. In the evening. It signified. I read novels. It made signs. to avoid those uncontrollable protentions that would occur as the waking reveries of the morning. I did not like it. a passion and a question that were also a state of exception and an origin: ours. When that language began to "speak. those whom one sees everywhere these days in the streets. then. It was a kind of passion. in a context where. This impersonal voice. was the language of pure significance of which Blanchot spoke regarding Char in The Beast ofLascaux. it was hypomnesically constituted by default. In that soliloquy of extremities. understanding it in order to criticize dialectic as Plato wanted to establish it-it was first ofall a matter offighting against the bad soliloquy. as the experience of a silence in which a voice arose. on the verge of talking to myself . as one says. and it was in these exceptional conditions that I encountered the Greek passion for language and the question of logos that arises there. how I undertook to practice philosophy. dialectic as the dialogue of the soul with itself. I am obviously tempted to speak of "vocation": it resembled what the tradition considers to be that of which a vocation consists. if not a system of cretinization. I had the feeling of entering into a state of ultralucidity. language that is rarely produced in the dialectic of a dialogue between two. as a soliloquy sustained by the hypomneses of writing. anamnesically reconstituting language as that which does not allow itself to be understood except through the trial of a cloistered asceticism and an absolute solitude. overcome by the harshness of life. But I did this on the basis of frequent preparatory readings of Plato and his discourse on dianoia. by this default that the hypomnesic technique of writing is. unfortunately for us." to signify. This was. today. insofar as we philosophize today. a default of origin-as Husserl glimpsed at the end of his life. as well. I compared my position with Husserl's thoughts on soliloquy in Logical Investigations. in the social dialectic. for me-rigorously experimenting with dian 0 ia. from that point of view. which has almost always become. those who have lost their spirit. It was a matter of a voice [vocare].How I Became a Philosopher 21 self. Much later. talk to themselves. pure chatter. But I came to the position that this originary Greek passion was. the hell lived by those who. and. in potential or in act. which was not the language of communication. of the suspension. in a way. therefore. the paper. I found myself in a state of unimaginable excitement. methodical. who accompanied me throughout this adventure. by chance.22 How I Became a Philosopher but just before that point. I discovered this philosophical theory and practice by chance and by accident. and to an "apodictic" vocation or pretension. and that he had the impression of witnessing a perfectly singular experience. thanks to the books. empirically and savagely. I was able to enter philosophy properly speaking by accident. hypomnesis was my safeguard. but at the same time he also found himself at times disarmed: my situation often made me resistant to traditional readings of what he rightly liked to call "the tradition. which left me the legacy of that fortunate heritage. of final ends and profound roots. . of the thesis of the world." Then. ifyou will by the chance of everything that I will shortly call the already-there. When I discovered it formulated and theorized by phenomenology. struggles that would prove one can conduct a politics ofthe passage to the philosophical act. To give place: The invention of locality I thus discovered what one calls in philosophy the phenomenological epokhe--the suspension of the world. the spirit of the laws of the French Republic meant there was a library in this old prison. was also enthused. long before studying it in the works of Husserl: I deduced it from the situation. to a practice that was reasoned. of the spontaneous belief in the existence of the world. but also thanks to the laws ofthe City. notably by philosophers. for which I here give thanks as a child cherishing its mother. on the edge of that quasi-madness of extreme thoughts. thanks to Gerard Granel himself. I was able to pass from the empirical practice of the epokhe. I believe that Granel. I practiced it. to the knowledge of writing and reading taught to me by the Republic. which constitutes in Husserl's language the natural attitude-what I previously called ordinary life. that is. through this chance issuing from struggles that were conducted for literacy. in its guise and according to its place: as originary default of origin. on the other side of deixis. to invent it. the here-and-now. Deixis is. in the years to come.How 1 Became a Philosopher 23 These laws and that which is today. So. inasmuch as a locality is always artifactually and prosthetically constituted-and. In the impossibility. without hereand-now. through the state. reconstituted by and in that which remained of a "milieu" despite everything. apodictic thought. and even as default. and in its apodictic residue. by default. by the default. with Derrida. I posed the default as that which every locality expresses. which does not give itself other than through being torn from context. as such. 1 hope. but on the contrary their anamnesis." The lack. and as locality itself constituted. outside deixis. as such (a lack). my retentionalfin i- . is the inability to know how to live this absence. is rather a fault [defaut] and a necessity [il faut]. quite close to the un-world [immonde]. fighting against the finitude of my memory. it does not know how to find the learning necessitated by default. that which gives and gives place. rather than what "lacks place. that is. the that-which-is-here. in my situation then and there. outside context: outside milieu. in the suspension of the world. still preserved as their spirit will. from local determinations. it is that which shows itselfas here-and-now. against that which I later called. commenting on Husserl." which. that is. in a sense their renewal. this "learned lack. the monstrative site of what Aristotle called the tode ti. just as water is absent to a fish. for example. its locality. I found the world as irreducible locality. and. Apodictic means without deixis. The apodictic is the demonstrative. the apodictic already supposes a suspension-if not that of the world. not find their destruction. I thus passed into philosophical thought. in all circumstances. in the unsupportability of the absence of world. granting me in the end a place still. in this absence. in Greek. an ensemble ofremains that I wanted to save and that I therefore reconstituted hypomnesically. I found first an absence of world. but invisibly. that default of pronunciation which we hear in a foreign accent. in this case. at least that of its here-and-now. be apodictically demonstrated-except by default. against Plato's phantasm of pure liberty. that which nevertheless could never. an irreducibility ofdeicticity or. in Plato's absence." as Phaedo says to Socrates in prison. to the death. a necessity of the world (that which is necessary of the default). This by-default is what I experimented with through my melete and my dianoia with the Platonic hypomneses that form the Dialogues. I believe that to speak of the necessity of the tie that the default is. This is philia as love. where I finally found what I would call the virtue of prison.24 How I Became a Philosopher tude. to refuse to accept its being-by-default or. what gets metaphysics underway. to put it another way. is revealed his immense impact after the Platonic evasion that betrays Socrates. which is piety. such as in the Symposium. The idiom of that which signifies The laws of the City always have this character of locality that marks them as laws of this city. in his absences. in effect. I gave place to another place. and anamnesis to hypomnesis. which nevertheless does not at all mean that Socrates speaks of the immortality of the soul: the Phaedo concerns on the contrary the acceptance of mortality. dare I say it: there. With these remains. without doubt. I produced a new world. that is. to all default posed as alienation-and I did it while not ceasing to read Plato. to dogmatize the immortality of the soul. I discovered. and which unfortunately consists in opposing the soul to the body. hypomnesically transformed. This is. of the City: right up to the hemlock. and against which I struggled and fought throughout those five years. through the apodictic path. which means also and even initially accepting the laws of the City. its being-in-becoming. opposed to all alienation and all default. index of contingency and acciden- . its" it must' ["il faut"]' is the heart of the question of Socrates' Apology (the default is first of all mortality) and of Crito (where the law is necessary for me to be condemned). to put it another way. even the Phaedo--because that also has to do with "dying and wanting to be dead. How I Became a Philosopher tality. not as an unformed. The world. I am already within that jurisdiction: I always belong to a here and now. no matter what. something always happened and. which are themselves traces of that which is in default because it is no longer there-it is no longer there as that which must be there. in that its significance comes solely from signifying and making signs. by my "secondary retentions." and maintained through the tertiary retentions of my reading and of my writing. that is. of the desiring and signifying beings that we are. even alone or silently. mortal-ity as ethos ofall mortals. but in which took place an intense signifying production. the locality that for example ties me. There was the most local level of the idiomacity of my soliloquy. and thus I never finished becoming. And all those retentions. Whether speaking. and in default as locality. precisely as that which makes sense. to a locality. nor simply the sum of physical laws constituting things and beings. precisely insofar as it signi-fies and can only do so from its local-ity. inherited from the already-there of my knowledge held in memory. I belong to local-ity by default. And there was the level of what I call the most-ample-locality. amorphous exterior. even. . which I cultivated and maintained through the artificial retentional milieu of my hypomneses. or writing. being-there--present suddenly and completely differently that which is no longer there: the world. locality. through which language does not cease to reinvent itself. constituting in its isolated facticity a here and now where. a profusion of new enunciations. that is. because it is still my language that constitutes me. in the first place in the irreducibility of the idiomatic character of language. insofar as it is idiomatic. finally. From then on I tried to isolate the degrees of localities by diverse imaginary variations and signifjing practices. The factical world was my whole world. more than ever. idiom. Even when imprisoned. This contingency is that which marks itself and remarks itself. from which fact proceeds the Athenian decision to condemn Socrates to death by hemlock. This was because I remained temporal in remaining idiomatic. vague. which substituted for absent things insofar as they themselves give support. 26 How I Became a Philosopher between beasts and immortals. the use of one's time. of the default that the question of prosthesis poses. one's home. where idiomaticity would be the symbolic but also artifactual elementarity of that supplementarity. is in all its diverse facets the question ofsignificance and of its combat with insignificance. beginningfrom the first day ofmy imprisonment. dare I say it. that which ties all those questions that invaded me in the immobility and silence ofsoliloquy. and to begin building. to Lascaux-the giving-place that I share with Lascaux. in effect. and in truth has it ceaselessly. and which changes everything about things. . with itself. but also still unthought networks of new modes of "deterritorializing. Everyone has had this experience. The world is being-toward-the-world-I then began to enter into Being and Time. or which disappears. as well as being that which is framed and woven by these practices. in other words. All locality would in fact be constituted from such prostheses. And in fact I was only able to hold-and continue to have a place-through constituting and reconstituting daily the artificial locality of my writing and my reading. Between these extremities lie innumerable variations forming so many modes of constitution of the we where we are as 1. which appears or does not appear. and of substitution. in things and between things. one's friends. and so on. Because finally. and so on-and consequently of articulating and arranging. a soli-loquy [solilogue] with Heidegger-and this world is the fabric or the framework of signifying practices." This is what led me to the question of the default in general but. more particularly. the question of the artifact. idiolects and dialects. Significance and insignificance The conditions of the constitution of the world appear in the absence of the world in particular as the impossibility of choosing--one's clothes. and the experience of this intimate and secret difference. From then on I adopted a principled attitude. even oppressive. who have transformed myself since yesterday. to allow myselfto individuate. this is so only to the degree that it produces itself-which is what permits one to flee it.How I Became a Philosopher whether consciously or not: one desires or waits for or considers an object. as living memory. precisely. being there. In prison I permanently and in a kind of pure way had the experience of the remains that framed me and that in the end I am. becomes indifferent. or the being. and since I am alone with it and nothing around us has changed. But if others can cover over this experience. In undertaking this ordeal I came to understand that there is no abstract significance-that is. while around me everything is still as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow. that which. it was significant. it is in me and by me that everything passes and is passed. in fact. according to which my task consisted offinding significance in the insignificant. then the object. today. it is not the thing that is insignificant because. effaces itself. when I do not want to allow myself to be altered. tomorrow. other me). I cannot ignore it: it is I. such as I articulate and arrange them. I do not want to become myself-another. a good. outside of a signifying material and a signifying practice-and that I alone am responsible for whether there is signification or not. disgusting. or in themselves. indifferent. as happens in the ordinary world. laden with meaning and. And I understood that significance demands frequentation. but the relation I have or rather that I do not have with those things. yesterday. It was posed there before me and as the very experience of the me: I could not avoid noting that. in that sense. I posed in principle that there is nothing insignificant other than myself when. and the very opposite of what it was-at least insofir as I have not understood that precisely from these ficts comes this other fict that there is nothing insignificant in itse/j and that what can be insignificant are not the things themselves." never fails to become. through the signifying of the other (other thing. is very prominent and consistent. eclipsed-nothing. a being. "significant. totally insignificant. In prison. the . the good. instructed by the material of my past life. for example. in which one does not have a sustained relation where one individuates oneself in a language that one does not speak. From then on it was a question of learning to cultivate high expectations. The alter in the ego Thus was constituted the question of my reminiscence. make signs to me.How I Became a Philosopher frequenting of a practice. 14 It is thus that I came to impose upon myself and to systematically practice my disciplines. with no way out except that of finding in myself the resources that would give me access to such questions. But this quite clearly had another source. a protention. my melete-where I discovered that significance has a part essentially tied to memory. of finding myself completely removed. books. the "significants"-the utterances. more generally. and as the question of signifying practices that it was a matter of reinventing . that they can signi-fy. immobilized and imprisoned in that cell. that of the memorious reconsideration of that which brought me there. and finding there a sense of things and the desire for this world? It is out of this first question that the question of reminiscence emerged. and that this was what Saussure had got bogged down in-and with him the whole of structuralism. have found it so insignificant. in passing to the act. whose OfGrammatology I read avidly. and all that which frames the unity of human milieus-only appear to me as echoes of my memory. One does not arrive at the significance of a language. objects and. It is insofar as they respond to an expectation of my memory. which gives itself only to the patient. I encountered. but by a wholly other path. no more than one arrives at the significance of a music that one does not frequent assiduously-like the poetry of Mallarme. objets d'art. the enterprise of Jacques Derrida. leaving me with a unique question: how could I at that point no longer have loved the world. make signs. signs and symbols. that I had taken the risk. I understood also that the opposing couple of signifier and signified was not the right question. the access to the "transcendental" subject. which I called texts in the sense of fabrics [tissus]. into a-significance. But I anticipated it above all as the danger to come from refound liberty or. presently alone. and that they are the supports of making-world. And it is to the extent that the world appears insignificant to me. on the contrary. of practices in signifYingfields. in a sense that is thus not only linguistic but grammatical. that other being itself inaccessible without signifying practices: outside of the . solely responsible for my past and my future. that is. rip. especially. which. repetitions. and in a way does not appear to me at all. more or less perceptible. So. decay: I can perfectly well enter into an attitude of inattention to the world. appeared therefore impossible without the other. a disposition. and that if I did not want to tumble into madness-that is. that I am myseiflnsignificant-and I know this. myself. and I suffer from it: difficult freedom. This is how I understood that signifying practices are forms of discipline. the goal of all epokhe. almost every time I left my cell (and first of all in myself). I then understood that signifying practices constitute frameworks. and I constantly felt it as the danger facing me. at the limit. observe. which is much worse that insignificance-it was necessary that I impose on myselfa melete. to the point of passing to the act. retentional. everything I lacked sent me back to those practices. or. to occupy a position and make myself unavailable to that to which I opposed myself. The fabric of signifying practices that forms the material of the world. finding myself. all of a sudden. Isolated. I very often saw this possibility of decay in prison. and thus of insignificance. and note how I was able to adopt an attitude of availability. I was able to experiment. can obviously weaken. no longer had any material support. and how I was able to make myself available or unavailable depending on those practices that I did or did not take up in the diverse signifying fields that were mine. from disincarceration. rather. With nothing there for me. even of dereliction. which organizes and programs all social behavior.How I Became a Philosopher from out of the insignificance into which I had fallen. not only as an ensemble of rules and maxims but. In this remainder that in prison cannot cease. but the alter without the ego. concretized through tertiary retention: traces.3° How I Became a Philosopher outside. Because what shined brilliantly in the absence of the world was the alterity ofthe other. but ofwhich I am first constituted. in a kind of originary apres-coup. and that inevitably means also hypomnesically already-there. when time no longer seems to flow-space appeared to me. and which I formalized for the first time in 1980 through the concept of idiotext. through them. rather. to myalterity. And that meant I had to learn to think before the opposition of space and time. to constitute time or. is also an individuation of the we in which is constituted the alter without the ego. can only be the recollection of my retentional already-there. Thus there was no inside. To my individuation. Much later I discovered that this question of the already-there. and to which the outside gives place. that others in the world are there to give me access. to my future. the alterity of an other that was not constituted from me. little by little. and which. I cannot find the virtue ofnecessity other than in the accidents and the contingencies that befall me: virtue is outside of me. as becoming-other. and in the signifying soli-Iogue I tried to maintain with myself. however. still there by default. It is my . Significance and locality form. hypomnesically supported. I am essentially my outside. was also the question of what Simondon called the preindividual. This outside was just as much the question of the already-there. hypomnesic productions. My individuation. to reconstitute it. it was the alterity that. It was no longer a matter of reaching an alter ego. a single question. which is something spatial. which I have learned to formulate through Heidegger. and memorially. but it is therefore also-and immediately-tempora~since it is constituted in the already. appeared vita~ and which I had to find in myselfin altering myself through those practices by which I grasped. ultimately. as "myself-an-other" ["moi-autre'1 rather than "my-self" ["moi-meme'l. even when there is apparently no longer anything else-that is. insofar as it is charged with protentions. contrary to the insignificance that it ordinarily seemed to constitute. forgetting them. I had no philosophy. and true politics. to the degree that they are inevitably on the side ofthe interpretation ofthe world and not ofchanging the state ofthings. philosophy in action(s). The material of spirit-before prison Before I arrived in prison. in the sense that I knew practically nothing about it. When I say that the necessity of milieu-that I have to invent it and that I experiment by default with it-cannot be found except by myself I say the same thing as when I speak ofsignificance and insignificance. that is. I therefore considered myself an anti-idealist and. that was materialist philosophy. who uncovered in any element whatever of daily life its signifying force in the world. Having met with this realization. a text that was crucial for me in relation to this question. I can only find necessity in a milieu. .How I Became a Philosopher 31 outside. The extra-ordinariness of the world is what is found by one who knows how to go beyond the insignificance of things. as such. I believed that philosophers were necessarily on the wrong side. that was politics. but nevertheless I had a position. which was constituted politically--I had been a member of the Communist Party-and which was not therefore philosophical in its origin: I had the conviction that materiality is primary and conditions everything. things that one had rendered ordinary by tying them up in a nonrelation. identified through Marx's aphorism condemning the interpretation of the world and appealing for its transformation through acts. True philosophy. We have here returned to the question of anamnesis. which passed precisely through materialism. it governed my subsequent reading and comprehension of Of Grammatology. and only this gives me access to myself which means there is no difference inside/outside. an attitude or a philosophical disposition. It is only my relation to the thing that gives it significance or not: this is what was shown so well by Barthes. My opponents were those who belonged to idealism. the outside. which is my pure responsibility. I preserve the word spirit to qualify this process insofar as it concerns a process of return where. more necessary. in what I call the virtue ofprison. That which con-sists therefore does not cease to return as in-sistence. to consist: one cannot renounce it. in particular. and hypomnesic. and does not cease. this is full of terrifying passages to the act. produced in matter but irreducible to physical laws. but which poses that the spirit. as if I found myself in front of you having returned to square one. to prepare myself. in the sense of a materialism that does not deny the spirit. And unfortunately. what returns is moved by what I call the unreal consistence of that which. while certainly not existing--for example. It appeared to me. The more time passed. justice-is irreducible. the more I feared falling back into that world. is always conditioned by it. the world has in effect revealed itselfto be appallingly inhospitable. This is what I call the organization of the loss ofindividuation. the more I sensed that the world refound would not be immediately welcoming. therefore. and which require formalizations for which the resources of the natural sciences remain irreducibly insufficient. or even a-significance. and it is an essential motor of all human life-and the condition of desire. "Not reducible to matter" signifies that there is a process.32 How I Became a Philosopher I cannot say that today I am a materialist in that sense. legacy of prior generations and responsibility of a heritage. in the patient immobility of silence. Twenty-jive years later I followed this path for five years. or even biological ones: there is a play of mnemonic layers that are at the same time biological. but I must say that I remain a materialist. Now. in effect. more intelligent. psychic. for a return to the world. while not reducible to matter. that everything seems to be organized to encourage the attitude in which insignificance dominates. in the twenty-five years that have passed since that epoch. more worthy. as without doubt it does to many among you. . in relation to which one asks if a maieutic is still possible today. between 1978 and 1983. of faith. discretely. that is. in suddenly making it necessary for me to say from where comes and from what proceeds. if it has one.How 1 Became a Philosopher 33 Twenty-five years after the passage to the act that led me toward philosophy through acting-years that reconnected me to those who. and which results from the accidental character of existence. it became problematic for me to live in the occultation of my past. "Only imbeciles don't change. the material of what I now call "my thought.. " And at the same time one must remain. if not multiple personalities. appeared to me so estranged not only from philosophy through acting but from all potential vocation to philosophize. remain faithful to the . But what is it to change one's life? And is it possible? In truth. immediately opens the question of fidelity. sometimes without knowing it. even if that occultation was part of my existence by choice: I wanted to play the role not of ex-convict but first of all of philosopher. It is therefore perhaps not by chance that around 1995 I set to work on the Critique ofPure Reason. Be and remain faithful. One must change and. in remaining faithful to it but. I have changed my life several times. One cannot be faithful to the unity and the identity of what remains constant throughout the alterities of the diverse characters one will have been and played. out of this material. without noticing it. I have had successive lives.. In October 2002 Marie Alphant suddenly directed me back to that question of the forgetting ofwhy one does what one does." So. without citing my sources or resources. in its accidental sources. in a sense. the question of fidelity is an aporia. this is the question of the fidelity of commitments [engagements]. which is our default. that one ends up asking if the unity of a we is still possible-I ask myself what is the unity of my own life.. to plough through the Paralogisms of the ego and the question of the unity of consciousness. as the saying goes. Be faithful to what remains. Being-in-becoming. Faithful. stupefied by marketing and the media. unfaithful Now. alarmed and overwhelmed by life. and thus in the apres-coup. the religious do it. how to accept this without accepting it as infidelity to others. above all in the unchanging context of incarceration. partly as the experience of time as flowing in an eminently variable way according to the conditions into which one is existentially thrown. as the hypomnesic dimension of anamnesis. How then to accept this situation of making fiction without accepting lies. And this is precisely what must be avoided. infidelity to oneself? That is. I believe the only worthwhile fidelity is one that tackles this problem of the apres-coup head on. as the originarily technical dimension of time. to which I have often bound myself-the relation between this question of fidelity to oneself and the infidelity of oneself. is more conducive of passages to undesirable acts than culpabilization. Now. precisely. the problem of the means through which is permitted the dulling of retentional finitude-has not yet released me. Nothing. It has posed itself in numerous ways: partly as a recollection leading me toward reminiscence. memory is unfaithful. what has really posed itself to me ever since 1978. one is in the reconstitution of hypomnesis. above all at this moment. that is. then. The question of time is perhaps. the apres-coup is the irreducible creator of phantasms and fictions.34 How I Became a Philosopher remains. since it is henceforth a matter for me of also remaining faithful to an experience of what was most near. This question. in effect. I believe that it is absolutely impossible to resolve or reduce these difficulties. which was the subject of the book I published in 2001. and. and. It is impossible for me not to make fiction in the course of speaking. and as that which is so near to the vile [l'immonde]. The problem is that monotheism does it in the mode of guilt. Now this is what makes retentional finitude difficult: the fact that memory fails. 15 From the moment one is in a process of reminiscence. Being fragile and fallible. finally. of the self and its means. to those whom one addresses? Everything I have said to you this evening is subject to this context of the apres-coup. like the question of the unity of consciousness. In a certain way. . equally. as the question of the unity and nonunity of being. I have not ceased to have changes of life. other than through the ordeal of this succession of roles I have been able to occupy-and of the vertiginous variety of viewpoints that remain within me. if they ever were. in the apres-coup of my fragile liberty. persona that have been needed. . a multiplicity of stories and roles. and that were only justified. in my fallible fidelity to the default of origin-to the law. I have never philosophized. as if I have had severallives. I carry this succession as the very mark of the default of origin-which is necessary-of which these successive and accidental roles are masks.How I Became a Philosopher 35 To the law My life will have been a succession of lives. if I have ever philosophized. that I became as necessary. to Love Us: From September II to April 2I .To Love. to Love Me. . They cause me to suffer because in the proximity of their suffering. I fe~l that this distance is our lost community. If I feel close to those people who suffer while they also make me suffer. but also the suffering that separates us. What is common to us is the feeling of absolute separation. But this concerns not only our common suffering. our proximity. I suffer also with them from that which makes them suffer. I feel them infinitely distanced from me-and I feel infinitely far from them. I feel close to them because they are people who suffer and who cause me to suffer.I dedicate this lecture 1 to the electors of the National Front. to whom I feel close. as such. if I suffer with them. This distance is paradoxically the vanishing point of our common suffering and. I do not suffer only because they make me suffer. from not having. 4 I call "primordial narcissism" that structure of the psyche which is indispensable for functioning. he said. but that is not what I am referring to. Freud speaks of primary narcissism."3 Richard Durn suffered from a structural privation ofhis primordial narcissistic capacities."2 When he looked in the mirror he saw only an immense nothing. Freud also speaks of secondary narcissism. or even deliberately manipulated-engage above all a question of narcissism. a "feeling of existing. Primary narcissism designates infantile self-love. the official representatives of a we. Durn affirmed that he had a need to "do evil at least once in his life. to have the feeling of existing.§ I The destruction of primordial narCISSIsm . It is a matter of narcissism in the sense of someone like Richard Durn. This was revealed by the publication of his personal diary in Ie Monde. Narcissism and insecurity The violence and insecurity in which we live-as much as they are exploited to the point of fantasy. . is to assassinate a wt'--who suffered terribly from not existing. but without which any capacity for love would be impossible. assassin of a wt'--to assassinate members of a municipal council. a precocious phase of sexuality. which survives 39 . that part of self-love which can sometimes become pathological. and result from a process of loss of individuation. to Love Me. which is without doubt closer to what Lacan calls the "mirror phase. characterized notably by the suffering of the narcissism of the we. by a kind of sickness ofthe we. throughout the course of human history. it contains the additional sense that the conditions of the individuation of the we. The narcissistic structure of a story The most important theoretical advance has certainly been the application of the libido theory to the repressing ego. The ego itself came to be regarded as a reservoir of what was described as narcissistic libido from which the libidinal investment in objects flowed out.4° To Love." Now. Freud in fact has a list: early dementia. It is. but this is still not primordial narcissism. An I and a we are processes of individuation. however. This potential circulates. transform themselves. This is not merely to say that each we is a different history. in a very specific sense that we live in an epoch of great narcissistic suffering. the I and the we have a history. As such. The conditions of individuation at the start of the twenty-first century are different from those of the fifth century B. that did not return to him any image. and he massacred it. there is a primordial narcissism ofthe we just as there is of the 1: for the narcissism of my I to function. as processes of individuation. Narcissistic conditions that are diverse forms of neuroses also exist. failing to develop his narcissism. (the birth of the Greek city). to Love Us into adulthood. and into which they could be once more withdrawn.C. Richard Durn. which are in turn different from those at the birth of the primitive horde of which Freud speaks in Totem and Taboo. saw in the municipal council the reality of an alterity that made him suffer. which are themselves different from those of ero-Magnon man. and melancholy. and it so happens that when it functions badly. narcissism engenders narcissistic troubles. there must be a narcissism of the we onto which it can project itself. I am not an Iother than to the extent that I am part of a we. paranoia. 5 This is Freudian energy: the ego is an energetic process having a potential. These processes of individuation and their evolutions . 8 1 am thereby progressively annulled and. a consumer does not have the right to say 1: a consumer is no longer either an lor we. We are. and the I in the we. this permits the realization of industrial economies of scale. if my singularity is annulled by the synchronization ofmy behavior (that is. The organization of consumption-which consists in synchronizing the Is to the point of annihilating their differences (because after all an 1 is a diachrony. of my consumption) with the behavior of others (that is. Today we are enduring an enormous suffering of this individuation and this narcissism. selflove. to annul the differences between them and thus to transform them into a they. because of this progressive annulment of my 1. since others are nothing more than the mirror of my self-love: in this consists primordial narcissism. and passage to the act Industrial exploitation poses problems regarding the limits of what is possible with industry's resources. I no longer love others. I no longer love myself. the conditions for the passage from one phase of the process of individuation to another. all . This suffering occurs insofar as mnemotechnics and mnemo-techno-Iogies (which govern all the processes of human individuation) have passed into the sphere of industrial exploitation.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 41 have their own conditions. essentially targeted as consumers. Consumption-as an epoch of the system related to what I call the process of adoption?-tends to confound the I and the we. a collapse of the necessary primordial narcissism of the I and the we. in principle and in structure.6 the consumer is depersonalized. of a we. if I no longer love myself. In effect. since I can say I only insofar as my time is not your time)-is what tends to annul the love of self. insofar as we are Is. disembodied. consumption. because he or she is reduced to a they. Narcissism. today. Now. of the I These conditions for the evolution of individuation are mnemotechnics or mnemotechnologies. From the moment that I no longer love myself and no longer love others. with the consumption of others). and through it. Now. 9 These dis-equilibriums translate into crises punctuating history. not the time of the stars.42 To Love. to Love Me. both individual and collective. Becoming and future The liquidation of narcissism. that is to say. We are talking here prospectively: this prospective is a question of collective intelligence of the future-and therefore of the understanding of the question of time. to Love Us transgression becomes possible: there is no longer any limit to my action. then with large empires. which is at first very slow (lithic industry of the chopper. articulated and worked through by a process of technical transformation. a liquidation that is the organization ofpure madness. the time of the physical becoming of the expansion of the universe. which may be more or less violent. Stellar time is entropic. In dedicating this lecture to the electors of the National Front insofar as they suffer-like you and I but perhaps more than you and I-I am saying to you that the unlimited organization of consumption is the organization of the liquidation of narcissism (of which these electors are victims). When a technical system transforms. yet they are different. Human time relates to stellar time. then. leading inevitably to suicidal behavior. This is a matter of human time. Human time . intensifies terribly the phenomenon of dis-adjustment that regularly occurs to shake up human societies. Society is always haunted. at the rhythm of millions of years. But when these processes of dis-equilibrium linked to technical evolution combine with a loss ofindividuation engendered by the liquidation of the narcissistic potential of the I (which has only happened in our own epoch). ofindividuation. which means my action may become a passage to the act of pure madness. it dis-adjusts social relations and provokes their dis-equilibrium. dis-adjustment attains a limit. and finally with the process of permanent innovation characterizing the industrial society in which we live. but this is generally temporary. the bi-face tool) but accelerates with sedentarization. therefore. in principle." that is to say. It is because the future cannot be reduced to becoming (but must on the other hand negotiate with it) that we must fight against all scientism. The possibility of the future is fragile: this is why the end of the future is far more probable than the end of becoming.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 43 is negentropic in an extreme sense. Confounding stellar time with human time reduces negentropic time to entropic becoming. The articulation of the I and the we Human time articulates the I with the we. which is conditioned by the time of the Is that compose it. however. Those who do not want to hear talk of such a possibility do not know how to discern that which. but in the past it was not perceived. the time of the we: it has its place in the time of the we. the end of the future (which is far more complex than becoming and also. I am human only insofar as I am part of a social group. is negentropic. The time of the I is not. hundreds of patents are lodged . constitutes the possibility of the future without confounding it with this becoming. The difficulty consists in this tension-and this complexity makes difficult what one calls collective intelligence (which reason a priori poses as possibility and necessity). when industrial objects appeared systematically in the form of new objects dedicated to replacing preceding ones. which is contradictoryexcept in posing the possibility of the "end of times. The reduction of the future to becoming would be its liquidation-it would be the "end of times"-and this is indeed possible. Human language is therefore constitutionally idiomatic (we will come back to this point). 10 It is not only the biological structure of humankind that. The question of the articulation of the I and the we is overdetermined by that of technics. each day. This is what we call consumption [consommation]. Cultural structures are too. It became perceivable in the nineteenth century and above all in the twentieth. more fragile). in becoming. This has always been the case. Now. as is the case for all living beings. Techniques of adoption. in permitting the projection of this phantasmic past. a priori. a new washing powder. in particular. according to the mode of consumption. we don't want them. Societies have no spontaneous need for new products. the specific and specifically miserable trait of our epoch is that the articulation of the 1 and the we is hegemonically submitted to the imperative to adopt the new. a new optional standard in cars. Ernest Renan. But this . Psychological techniques are developed to make us adopt new products because.44 To Love. can develop only because of the generally hidden and forgotten fact that society is already a process of adoption. to Love Us around the world. yet they must also transform themselves to survive. they want to remain as they are. which must be adopted and which make us adopt them. Paul Valery. highlighted the process of adoption. which serve to more or less artificially "sustain" consumption. Tocqueville. to Love Me. such as marketing. also made possible the projection of a common future. systems of behavioral synchronization. and Andre Leroi-Gourhan. from which result innumerable new objects. speaking of America. a new type of mobile phone. the media. are technologies of adoption: they make us adopt a new toothpaste. established that all society is created in this way. The process of adoption and what we want The adoption of new products has grafted itself onto the general process of adoption. yet which. We must consume in order for the economic machine of the global we to function. at the heart of which the social is constituted. Ernest Renan explains in "What Is a Nation?" that all societies are constituted by immigrants who arrive but do not form part of a we. Today. ll Leroi-Gourhan showed this regarding China: China is made up of thousands of different ethnicities that have shaped the past of a we that never existed. so that one must say that the we does not literally exist. As a general rule. Marketing. The occlusion of the knowledge that there is always adoption can even take the form of burying thousands and even millions of individuals in mass graves. " Until a recent epoch. we must share the same calendar system and the same cardinal system. The problem of adoption is posed as such from then on. to be able to adhere to the past. For us to be able to say we. and if . during the colloquium "Modernity: The New Map of the Times. we want that. if we do not share common time. the question of adoption is posed more and more explicitly from the time of the industrial revolution onward. that is.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 45 fictive creation must be hidden because. For social structures to absorb this incessant novelty. and social organization explicitly becomes the organization of adoption or. in other words. cardinality. as new objects appear without interruption and with increasing speed. permitting us to say together. Calendarity. Last year I gave. In other words. my children are French citizens. I must believe that I belong to this phantasmic past we. and this remembering elevates the narcissism of the we. adoptive techniques must be put in place. A we is always constituted by calendarity and cardinality. I adopt my past by integrating the lessons of places of adoption-school and certain other structures-conceived to enable me to adopt it. If we cannot refer to the same calendar. A common past with you who are French permits me to construct with you a we projecting a future. and therefore make this past mine. "Our future: we want this. and as the framework of daily life incessantly transforms itself. and fiction Adoption is that which is presupposed by the constitution of a we in general. but we are called Stiegler."l2 the example of my personal case: I am a French citizen. this process of adopting a past-which is artificial but at the same time permits me to adopt a future-was concealed. I recognize in the sans-culottes the representatives of my past. Nevertheless. even if the past of my grandparents is not that of the sans-culottes. like my paternal grandfather-and my maternal grandfather was called Trautmann. the organization of consumption. TFI. or even to both at the same time. The television channel TFI has recently seen its share price fall because it purchased at very high cost the broadcast rights for a Zinedine Zidane football match." news-time on television. if we cannot read street names. derives its value from its capacity to control calendarity---and the football World Cup is a major rendezvous on the global calendar. however. Everyone today recognizes what we call" 20 Heures. To control access to the consciousness of consumers at such events constitutes a fundamental advantage: it ensures in principle very high audience ratings. or road signs-we amount to strangers. to Love Us we do not have a common representation of the spatial world in which we share systems of orientation-for example. and this is always a . The power of belonging to a group requires the projection of an always fictive unity of this group. moreover. in sport. The mass media has turned it into a day for a televisual rendezvous. like all TV stations. Yet one can sense the fragility of such a system (if not its absurdity) in the fact that the weakness of a footballer's knee may threaten it. of the unique event. This star of the French team was supposed to guarantee the channel and its advertisers a record audience. The calendar even directs us back to the divine. a day of rest in common. and in any case to an exceptional event that stands above the present as an excess. maps. or even to the exceptional foundational event of politics. What is true of days is true of hours.To Love. one still exploits a kind of adoration of the inestimable. to Love Me. Sunday was originally a sacred day for Christianity. calendarity and cardinality are submitted to the control of global cultural industries. A calendrical system and a cardinal system direct us to something beyond the calculable-and. Today. Calendarity organizes the coming together of the we. We have no sense of familiarity with a we other than on condition of such a sharing. of the exception. Submitted to the control of cultural industries. but he injured his knee and his participation in this global sporting encounter became uncertain. calendrical and cardinal systems are in the process of disintegrating-and this provokes a loss ofindividuation as a consequence of the resulting destruction ofprimordial narcissism. That which I love and those whom I love. diabolical. I love to the infinite. correctly. you. my children. Freud tells us. Desire is structurally related to infinity. that is. without condition: I cannot love it other than in a manner that is (phantasmatically) unlimited. . which is indissociably from the we and of the we. But I repeat: without this fiction (that is. literally. us insofar as we are capable of forming a we--all this I love. in which I propose that. But for that limited libidinal energy to function. from one to the next [de proche en proche]. despite everything. It is only possible infinitely: it involves desire. as one says. for example. This is nothing but a fiction. worse than beasts. This fiction is called. it is necessary that I fantasize my energy as unlimited. indissociable from the desire for a we. a sort of pure future. This is merely a fiction. you." beasts and. What I love I love without limit. but without this fiction there would be no desire. the messiah. and. 13 And if I had the time. the we is impossible. desire for the possibility of saying we.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 47 fiction that narrates an exception. We become. This is what the question of philia in the Nicomachean Ethics teaches and means. without the default oforigin that is the fiction of desire). individual desire. those close to me [mes proches]. and this allows me to fiction a future that I hope will belong to us-me. But I need that which will never take place in the mode of a fiction. and I love it (and I love you) infinitely. as a result of what I have just said. There is no infinite love-no we as the origin of an I-that is not a phantasm. in the form of an absolute future: a future that will always remain still to come. a pure destructive power." Without which no we is possible. The power of saying we requires that I "fiction" a past that is not mine. Desire and infinity This future that I fiction-that is. I love only to the infinite. "to the infinitive. We become less than "barbarians. that libidinal energy is limited. it will be. which I desire and fantasize-I will without doubt never see: it will very probably never happen. I would show you how and why. which is legitimated by the need to "get . an extraordinarily false delusion. This system engenders herd behavior and not. according to a finishedfinality. must be capable of a primordial narcissism: how it needs symbols. extraordinary because no one seems conscious of it. egotism has been elevated to the pinnacle of life. and. "Fight!": The final finality of the consumption of a herd-society Contemporary global calendarity and cardinality. as comprehended and anticipated by Nietzsche. individual behavior. in a fictional direction. and the audiovisual. an I in a we or a we composed of Is. To oppose the individual and the collective is to transform individuation into social atomization. The violence of which I spoke at the beginning-the violence of those one calls "little savages" ['sauvageons'1.To Love. informatics. like the 1. that is. producing a herd. which remains always irreducible."14 Cardinality and calendarity provide the framework for such fetishes. moreover. as if the efficacy of the lie was proportional to its enormity. We live in a herd-society. one that is manifestly exhaustible. Some think this society individualistic because. this being always and indissociably a we and an 1. controlled by the cultural industries-not only television and radio but also the Internet and the integrated system of telecommunications.. 15 for example-is kindled by today's hegemonic discourse. Individualism wants the flourishing of the individual. and as if the lie was nobody's responsibility. in which it can be reflected. auto-erotic fetishes. But individualism has no relation to this egotism. at the very highest levels of public and private responsibility. to Love Me. precipitate itself "in a primordial form . incarnated by Is. to Love Us the we. that is. contrary to legend. according to which life is the struggle for life. To say we live in an individualistic society is a patent lie. the product of the convergence of electronic technologies-form a system that functions according to a finality submitted to a calculation.. but also in the smallest details of those processes of adoption stamped by marketing and the organization of consumption. forming itself an absolute past that is necessarily mythic-was what permitted the commonality required for the constitution. for example. and so on. in setting this "reassortment" in motion. which I can use at home to consume while watching television. "The family" and ruin The calendrical and cardinal system. and." "Fight!" is the maxim of such a point of view. combined with the loss of narcissism. will be found again in my business as a tool serving to direct. This integration constitutes a ruin of crossed narcissisms (aiming . and this will in turn set in motion a "reassorting" (a resupplying of stocks). In the end television will become an access terminal that will permit a viewer. exceptional mirror of the absolute future. and submits to it. precisely. where the symbolic and mnemotechnical system. opens the door to all transgressions. until now. We arrive here at a totally integrated ensemble.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 49 by through any means. this evolution consists in the integration of the technical system of production with the mnemotechnical system sharing out calendarity and cardinality. desire. a production line. This pseudo-individualist discourse. calendrical and cardinal. it organized the memory of an immemorial event-a founding fiction. who form audiences for advertisers mandated by producers of consumer objects. combines with the technical system for the production of consumer goods. cultural industries aim to produce such a commonality of desire by capturing and channeling the libidinal potential of consumers. As Vance Packard 16 clearly showed. Calendarity opens commonality: philia. of any accord. insofar as. All this is articulated in a single system where the organ of television is called to fuse with the organ of tele-action. degraded and degrading-these are the males of the herd who attack each other-promotes ultra-egotistical behavior. while watching the program. that is. love. integrates with this system. which. the loss of the understanding of limits. to order a product. This teleaction terminal. On the map of the history of social structures. a command will also be issued for the production of the product. a decoupling of individual and collective time. diachronic possibilities. wants to "immerse a man ofpolitics" for close to two days in the private and professional everyday life of a French family. the launch of a new program "which would like to bring closer together the man ofpolitics and the citizen. we see the arrival of political "realityTV" programs. in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 45I (based on Bradbury's novel) was called. nor familial. 17 A calendar is a system of synchronization. On the other hand." dedicated to the French football team of 1998. a man of politics is invited to stay. It defines the rendezvous of the we. that the father does the same at 8 p. hosted by Ruth Elkrief. to Love Me. on Wednesday. a de-composition of the diachronic and the synchronic. or programs of "political reality. eventually. an adolescent who returns to the family home at 7 p. however. A rendezvous. a rupture with the symbolic milieu. it is the great televisual consumption system. . makes possible. to Love Us at the one in the other) of the I and of the we. the only meeting point being. indeed.. which had produced "The Eyes in the Blues. "the family. The destruction of modes of collective life means that.5° To Love. precisely.m. here in the present. on the occasion of its press conference for the new season. with a family: TF1 has announced. insofar as hypersymbols (synchronization is operated through symbols) engender hyperdiaboles-dia-bolization." Provisionally baptized 36 Hours. beneath the gaze of the cameras." Now. a system that. the development of cultural industries leads to a hypersynchronization that eliminates diachronization and paradoxically engenders a hyperdiachronization-that is. This show is produced by 2P2L. nor national. the television news. 27 August. nor religious-because it is no longer a we--rather. What organizes calendarity is neither local. this program.m. social atomization." where. This ruin consists in the organization of what I call hypersynchronization. eats from the fridge. and nobody eats with anyone else. for example.18 Deception This hypersynchronization engenders a hyperdiachronization. in a synchrony of the we. if we can still say we. experts. it conditions all the others. this disenchantment. they respond in general that they don't like it. one must watch TFr. but one has to. Even if it is not the only one. nevertheless. that Arte is better. This happens because hypersynchronization provokes a loss of libido in relation to the system of synchronization. to follow what happens in the political landscape with the vote for the National Front. that disgust with oneself? This is the sense in which. after having sat in front of the television. would on the contrary tend to produce hate and disgust. that Arte has become as bad as the others.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism a total disconnection. I watch TV but I hate it. and yet admit watching both Arte and the other channels. and in denouncing its ravaging effects. oppose synchrony and . One doesn't want to watch this channel. one must not. As for these apparent paradoxes-symptoms of what I very generally call ill-being [mal-etre]-analysts. and above all self-disgust. For example. the whole time thinking there must be something better to do. There's no choice. I don't want to say that TFr is the cause of the National Front: it is the calendrical ensemble that constitutes the TV program industry-of which TFr is in France the premier representative-and that forms a new system of organization of the we. If you ask people what they think of the programming on TFr. even though the situation seems clear enough. And this deception is a primary and essential element of the vote for the National Front. Others say it's all bad." if it exists. The audiences produced by the cultural industries do not form a we that produces philia. it is truly by default. Who has not at some time felt. yet they admit to watching TFr anyway." This is how interviewees respond. that creates desire. is shown in a paradoxical fashion in research undertaken into the relation between publics and their medias: "I don't believe it anymore. This "we. 19 The destruction of time In analyzing hypersynchronization. and commentators mostly fail to comprehend the main thing. the development of which is deceptive. This loss of libido. To Love. is a synchronic milieu (as Saussure taught us) in which there is diachrony. in other words. but if I can speak to you. synchrony-designate entities one must distinguish without opposing. What I call the "becoming-diabolical" of symbols is the result of such a decomposition. a composition that produces a dynamic process. which is. this industrial "calendarity" destroys time. that is. for the same reasons that led Freud to propose that the pleasure principle is constituted by the principle of reality. a disgust. its "opposite. on first analysis. We tend naturally to oppose things rather than to compose them. however. we. and which are always in the process of composing. It is necessary to reason not by opposition but by composition. And a language dies when these tendencies decompose." The . diachrony. with reference to Bergson. This produces a profound ill-being. Or. however. it's because I am not in absolute synchrony with you. there is also the industrial exploitation of time-through the cardinality and calendarity of the cultural industries-which tends structurally and organically to decompose the synchronic and diachronic. it is because my diachrony tends to synchronize with you. to Love Me. and Nietzsche. Language is the articulation of the diachronic and the synchronic. for example. Well beyond this seemingly obvious natural inclination. In other words. Freud. One must not oppose synchrony and diachrony. If I speak and you listen to me. symptom of a liquidation of desire-what I have called elsewhere "disbanding" ["debandade'j. in the sense one intends for the word decomposition when it is a matter of necrosis. 20 Industrial temporal objects I try in a general way to reason in terms of tendencies. The terms I have employed-I. to Love Us diachrony-and this is a question of method. the industrial exploitation of time (the time of consciousness become a market) is entropic: it eliminates the difference between becoming and future [devenir et avenir]. Language. the composition of two tendencies that are also forces. this synchronization enters tendentially into opposition with all possible diachronization. then. it is nothing but temporal flux. we consume an economic good that belongs to the class of what Husserl called temporalobjectr-in this case an industrial temporal object. and you synchronize yourself with those consciousnesser-you are in the same time-consciousness. If it is a television broadcast (rather than a cassette in your VCR). I call an object "temporal" if its flow coincides with the flux of the consciousness of which it is an object.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 53 pleasure principle knots and unknots itself in the principle of reality. With Husser!. this protentional and retentional process also frames the temporality of consciousness generally. adhering to the temporal object that is the object of your consciousness. a temporal object is an object of time-consciousness. a beginning and an end. A temporal object is a tissue of retentions and protentions. to understand the specificity and force of industrial temporal objects and how they make possible a synchronization of minds. Now. it has.· that is. your time-consciousness passes into the broadcast or into the film. like all temporal objects. and . when you who are consciousnesses watch a broadcast or a film. It is necessary here to deepen the notion of the temporal object. then hundreds of millions of people watch it at the same moment as you. As a general rule. This process of the destruction of the synchronic and diachronic. by the systematic exploitation of instruments for fabricating the demand for consumption-leads to an exhaustion of libidinal energy. which is itself essentially a flux and only ever constitutes itself along the course of time as flow. Now. and these verbs denote that what is at stake is a process. the exhaustion of diachronicity and thereby of libidinal energy. Now. The melody is paradigmatic. This is how the decomposition of the synchronic and diachronic operates. between this beginning and end. that is. When we watch television. the de-composition of the I and the we (or the collapse of the I and the we) through consumption-that is. for example. This consciousness is itself essentially temporal: it never ceases to flow. the World Cup. the flow ofwhich occurs simultaneously with the consciousness of which it is the object-because this consciousness itselfflows. and. which overdetermines the relations between primary and secondary retentions in general. and this means that primary retentions vary from one phenomenon to the other. but also films. Retentions of the first audition. such as. and which constitutes the past of my consciousness. Because when the same temporal object is produced twice in a row. in the present moment of a musical object that flows. it was absolutely impossible to hear the same melody twice. One must not confuse. since the invention of the phonogram.54 To Love. It is in music that these processes are best formalized (in its military or religious functions. to Love Us temporal objects permit in one blow the modification of the process of consciousness and. the note that is present can only be a note. in a certain sense. Before the invention of the phonograph. playa selecting role in the primary retentions of the second audition. which I can hear again in imagination by the play of memory. perception (primary retention) and imagination (secondary retention). which remains present-a preceding note stillpresent. . influence and even control this process. Now. says Husserl. and this permits a better comprehension of the retentional process. it engenders two different temporal phenomena. to Love Me. but the tertiary retention-the phonogram-makes it obvious. in becoming secondary. In the "now" of a melody. insofar as it retains within itself the preceding note. On the other hand. for example. which itself retains the preceding one. up to a certain point. and radio and television broadcasts)-are materialized time. and so on. for example). permitting their control These industrial temporal objects are increasingly today what give rhythm to and frame the flux of consciousness that we are. which is itself what I call a tertiary retention (a prosthesis of exteriorized memory). the identical repetition of the same temporal object has become possible. tertiarized temporal objects-that is. rather than merely a sound. which in turn retains the preceding one. the melody I heard yesterday. One must not confuse this primary retention belonging to the present of perception with secondary retention. objects either recorded or converted into a controllable and transmissible signal (such as phonograms. This is true in general. thus. The suffering of Richard Durn will have been above all that of not . and many other functions of the industrial global production/consumption system. The liquidation of primordial narcissism. of signi-fying insofar as it is the non-insignificant. their singularity. which always means their liberty to think. which is to say their liberty. we pass from an industrial level to what we might call the hyperindustrial. and thus to selecting the same primary retentions. leading to a loss of self-esteem (the self. which integrates the world of culture and spirit in its totality at the heart of a vast techno-industrial system. with the mutations of technology currently underway.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 55 Moreover. The standardization of secondary retentions as the reign of symbolic misery When ten million people watch the same broadcast-the same audiovisual temporal object-they synchronize their flux. can no longer inspire in itself the desire for self). And when the television antenna becomes a terminal of tele-action. which becomes a herdlike they. then the fact that the same people watch the same programs every day necessarily leads each "consciousness" into sharing more and more identical secondary retentions. but also make possible remote actions based on those programs. losing its diachrony. and which in turn produces the great political catastrophes of the twentieth century. production. they do not perceive the same phenomenon: they don't all think the same thing about what they watch. But if it is true that secondary retentions form the selection criteria in primary retentions. authorizes all transgressions. and. insofar as it is also the liquidation of the we as such. their criteria for selecting retentions vary. that is. where the tools for producing material goods and those for creating and diffusing symbols and other "spiritual nourishment" have become the same. Of course. it will not only permit the viewing of programs. such as purchasing. The de-composition of the synchronic and the diachronic is the de-composition of idiomaticity and of sign-making in general. therefore. They end up being so well synchronized that they have lost their diachrony. as we will see in the second chapter. the degree of figurative participation coheres with the group's techno-economic characteristics. to which the liquidation of significance leads-and from which no one. which consists in the destruction of the capacity for narcissistic projection. Such is the consequence of symbolic misery. From that moment. Figurative specialization . escapes. to Love Me. The loss of symbolic participation as the destruction of individuation and April 21.To Love.21 He cannot participate in individuation. Mega-ethnicity and the disappearance of aesthetic participation (which corresponds to the phenomena of exteriorization and the specialization of human symbolic faculties in the industrial system) are incomprehensible if separated: "Thus figuration appears . insofar as it is a process through which the I individuates itself as well. from the psychic and collective individuation of the we.. of the libido-and which would reach its limit in what he called the appearance of the mega-ethnic. indissociable from those social events that maintain ethnic continuity. beyond insignificance and as an unbearable limit-to the point where it leads to an act of massacre. He writes in his diary that everything seems insignificant to him. cannot individuate himself. the necessity and the convergence of that and of those who exist within the same process-a process that fundamentally arranges. during which there is no longer anything to say. for example. in the end. ex-sistere.." that is to say. that is. Richard Durn had truly found what we must call a-significance-the limit of significance. and that he himself cannot signify. It weighs or hangs like a phantom over so many dinners. however. that is. 2002. as projection of the future of the we as one. To individuate is to exist. difference and multiplicity. to experience the consistence of individuation. From this aspect. to Love Us having the power to signifY. in France Leroi-Gourhan developed the concept of loss of participationwhich is close to what I describe here as the loss ofindividuation. 23 And this is indeed how the Gulf War will in effect have taken place. 22 Now. where the majority of individuals are no longer required to play roles as social figures. where individual memory (that is.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 57 and the separation between actors and spectators attain a maximum in the modern mass. the singular point of idiomatic differentiation) comes back to collective memory (that is. where the diversity of products is not great enough to hamper the development.. The automated management of production or destruction affects the present. In fact the process is already so advanced that we can clearly see the direction it is taking. as a process of exteriorization of symbolic exchange in general. we may wonder whether yet another process of exteriorization-this time the exteriorization of social symbolism-might not be taking place. even if. and the megadeaths will instead be processed indirectly from electronic control panels. This is in fact already feasible. threatened in its essence by specialization: It is evident that human development is heading in the direction of mega-ethnicity-a global unit of measurement rather like the "megadeaths" devised to express the destructive power of atomic weapons.. but where all occasions for prestige have been reduced by television to a state of pure spectacle. which is produced as the consistence of individual singularities). symbolic creativity is the condition of individuation as circuit. This is the condition by which collective individuation renovates itself and continues on. In other words. to collective individuation. and it must therefore be kept in a sufficiently "sapient" state. We can see the time coming when government will no longer have to call upon the uncertain services of artillery. and it is this symbolic creativity that finds itself threatened by the horizon of the mega-ethnic. in its most vital .. as Leroi-Gourhan says. psychic individuation. The time is not far off when all our manufactured iron will be processed in a small number of centers by entirely automatic methods. this has already happened in the case of oil. We therefore might well ask ourselves what continuing means of escape the zoological flux will have at its disposal-for complete dehumanization would eventually become prejudicial to the efficacy of the social machine. thereby ensuring the reproduction of the species. modern audiovisual techniques. Just as sexual reproduction can now become passive (without recourse to the eminently complex aesthetic sequence which in the past preceded and followed it. The city worker still goes out to watch a soccer game. that is the only period when the reproductive minority shows some independence of behavior. with the first in vitro fertilization taking place in 1977. or be they corporeal. to Love Me. seem that a modicum of social aesthetics will continue to surround our years of social maturing. by the way. as the constitution and stabilization of the familial cell aimed at in the courtship display. This would still necessitate a direct aesthetic participation by individuals-insofar as their libido must pass into action in one way or another: As for the social sphere. such as in the analyses of Leroi-Gourhan) lead to a literally catastropic insensibilization: The loss of manual discovery.To Love. that is. of the personal encounter between human and matter in the exercise of a craft. or attend a parade. such as I have described here as the setting to work of singular secondary retentions. when direct participation is necessary to collective survival. has closed one of the doors to individual aesthetic innovation. for the time being. activities involving direct response are increasingly confined to adolescence and the pre-conjugal period. but with all the potential for frustrations that this engenders) so too can the loss of aesthetic participation (be it intellective. catch a fish. to Love Us core it seems irreducible. 24 It must be noted that this text was published in 1965. and that since then there have appeared technologies of procreation. If we exclude the vital cycle. or manual. and still has a life of responsiveness. but one that may stretch to taking part in the activities of a club. Until we get to the stage already reached by the species of domestic animals that are best suited to productivity-the stage of artificial insemination-it would. At a different level artistic popularization (vulgarisation] enables the masses to live passively on . carnal. The age we live in is still filled with survivals from the past. already provide a most convenient staging-post. imperfect as they are. In insect societies. restricted it is true. But art will eventually go the same way as adventure. to the limit of suffering. 2002." and the insensibilization resulting from the global organization of consumption. of existing. that is. an extraordinarily dangerous quasi-insensibility. which is the profound meaning of the vote of April 21. an impossibility of signi-fying. in France-but also of all desperate behavior in the world today.The destruction ofprimordial narcissism 59 the planet's cultural stock. 25 "A minimum of participation is necessary in order to feel. and the hypersynchronization in which it consists (as negation of all diachrony). The problem of this modicum of the personal in art is as important to the future of Homo sapiens as that of the deterioration of human motor function. of which the murderer Richard Durn will have been one individual expression at the extreme of this loss of individuation. and Chinese paintings and Mayan sculptures will pall like the cowboys and the Zulus simply because a minimum of participation is necessary in order to feel. of what is bearable. . an immiseration of sense. produces immense suffering. which is founded on singularity and narcissism as an image of an otherness of myself. I interiorize all these times as secondary retentions I share with the other spectators. this industrial fabrication of behavior has become truly dangerous: it is an entropic process. And Andre Gorz recalled recently3 that it was Freud's nephew. Today. So what retentional criteria 60 . as Jeremy Rifkin! and Naomi Klein 2 have shown on other grounds. If I spend fifty-two minutes in front of a television program. Edward Bernays. caused by the consumer's disgust [degout]-which is the pure and simple destruction ofone's taste [gout]. who invented marketing as the technology of the phantasm-as Vance Packard already understood by 1950.4 The industrial exploitation of the power of temporal objects will end in the exhaustion of conscious desire. which raises questions of cultural ecology. My consciousness passes into the temporal object. my consciousness has lived those fifty-two minutes in the time of the temporal object. At the cinema I am not in my chair-I am in the screen. Marx said it already: capitalism is essentially the creation of needs. Such is disbanding-the coming slowdown of consumption. Audiovisual temporal objects permit the diffusion and mass adoption of behavioral models through which consumers adopt new products.§ II The destruction of the process of psychic and collective individuation and the question of evil The they where there is no longer any witness Cultural industries serve to create markets. Your past. becomes the same conscious past as that of the viewing they. which was originally your own in relation to these "neighbors" (because your past was not the same as theirs). and in a singularly strange way. and in an asymptotic manner. From the moment you adhere temporally to the same channel of information every day. tend to cease to be an analysis. without knowing it. Take. the support of your negentropic singularity. for example. you have "had a rendezvous. And this is no doubt partially true. little by little. and therefore do not witness in the same way-in the first place because a past grounds expectations. and finally there is the driver.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 61 does the television industry rely on when deciding what programs to produce? It is always the same marketing agencies that define standards: The Loft of television channel M6 immediately finds its homologue on TFI." And that difference of analysis. Normally. reduced. The criteria put forward by channels regarding the constraints of marketing are inevitably interiorized by the public. one might tend to think that the reason each has understood the causality of the event differently is because each one saw things from a different location." originally different. retentions and protendons. One sees on the basis of a competence. This is why the diversification of offerings (which in itself is an interesting fact) barely affects the dominant tendency. Spontaneously. The three witnesses give three different versions of events. a traffic accident: somebody gets hurt. finds itself. progressively. forms horizons ofexpectation that are proper to the past and that receive events and render them sensible to those to whom they happen. Your "analyses. but definitely and systematically. in other words. "meeting" at the same time. tend to become identical or. if I witness the occurrence of an event and you witness the same event. formed by memories and correlative expectations. you adopt the same history of events as everyone who watches these broadcasts-and with whom. but I think above all this difference of viewpoints leads rather to the conclusion that the witnesses each have their own past. a "competence" that enables a "performance" (to speak like . we see two different things in the one event. slowly. there are three additional witnesses. little by little and asymptotically. And this is true for other channels. such that there is no longer anyone to denounce the horror. The word responsibility is doubtless cumbersome for qualifying all these religious cults. And the very goal of a synchronizing rendezvous is to intensify diachrony. Thus the television news can "virtualize" a Gulf War. even the ones you don't watch. He tries to install me in my responsibility. the same commentary. The channels use the same sources and. the cult poses in principle that we. to the temple. those who can synchronize in principle are those who are primordially diachronic. of "consciousnesses." of a more global process whereby industrial synchronization tendentially suspends all diachronizing difference in the appropriation of what I watch on television. Such is the product of cultural industries. they disappear in the they where there is no longer any witness. the synagogue.62 To Love. insofar as we synchronize ourselves. for reasons similar to those that lead to the asymptotic liquidation of the diachrony of the Is. or the mosque. responsibility-I speak here of the responsibility of a response. the officiator addresses me as a singularity responsible for who I am. that is. to Love Us certain linguists). are good and amicable people only insofar as we install our synchrony within a diachrony ofprinciple. that is. Response-the cult object When I go to mass. which is nonetheless broadcast live. then there is simply no longer any witness. increasingly. There is an entropic integration of the channels themselves. And. The I is confounded with the we:. at the level of supposed "elites. everything that comes to consciousness is identical to what strikes my "neighbor's" consciousness. for example." but this is nothing but the reflection. such that a respondent in . to Love Me. to diachronize me. a given event that I have witnessed and that will be verbalized in the form of a police statement. but I nonetheless believe that it is something like a response (which is also a musical form)." All this engenders what has been called "pensee unique'S in reference to the thought of "elites. from that point of view. But if. " insofar as it is the consciousness ofour body. So our consciousness is also "bombarded. mobile phones. in view of realizing the industrial economies ofscale that mass markets make possible. and optional extras on cars-passes through the metamarket of audiences. of synchronizing the behavior of these bodies. but rather having access to a market where you can augment your margins thanks to economies of scale. It is a matter. one is responsible for the other. the problem is not so much achieving good industrial productivity. 6 one of the first truly global events. all in the name of that ancient practice-preeminent with respect to the primordial narcissism of the we--that sports were in the past. The global audience Our "consciences/consciousnesses" ['consciences'] are bombarded mediatically by the cultural industries. . insofar as they are traversed by those consciousnesses forming an industrial material available for sale-which Thierry Gaudin has. absolutely alone facing God. This is what in Christianity will be called conscience: one has a conscience.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 63 response-who must respond quite faithfully (beyond what is the case in Catholic liturgy)-is centrally at stake in all cults. whose newspapers are. and insofar as our bodies consume. referred to as "audiences. If you want to install a product on the market. alone. This is the historical meaning of the football World CUp. because in the current state of economic war. within "the media. nor having a truly innovative product. It is a matter of gaining ever-larger audiences. to amortize industrial investments one must aim at global markets." These audiences have a price: they constitute metamarkets." less and less differentiable-and the honor of the noble profession of the journalist will be measured in the future against the shadow of the capacity for one or another to distinguish themselves. and that is why calendarity inexorably conforms to the systems of global synchronization. The market-for toothpaste. for fifteen years now. which has become over recent decades a typical event within the apparatus of consumption. "8 But this desire to rejoin an original fusional milieu is founded in my primordial narcissism. where. and incommensurability This becoming of calendarity (and the shipwrecked press that has allowed itself to be engulfed-those organs previously devoted to the constitution of public opinion but now submerged in the "mass audience" fabricated by marketing) thus engenders loss of desire insofar as desire depends on primordial narcissism. and insofar as this in turn depends on primordial diachrony (that is. where one needs (in the modern sense starting with counterpoint) several instruments or voices. that I am not the other. My time is absolutely unique. I am nothing but de-synchronized in relation to the other-in diachrony. to Love Us Narcissism. starting not from consumption that Franklin proposes that "time is money. engenders an archi-synchronization in which I am not-where I am targeted no longer as an I but as a consumer. to Love Me. so long as a cent remains in his pocket: as a consumer he has a right to respect. had become the dollar. I would prefer also that. Consumption." but rather from labor . for whom the best index of God. lovers will uphold that I and You are one. as in rapturous love.TO Love. 9 It is necessary to respect everybody. I cannot love myself except insofar as I know myself to be absolutely singular. just as in music. according to the viewpoint of Benjamin Franklin. on the other hand. even the lowest of the low. my time be reducible to the time of others: I search originarily for the fusional element that I phantasmatically project in "oceanic"7 feeling. or (in the Greek sense) several intervals forming a mode. "against all the evidence of the senses. It is. the elementary tendency of the composition of time insofar as it is not reducible to becoming while nevertheless always having to reckon with it). I may attach myself to a herd. in the intimate knowledge that I am singular. the condition of harmony. if not its representative. in principle. diachrony. of course. phantasmatically. that is. for without this knowledge I may be overcome by anguish and despair. irreducible to the time of others. extremely dangerous rejection behavior proliferates. Disgust and discredit The system of synchronization put in place by the cultural industries (which aim at the adoption of consumer products through a system of integrated marketing) leads to de-diachronization. in the world of Franklin. It concerns catastrophic phenomena in the strict sense: in a single blow. Now. a market. commensurable.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 65 as the obligation to earn. and thus leadsthrough the loss of love. One can thus ask oneself if. the synchronic insofar as it responds to the diachronic. called the infinite). here including in the pecuniary sense. the wholly unlimited intensification of consumption. testifying to the fact that the unlimited exploitation of consumption engenders a refusal to consume that is itself unlimited (but in another relation to the unlimited. the sole guarantor of God. and hence the loss of all faith and all credit-to ruin. in the generalized reign ofdisgust. synchronizable in totality. that is. the intensification without limit of earning (which is here the index of the infinity of God) implies the extension without limit of markets. if I may put it like this-a suffering of primordial narcissism-which leads to no longer wanting to consume. that is. otherwise put. and thus to grabbing onto a certain number of alibis to justify this refusal to consume. that is. 10 All this makes possible the mad cow and all the phenomena of rejection of consumer products: these processes are the symptoms of a primordial suffering. something or someone can exist and have value if it is not measurable. that is. by all and of all. calculable. His sermons make the pursuit of pecuniary interest a duty and. alibis that correspond moreover to evident realities (the prion is not a phantasm). He is. and capable of being added up. the guarantor of the incommensurability of everybody in relation to each other. as such. But as earnings are not possible without exchange. God is reputedly essentially incommensurable and is. to disbanding through the loss of love of self. in a sense. of the diabolical. . that is. in the intimate knowledge that I am singular. the condition of harmony. as in rapturous love. I am nothing but de-synchronized in relation to the other-in diachrony. engenders an archi-synchronization in which Jam not-where I am targeted no longer as an I but as a consumer." but rather from labor . starting not from consumption that Franklin proposes that "time is money. to Love Us Narcissism. Consumption.To Love. where one needs (in the modern sense starting with counterpoint) several instruments or voices. the elementary tendency of the composition of time insofar as it is not reducible to becoming while nevertheless always having to reckon with it). on the other hand. It is. to Love Me. so long as a cent remains in his pocket: as a consumer he has a right to respect. of course. that is."8 But this desire to rejoin an original fusional milieu is founded in my primordial narcissism. according to the viewpoint of Benjamin Franklin. 9 It is necessary to respect everybody. "against all the evidence of the senses. irreducible to the time of others. had become the dollar. my time be reducible to the time of others: I search originarily for the fusional element that I phantasmatically project in "oceanic"7 feeling. where. in principle. if not its representative. lovers will uphold that I and You are one. even the lowest of the low. that J am not the other. I cannot love myself except insofar as I know myself to be absolutely singular. I would prefer also that. just as in music. phantasmatically. and incommensurabili ty This becoming of calendarity (and the shipwrecked press that has allowed itself to be engulfed-those organs previously devoted to the constitution of public opinion but now submerged in the "mass audience" fabricated by marketing) thus engenders loss of desire insofar as desire depends on primordial narcissism. diachrony. I may attach myself to a herd. for whom the best index of God. for without this knowledge I may be overcome by anguish and despair. and insofar as this in turn depends on primordial diachrony (that is. or (in the Greek sense) several intervals forming a mode. My time is absolutely unique. that is. the sole guarantor of God. to disbanding through the loss of love of self. . His sermons make the pursuit of pecuniary interest a duty and. that is. and capable of being added up. Disgust and discredit The system of synchronization put in place by the cultural industries (which aim at the adoption of consumer products through a system of integrated marketing) leads to de-diachronization. that is. the wholly unlimited intensification of consumption. otherwise put. 10 All this makes possible the mad cow and all the phenomena of rejection of consumer products: these processes are the symptoms of a primordial suffering. It concerns catastrophic phenomena in the strict sense: in a single blow. in the world of Franklin. that is. synchronizable in totality. God is reputedly essentially incommensurable and is. in the generalized reign ofdisgust. the synchronic insofar as it responds to the diachronic. alibis that correspond moreover to evident realities (the prion is not a phantasm). He is. as such. called the infinite). commensurable. a market. But as earnings are not possible without exchange. by all and of all. One can thus ask oneself if. the intensification without limit of earning (which is here the index of the infinity of God) implies the extension without limit of markets. something or someone can exist and have value if it is not measurable. testifying to the fact that the unlimited exploitation of consumption engenders a refusal to consume that is itself unlimited (but in another relation to the unlimited. that is. here including in the pecuniary sense. and thus to grabbing onto a certain number of alibis to justify this refusal to consume. of the diabolical. calculable.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 65 as the obligation to earn. extremely dangerous rejection behavior proliferates. in a sense. and hence the loss of all faith and all credit-to ruin. if I may put it like this-a suffering of primordial narcissism-which leads to no longer wanting to consume. and thus leadsthrough the loss of love. Now. the guarantor of the incommensurability of everybody in relation to each other. in the individuation of a we where. The theater of individuation and the memories of man Simondon. all of these in a succession of personages. which may oppose one another. in primordial inadequation as originary default of the . I do not exist other than in a group: my individuation is the individuation of my group-with which nevertheless I am not confounded. adapting their action and inaction to the constraints of the system-struggling. and thus sinking into discredit. It is impossible to draw the traits from each of these roles and put them all together. forms that have never ceased to incorporate the facts by renouncing the exigency of a difference between facts and norms. which intensifies the inadequation of the I to itself. This is what Jouvet says: "The same man can at the same time be a good father. against inflation by colluding with the marketing of mass distribution. Perhaps the commander of infantry will have difficulties with the Catholic.11 shows that for the I to individuate itself. This series of personages do not simply succeed one another. Are we in accord? There are within this person continuous ways of passing from infantry commander to communist or to the MRp'12 and this in turn creates problems. and even have conflicts between them. and thus I may be in opposition with myself. for example. Catholic. to Love Us To this rejection of and disgust for industrial society as consumer society corresponds the rejection of political discourse and representation. lies in the fact of the default of origin. my individuation must participate in the process of collective individuation. which may be in disharmony."13 I can thus endlessly adopt different personages. moreover. in L'individuation psychique et collective. a judge in court or commander of infantry. but it is not this that makes a person. and. to Love Me.66 To Love. Now the possibility of such a multiple belonging. that is. insofar as I am an 1. or atheist. I have always already found myself inscribed. Protestant. I may belong to several groups. Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 67 process of individuation. And this fact is itself the origin of the original adoptive situation of man, in which consists his technicity, that is, his originary articulation with the prosthesis (the technical object), which constitutes his primordial milieu as well as his default of origin. Hominization, the appearance of the living being that we ourselves are-we, that is, "Man" (who disgusts god) 14_is the appearance of a being constituted not by two memories (where Weismann identifies the germ and the soma as being the two sources of memory that constitute a living sexed being), but rather three, the third memory being that of the technical milieu essential to that living being. From Weismann to contemporary molecular biology, the living sexed being is constituted by two memories: species memory, which is replayed each time one has a fecund sexual life and which recombines chromosomes, thus remixing the genetic patrimony of the species (and each living being is a carrier of that memory), and the individual nervous memory of that living sexed being. Animals have an individual memory, which is what makes it possible for them to be trained: chimpanzees, poodles, but also annelids, sea snails, great pond snails; one can submit them to an apprenticeship, through the work of conditioning. There is a plasticity of individual animal memory, and the farther one heads toward the higher animals, the greater the plasticity. But from the annelids to the great apes-the great ape being an outer limit-the apprenticeship of the individual cannot be transmitted to the species. This is why acquired characteristics are not inheritable. The negentropic potential of the nonhuman life form relies on the structural impermeability between genetic memory-the germ-and somatic memory, that is, the nervous memory of the individual animal. The evolution of species through the contingent recombination of chromosomes-which is independent of the individual goals of each animal-is what produces the negentropic diversification of life. Nevertheless, millions of years ago a life form appeared that, to guarantee its viability, needed to give itself prostheses. As Leroi-Gourhan says, it is naked, deprived of a viable natural defense 68 TO Love, to Love Me, to Love Us system. And it surrounds itself with fabricated objects-with flint cutting tools, and then with the billions of objects of mass consumption produced by industrialization. In a certain manner, technological diversification has today become more important than biological diversification. This is the appearance of the third memory, which I name epiphylogenetic. Genetic memory, which is transmitted from generation to generation, combines with the epigenetic memory of individual experience, which becomes transmissible through technical objects. This third memory is also that of the third person-that is, what we must name the he,15 condition and bond of the I and the we. When I inherit an object, a flint cutting tool, for example, I inherit through it its mode of use, that is, the gestures, the motor behaviors that lead to the production of the flint cutting tool. With the appearance of technical objects, a new stratum of memory is constituted, which permits the transmission from generation to generation of individual experience and permits mutualization in the form of what we call a we. This permitted me to say to you earlier: "I, Bernard Stiegler, of German parents, am nonetheless French." This is only possible because I inherit traces of a we-for example, the sans-culottes, which form part of the fictive past of France-which I have appropriated, forming an artificial retentional milieu, a mnemotechnical milieu that I adopt and that permits me in this way to individuate myself in a we called "France." And today's question is to know how to fabricate the we of Europe. A provisional response, and one by default: certainly not by reproducing the American machine for the liquidation of the we. This third memory, as the "third person," and as the he, is also the condition of the Book that speaks the He, that is, it is what sends us back to the absolute past, toward that which accumulated memory sends us as the utterly immemorial, as what Blanchot called the "awfully ancient," and which the Old Testament designates as "Eternal Father."16 The Book, as third memory, is that which therefore supports the cult-with the rosary that, as Pascal notes, sustains faith. That is to say, also, credit. Between the two world wars, and above all after the second, an Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 69 important mutation is produced in the history of spirit, that is, in the history of epiphylogenesis, of the third person, of the he, and which is the "death of the He," which Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche designate as the death of God: industry takes hold of that which becomes the premier metamaterial-consciousness. Our consciousnesses. Our times ofconsciousness. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that consciousness is a primary material, since it is "on the side of" spirit and not the body. The epiphylogenetic character of human time, however, directly affects consciousness, which is the very reality of human time. Consciousness is materially overdetermined and originarily constituted by the fact that the flesh which incarnates and supports it is itself in movement-that is, moved-and supported by the process of exteriorization, the results of which I described as epiphylogenesis, that is, as the system of prosthetic supports of which the electronic technologies controlling time-consciousness are the most recent epoch. But, equally, consciousness is essentially memory (of the past), itself inscribed in imagination (of the future). Now, the epiphylogenetic stratum in which technical objects consist is a material retentional milieu that fundamentally affects retentional and protentional activity (that is, the phenomena of expectations, of protentions, engendered by retentions, by "memories") of conSClOusness. This is why in the course of the twentieth century, with the appearance of mass media, which are retentional technologies, the mind can be targeted and commercialized as a mode ofaccess to the market. "The market" is essentially a mass of consciousnesses, inhabiting the mass of consuming bodies. To launch a new toothpaste it is necessary to pass through these markets of time-consciousness that the mass media are. TFr sells time-consciousness to advertisers, and the price is easily calculated. Consider the fact that an hour's worth of prime-time advertising on TFr returns 500,000 euros. If the station attains an audience of fifteen million consciousnesses for one hour, the price of an hour of consciousness on that channel is approximately three cents. This is not expensive. When we watch TFr, our consciousness is not worth very much. the clients are the advertisers. industry tends to cause the adoption of behavior. spectators constitute a "primary material" for sale. The absorption of the he Mnemotechnologies put to work by cultural industries are nothing but the industrial exploitation of the fact that memory is always artifactually produced. you are led immediately to think the same thing as others. the loss of individuation of both the I and the we. giving the they. When audiences of this kind are synchronized. at the same time as others). to no longer constitute a we but rather a they. In the twentieth century. which is also that of program catalogues and data files of subscribers." reaching daily not just dozens but hundreds of millions of consciousnesses. it is to "get" consciousness at a "better price" on the global market. to Love Us When America Online and Time Warner merge. "productivity gains. they tend. In that average!? the difference between I and we is diluted. This operation may founder-the frenzy of speculators in this field has never been so great in industrial history. your consciousness) watch television (and you necessarily watch it with others. I don't want to say that when you (that is. that is. to Love Me. and through them." it is a transitory material state)-and these consciousnesses are mental states engendering in their turn motor behaviors. has the goal of creating economies of scale. memory becomes the object of systematic industrial exploitation because . that is. at the heart of which alone can one individuate oneself. The "primary material" is what one calls the audience. When the mass media target consciousnesses insofar as they are metamarkets. I mean to say that television is a process that tends to make you conform progressively to an average. material states incorporated by the said "consciousnesses" (because the information is not "immaterial. This industrial fusion. This mimetic madness nevertheless has causes which concern the very limits I am trying here to discern in the perenniality of the process. a mass of consciousnesses controlled by systems and processes for diffusing signals-that is. asymptotically.To Love. on the other hand. that is. to minimize lead time. that is to say. With the integration of mnemotechnologies into the sphere of production-which tends to guarantee the synchronization of production and consumption. beyond the I and the we. the big Other (already in Aristotle the infinite cause of desire). disbanding begins-which is also the reign of the in-significant. knowledge. inventing. has become immanent. this process . The combat of becoming and the future: Conjugating. those who. art. This epiphylogenetic stratum constitutes the time of consciousness. in the traces of the he that has become. All incommensurability-that transcendence which up until then had been expressed by the fact of the separation of the clerics-has been suppressed. if we want to speak the language of Lacan. entrepreneurs. 19 If "God is dead. This is what remains for thought-as that which is contained in the remains. in principle. in its death. such that it tends toward the a-significant. in essence the "spiritual. the great third that constitutes authority as such. the primary material of consciousness commensurable on the marker.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 71 markets become accessible through the metamarket of consciousness. going by the name of "clerics"-ecclesiastical or lay-were in charge of religion. those who produce material goods. This incommensurable third could also be called. law. dia-bolical. a very long-term process that it would be deluded to "resist." the "devil" is still alive and well. It is the milieu common to all consciousnesses that industry wishes to grasp and exploit-it is this that is absolutely new. to make production work ''just in time"18-t hese two worlds became fused: the he. Until the nineteenth century there was a structural separation between the world of producers. politics. has been integrated. disconnecting. Nevertheless. With the absorption of this third." There were two separate worlds." Leroi-Gourhan summarizes this tendency with a concept that I have myself taken up: exteriorization. excepting oneself The integration of technical and mnemotechnical systems is a fact. and. in that sense. One can only negotiate with it. Rather than thinking through opposition. And such invention is nothing other than combat. Becoming is a process we never master. 20 This hypothesis notwithstanding. differences. moreover. that is. because of a failure to distinguish what is related to becoming. at least from Nietzsche's time. then he will no longer be called man-a transformation. it would be necessary to find another supportfor diachronicity and desire other than man-thus the question remains. he is nevertheless not only technical. it is a matter of inventing. But negotiating does not mean renouncing or adapting. It is not a blind determinism and. one must take account ofthe conjunctivity ofproblems. to Love Us opens alternative possibilities. what I call hypersynchronization. It is a matter neither ofadapting nor resisting. But then. questions of political economy are suggested that are still poorly identified. for the process to continue. From the nineteenth century. in an elimination of general differences. man is a prosthetic life form. economic. If one day he becomes entirely technical. in that framework. We must negotiate.72 To Love. This is why contemporary philosophy denounces the Cartesian discourse of mastery. there where it seems at first to consist. perhaps already partly accomplished as the transformation of life in biotechnology. Becom- . psychological. it is necessary to compose the problem of conjunctivity. as mere becoming. the process. and what is related to time. which is itself nothing other than radical critique. and. to intervene in the real. it is preferable to proceed through composition. modern thought begins to admit that one cannot master becoming. this process requires that we make choices. and so on-to be brief. because this conjunctivity is traversed by tendencies that concern what we call becoming. Now. to Love Me. which is another thing entirely. it is anthropological. that which we make of the process. Even if technics is constitutive of anthropology. sociological. The production of differences cannot take place other than through a critique ofwhat in the process condemns the process itself The pragmatic that I use to treat these questions consists in proposing that there are conjunctions and that. A problem is never purely technical: it is also legal. of temporarily "resisting. be in excess of it. in advance. on the condition that we can say we. as least as that which in the process is at the same time its delay and its advance. eventually. of deliberation and action. the question of evil is a dangerous question. inventive." Without us. that I am capable. this complex is nothing." on condition that I do not reason by simple oppositions. to operate disjunctions. a complex movement where each one tries to "find one's place. we are the dynamic inadequation of this complex: insofar as we can say we. eventually." I cannot resist by protesting: I must have intelligence about it. we exceed this process. a bad question-it is in a certain sense the evil itself. however. and by that same fact already be. I am at the same time capable of putting it to work through my capacity for invention-and thus. I buy toothpaste X rather than toothpaste Y) and macro-decisions (I vote for a candidate for the presidency of the Republic or decide to press a red button to destroy a population with atomic weapons-or I send an armed force to Iraq). As such. But there are always choices to make. of not being able to control the effects. while others are enormous. that is. such that this we is precisely not a they.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 73 ing is a movement that one must understand in order. This means that I decide. that is. and that. The question of evil and the thought of tendencies For someone who does not know how to reason in terms of tendencies. composing with the process. we stand. Time is the question of that choice. To think in terms of tendencies is to think that that against which one fights . Some are very small. So. if not before or after this process. on the condition. well beyond my capacity for "resistance. the menacing question or the question that Nietzsche considers to be the villain. of opposing myse/fto this process. There are decisions to make: micro-decisions (for example. inconceivable. we are even the exception that can unsettle the process-through disjunctions. Reality is conjunctive. to inscribe it in impulsions. Consequently. in total calculability in the service of the greatest possible and most immediate profit. and if one opposes there a countertendency. insofar as that tendency tends to become hegemonic (and in fact all tendencies tend toward hegemony against another hegemony). most of the time without having any impression of harboring bad intentions. while the minor improvements of the reformists hide the necessity for "quantum leaps" in that becoming which individuation is). and disadjustment-what the ancient Greeks named eris. This is what puts dissensus. getting out of phase [dephasage]. which designates emulation and competition. to Love Us is necessary. one must know that the tendency against which onefights is the condition ofthe tendency for which one fights. that is. thinking through tendencies excludes seeing in the adversary an enemy who is the cause of evil.at the very heart of becoming (such is the Simondonian theory of quantum leaps) and as its very possibility. Not that of Aristotle's ethics but. nor the mass. nor consensus. that is. It is the spirit of this eris. . The obvious difficulty of such a manner of thinking and acting is that it seems to take one back to the discourse of the golden mean. as Simondon says. In reality. it is not a matter of eliminating the tendency being combated but of composing tendencies. in modern language. That is. the discourse that systematically ignores radical questions (which are the only true questions. From this point of view. the discourse of reformism and adaptation. to Love Me. if one fights against a tendency.74 To Love. those that produce major improvements. that the organization of consumption degrades in the commensurability of all diachronies. The adversary is not an enemy who is the cause of evil-in other words he is not the evil-but is caught in a hegemonic tendency of which he has become the vector. the spokesperson. nothing is more radical than a critique that prohibits itself from diabolizing the adversary or the tendency-because the counterpart of the thought of the process as the irreducibility of one tendency to another is the thought that what permits the (re)com-position of tendencies in the process of individuation is the exception: that which is neither the average. nor adaptation. at the same time economic. unified by the TCP-IP protocol. What is important is the filters. A mutation has been produced in the world of networks since 1992. contrary to appearances. The search engines that permit the ranking of information charge those whom they reference. which decomposes the social fabric and exhausts desire in opposing synchronization and diachronization. is access." and the reactivity that inclines the tendency toward hypersynchronization. by rendering the diachronization of consciousnesses impossible through the control of mass retentional processes. as Jeremy Rifkin has shown well. via the digital. geopolitical. This is always a question of selection. The question of the network. and is still reinforcing it. I believe more than anything else in the necessity of acting in this domain. The Google search . has manifestly changed the organizational setup of the program industries. A building site These are the networks of communication and information that diffuse industrial temporal objects and constitute the infrastructure of hypersynchronization. This network of networks. I repeat. it is only possible as combat. if this is even possible-and. 21 For so many. they constitute a privileged terrain of combat and a field for social invention that could be extremely fertile. with the appearance of the Internet. and ecological (it is a matter of an ecology of the milieus of spirit)-this critique must analyze in every detail the manner in which the rupture that makes imaginable and possible a technological mutation of the digital (as the possibility for demassifying the diffusion of information and industrial temporal objects) has already been invested in and controlled by the industrial retentional system placed into the service of consumption and hypersynchronization. the critique that must accompany invention. These must be systematically explored. renders new perspectives conceivable.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 75 in the service of "just in time. And there is no doubt that this transformation of industrial technology. has the effect of homogenizing secondary retention. that is. The media deploy industrial technology for the exploitation of consciousness. through this. Individuation is not individualization. because pro- . and do so through the imposition of retentional criteria. to Love Us engine. Our supposedly individualistic societies are in reality perfectly conformist." identifiable through "markers" that are much more interesting to marketing than is political society. You are locked into your synchronicity. for example. Another access and navigation technique. This is the manner in which the diverse in general unifies itself asymptotically in an indivisible way. Nietzsche saw very clearly this lost capacity to produce a difference and the tendency of societies falsely named "individualistic" to deny the exception. where an hour of consciousness is worth the sum of the advertising receipts divided by the number of viewers. thus systematically reinforcing social mimetism and herdish behavior. of difference. and. prevented from changing. The control of retention implies the loss of identity.To Love. 22 consists in identifying your search behavior in order to propose something to you before you even have the idea of asking for it. Individualization is the result of individuation. reduced to socio-professional categories or "tribes. I tend to become myself-"me" as indivisible. And this is an essential cause (if not the only cause) of what I call ill-being. what is pursued amounts to hypersegmentation. This control of retentional systems where consciousness is a market. Singularity in the process of individuation What Simondon called the trans-individual is constituted by the epiphylogenetic domain of technical objects that I inherit. I tend to become indivisible-but I never get there. a marketing strategy for identifying ultraprecise niches. This is how behavior is standardized. is a system that requires the "people meter" [audimat]: it proposes to you that which has been most in demand. If this is not a programming of consciousness. user profiling. in the Pavlovian sense of these terms. it is conditioning and reinforcement. as pure unity-but I never get there. to Love Me. crystallize. when they are finished. with the qualification that psychic and collective individuation (of the I in the we) is a syn-crystallization that structurally fails. to the degree that it is always inadequate to itself-which is the inscription ofits diachrony in its synchrony. through which this I that individuates itself. acts. I can only attain the pure present when I am dead-but upon dying I will no longer be there. all sorts of things: those objects in which. within the group. I alter myself I reveal myself as other. Insofar as I belong to a group. objects.. I am. a singularity that nourishes the group in alterity. the garden I cultivated. whereas a crystal succeeds in congealing completely. or the phrases. I am always out of phase with myself: I am never in a pure present. I aim to individuate myself. I can become an ancestor who leaves traces. works-where by "works" I do not mean my "complete works" but rather perhaps the library I bought. and thus I will never succeed in individuating myself properly speaking. they have not reached their goal: having ended. Milieus of the we A process of individuation always puts in playa tension harboring a potential. in one way or another. Or.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 77 cesses of individuation are never finished. Being dead. that came to its finish by default. because I am inhabited by an inadequation that is my diachrony. In other words.. however. to become indivisible. something of my singularity is inscribed-"something of my singularity" meaning my inadequation with myself that is. A process of individuation is that which structurally cannot be completed . they have run aground. Life . or gestures by which. Individuation is the syn-crystallization of a mother liquid. of a potential that can catalyze. but in the asymptotic quest for my indivisibility. every process of individuation is dynamic. take the form of a crystal. with the group. and which has come to the end of its individuation-it is dead-may eventually become a source for a new process of individuation for its descendants: for we who inherit from this I that individuated itself by default. unless it carries on through a process of transmission. and I reindividuate. I reread my proper preindividual ground. as I am speaking to you. April 21 had not yet taken place. The chance of a we Nevertheless. the library that is here behind bars. I am in the process of individuating myself. at the very moment that I speak to you: individuating myself means seeking to constitute the symbolic coherence of . 25 But at that time. it is necessary that my individuation take part in the individuation of a we to which I belong-and which has a part in this individuation. caught in a process of metastable equilibrium. The potential of the I and the we is the legacy of this metastability (equilibrium at the limit of disequilibrium) that I inherit through traces. There are localizations in the capacities for appropriating the preindividual potential that open common scenes of individuation forming precisely the we. 24 And thus individuation has a history: one does not individuate oneself in the Australopithicus epoch in the same way as in the Cro-Magnon epoch. even if it is not completely new-I have already spoken of these things in this very place. Now that it has taken place. It is everything transmitted to me that is memorable. and the conditions of individuation are transformed by the evolution of technics. all these memories. I would not share the space of Jerusalem with practicing Muslims in the same way as would another Muslim. And these memories I share with others-more or less. These traces are the monuments of the dead. the chateau at Cerisy with its phantoms. And the they does not individuate itself today-in the hyperindustrial epoch-as during the industrial revolution: the epiphylogenetic milieu has been transformed. The epiphylogenetic preindividual milieu is the theater of individuation of which Simondon speaks. to Love Me. to Love Us is a crystal that does not reach crystallization. There are conflicts over sharing. 23 It is also TFI. over heritage. as Greek citizens or during the industrial revolution. At this moment.TO Love. for the I to individuate itself. Obviously. I propose a new argument. if I was a practicing Jew in Israel. which is called pure synchrony. Madness is at the heart of the process of individuation: it is the energy itself of individuation. A group is always between equilibrium and disequilibrium. Colloquium at Cerisy: Metastability Cerisy is a group. Metastability produces movement. but rather always at the border of both: at the border of pure equilibrium. . and it is called madness. is open to the future. Only here can there be the chance for a we: that we might understand each other. without future or temporality.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 79 my discourse. which we share in psychically and collectively individuating through conferences to form such a group. through an appropriate calendarity. and this is why in a moment we could perhaps have a debate. neither in equilibrium nor in disequilibrium. remains to come. If my individuation succeeds. total atomization. which we hope will befecund-this is the condition ofa we. the crystal being purely synchronic. it would lead to an explosion of the group-atomization. and this is the object of our discussion. entropy. of pure diachrony. it will have to have succeeded in you-but not at all in the same manner. and of disequilibrium. because what I am in the process of telling you I hear and interpret one way while you hear it ANOTHER way. it would be a totally ossified crystal. pulverization. Because in my discourse something is still inadequate. absolute disequilibrium. in spite of this inadequation and because of it-in this fact lies the possibility and necessity of affirming that. completed diabelein. Disequilibrium exists in groups. precisely. The goal of a decade at Cerisy is to give ourselves the means. It is a metastable process precisely in that it is not stable: if it was. the future lies in this very inadequation itself. calendarized and cardinalized to be channeled and to form something that creates movement without leading to disintegration. if it was totally unstable. yes. that is. but it is an energy that must be. for the mobilization of a preindividual ground. But I will only succeed in individuating myself tendentially (to reinforce my "potential" for individuation) ifI succeed in making you individuate yourselves with me. things well understood by archaeologists. because I share with others. in what a German has called "das Man. with other Is. to Love Us Pure disequilibrium is the collapse of movement. which are not necessarily religious-and fetishes that will lead to both Marxian and Freudian fetishism (Marx conceived of commodities essentially as fetishes). which refers to moments of prayer. singing. for millennia. a common calendar. When I watch the television news each day at the same time with around fifteen million people in France. Pure equilibrium is immobility preceding movement. Between these two is fragile metastabiii ty." the they-he himself fell into this they. to Love Me. Das Man Calendarity.80 To Love. but the confusion of the Is and the we: totalitarianism as the elimination of the differences of the 1 and the we. These are the technical concretions of the relation to space and time through calendar and cardinal systems. primitive accumulation. has meant that I have the feeling of belonging to a we. moments of concelebration. fetishes in general. linked to the conditions of the flooding of the Nile. which permit the metastabilization of the potential for madness that the group always contains. festival. When they are integrated in an epiphylogenetic industrial system-where there is no longer any distinction between the spiritual world of the clerics and the world of production in the new world of consumption-the calendrical and cardinal systems lose their efficacy. Six years after having announced the danger of das Man he wore the swastika. I point this out not to condemn the memory of Heidegger (the heritage and inadequations of which are at the heart of all of these questions) but to remind us of a certain prudence and modesty: . Calendar and cardinal systems are the stabilizers that serve to create the metastatic-the technics of space and of time. One can analyze these in a precise and historical way: hence the emergence of the Egyptian calendar from its conditions of appearance. a synchronization of the 1 is produced that is no longer the care of an lor of an ensemble of Is in the interior of a we. If we do not enact an ecological critique of the technologies and the industries of the spirit. absolute atomization and suicidal behavior is produced-such as that of April 21. Osama bin Laden. that is. But at the same time. Richard Durn. if we do not show that the unlimited exploitation of spirits as markets leads to a ruin comparable to that which the Soviet Union and the great capitalist countries have been able to create by exploiting territories or natural resources without any care to preserve their hab- . I argue that this diachronic tension-which is the condition of the individuation of a we. that is. And if I speak to you. when it concerns information. George W. whether it be the flint cutting tool at the beginning of hominization or material states at the order of the pico-second. bombarding our consciousness and conditioning our mental states. I can only speak to you because I think that a synchrony between us is possible. collapses. for otherwise I would say nothing to you. April 21 The commodification of consciousness is essentially synchronic. Collapses: September II. it is because I think I have something to tell you. You don't know it: you hope that I am in structural diachrony in relation to you (hoping that I thus promise a synchrony to come-but to the infinite). which circulate extremely quickly. as is often seen in times of great reactivity. The spirit consists in states of matter. and perhaps the opposite is true.Destruction ofpsychic and collective individuation 81 it is not by denouncing the they that one avoids the risk of falling into it. this inadequation between I and we that is the condition of the existence of the I and the we--in the present epiphylogenetic epoch. From then on. of a synchrony that remains always to come. or other forms of toxicomania. in the epoch of the industrial exploitation of mnemotechnical supports. March 26. Information is not immaterial but is rather a flux of material states. You only listen to me because you think I have something to tell you. Bush. whereas you listen to me because I am a diachronic consciousness-and I can only speak to you because you are diachronic consciousnesses. the problem has come into greater focus. I fear that all this is merely the beginning of a long and arduous path." critique." What more than anything is evil is 0 UR renunciation ofthought in favor ofthe denunciation ofevil. Pure equilibrium is the loss of desire that creates atomization. . the decomposition of the social. Such is the veritable "diabolical" that is masked by the demonizing [diabolisation] of supposedly rogue states supposedly linked to an "axis of evil. that is. combat. not fall into equilibrium or disequilibrium-which is the same thing: pure equilibrium creates absolute disequilibrium-but rather produce new movement. that is. in other words. Since then. here at Cerisy. and combat We spoke already of these questions and these threats a year ago. April 21 has taken place. and thus through an analysis of the conditions in which metastability can again become metastable. On this path one must cast all doubt aside to fight the imminent possibility of the total atomization of the we. to Love Me. that is. invention. that is. just after September II. Hypersynchronization creates hyperdiachronization. What is evil is the we. that renounces critique and invention or. The "diabolical. to Love Us itability to come-the future-then we move ineluctably toward a global social explosion. disquieted about the future of the we. This path passes through a critique of what spirit is today.To Love. toward absolute war. at the Centre GeorgesPompidou. Humanism. Maurice Blanchot. Even if this "just as much as" is not an "as". can touch on themes sometimes outside of the philosophical 'mode'-such as God. Plato. What is thought?-considered from a perspective that sees the defense of philosophy as one of the urgent contemporary civic principles. II. practices that suspend the ordina~whether these are experiences of religious life. 7. L. "Vocation. p. on this point. 147. 3. of thought. 2003. The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stiegler. 4. of painting (such is the extra-ordinariness of Mont 83 . Being. How to Do Things with WOrds (Oxford: Oxford University Press. whom I thank. Catherine Clement. 1989). 1993). 6. II-U. 1962). 8. which proposes to reinscribe the philosophical project in the intimacy and secret of a life. in the context of the "Les Revues Parlees" lecture series.Notes How I Became a Philosopher 1." 2. at the invitation of Marianne Alphant. La Technique et Ie Temps. 3. 2001). cf. Le temps du cinema et fa question du mal-etre (Paris: Galilee. p. Austin. J." article in Encyclopaedia Univer- salis. Gilbert Simondon. They are found not in experience but rather in extraordinary experiences and at the limit ofthe social-as that which delimits the social. LIndividuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne. pp. Crito 53e. The topic was: "Philosophers reflect on their path: Why and how has one come to philosophy? Why does one become a philosopher? Why does one remain a philosopher? This series. 5. This text was delivered on April 23. 4. music. Michel Schneider speaks of Durn's "narcissism of death" in Esprit. that is. is the difference between being and beings-which never ceases to be forgotten as we tend always to reduce the significant to the insignificant. p. 1996). The difference between significant and insignificant is the concrete but always changing reality of great differences that take place in the history of thought. 3. 4. Le Monde. Stephane Mallarme. Which finds the possibility of the world constituted by the transcendental ego. Because I will propose that the hypomnesic supplementarity of the world is constitutive. The crime of Lance Corporal Lortie in Canada immediately springs to mind. 9. La desorientation (Paris: Galilee. 3. 2. Richard Durn murdered eight members of the Nanterre city council. On this matter. part 2. trans. formulated by Heidegger. as accidental facticity.Notes Sainte-Victoire). II. 14. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press. literature. and so on. at the invitation of Edith Heuregon and Josee Landrieu. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard. to Love Us. ed. La Technique et le Temps. La Technique et Ie Temps. Collected Poems. 76. Part I 1. and Le . On March 26. a reduction toward which our terrible idleness does not cease to seduce us. I develop this concept. Henri Mondor & G. 2. CA: Stanford University Press. 2002. April 10. 2002. Oeuvres completes. oflistening. 12. Oeuvres completes. 3. 3. in relation to the Husserlian concepts of primary and secondary retention. p. 1-2. of which the most recent. 10. in Technics and Time. TO Love. 1945). 84. 2002. 1998). at the opening of the colloquium "Of the I and the We: Working Together in the City. and from another viewpoint. Stephane Mallarme. 15. ch. and La Technique et Ie Temps. of writing. which Pierre Legendre analyzed in Le crime du caporal Lortie: Traite sur le pere (Paris: Fayard. the original is in Mallarme. and that this world.2002. I: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford. May 2002. 1989). p. 1994). This book takes up and develops the text of a lecture delivered at Cerisy-Ia-Salle. Stiegler. is therefore irreducible. of dance. Prospective IV. each forming as many modalities of flight beyond the element. chs. ch." on June 9. 13. to Love Me. 368. by the constituting subjectivity. He committed suicide on March 28. James Strachey. and Other Studies. L'Aube (2003). 138." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological "W{}rks ofSigmund Freud. this default is that which makes mistakes in the fictional character of the self as much as of the community-producing so many histories.000 euros through economies of scale. Fran<. synchronized. p. for this product. writes Jean Lauxerois.. William G. "Psychoanalysis. 2003. trans. Now. Thus a prototype automobile costing a million euros to make can see its price in the market reduced to 20. I. 139-40 . 1955). pp. entitled L'amicalitt. through this object. But this presumes the constitution. IO. the reduction of production costs.ois Ascher & Francis Godard (dir. by inscribing negentropy outside of this living. See the translation by Jean Lauxerois of books VIII and IX.). Ibid." September 8. vol. and in "Le pied de la . 2002). 88). 175-77. II. The process of adoption is consubstantial with the process of individuation. Aristotle. 5. 156 . Hutchison (London: Walter Scott. Sigmund Freud. at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Paris. p. 6. 13. I. ed. translation modified. which concerns. 61-83. of a market of global dimensions and the organization of consumption through pressure applied to the entire world's consumers. I have developed this concept of the they in La Technique et Ie Temps. This is because human time exceeds the process of negative entropy by which Schrodinger and Brillouin characterized the living. 3. An economy of scale permits. 2002. 1896). and his epilogue. 18 (London: Hogarth Press. This is what I examined in the first two chapters of Technics and Time. 9. November 12. The default is what modern philosophy does not know how to think. pp.Notes Monde. 12. 8. Ernest Renan. and Lauxerois demonstrates this also in his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus the IJrant. 7. "What Is a Nation?" in The Poetry of the Celtic Races. Vincent de Gaulejac also gave a very interesting presentation analyzing Durn's passage to the act during the colloquium "Llndividu Hypermoderne. p. whose modes of life are therefore. Nicomachean Ethics. 249. and as characteristic of the human's vital milieu and what I call its epiphylogenetic memory in Technics and Time. through the production of a series of the same object. "A titre amical" (Paris: A Propos. "thinking today the default as bond of self to self and as the site of all possible community" (p. " Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W W Norton. 15. a populism tending to attribute individual. Disbanding captures Stiegler's reference here to his discussion of the breakdown of the dy~ namic of individual and collective individuation. and is an expression typical of a certain leftist populism. debandade means the disbanding of a group that results when it loses its unity and its members drift apart. Translator's footnote: Literally. p. He thinks narcissism according to the habitual notions that take it as pathological. La decadence des democraties industrielles (Paris: Galilee. forthcoming from Editions Galilee. The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay. For all that. 14. And the question is then to think the default oforigin that constitutes the we: such is the constant intention of the five volumes (of which two are yet to appear) of Technics and Time. permit me to refer to pp. Translators' note. The literal definition of sauvageon is a child who will not submit to any kind of discipline. which will be the title of La Technique et Ie Temps. 17.86 Notes lettre. 3. if not racial. Jacques Lacan. 2004). 2. but it is also a word that has been taken up in French political discourse. 19. 5. 26-28 of this volume. See note 13 above (on Aristotle) and Comme si nous faisons difaut [As if we were lacking]. Cf. August 29. It has been used. La mecreance et discredit I. Now. 1977). 1957). 2003. characteristics to behavioral problems. See Bernard Stiegler. 90-91). psychological. La Technique et Ie Temps. On the question of the significant and the insignificant. 21. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. 16. 87. for instance. 18." his magnificent epilogue (Paris: A Propos. Le difaut qu'ilfaut [The necessary default]. The characterization of this debandade as a "symptom of a liquidation of desire" is elaborated in relation to Freud's notion of libidinal energy in the following section." which is the subject of pages n8-20 of L'amicalid. 20. what I am trying to suggest here is that primordial narcissism is precisely the default that we must think-beneath (on this side of) and beyond the "petit narcissism" of "petites differences. by the French minister of the interior. Jean-Pierre Chevenement. 2001). Vance Packard. p. . Le Monde. I myself have for a long time explored this question of default. Lauxerois seems to suggest that the inability to cope with the default leads to narcissism (pp. No Logo (London: Flamingo. MA: MIT 1993). The annual global turnover from football today is 200 billion euros. 358. 6. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity. Ibid. consists in a peculiar feeling. 356. 3. but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems.Notes 22. in Standard Edition. 21. One may. Naomi Klein. Gesture and Speech (Cambridge. he thinks. 5. P. 4. Pensee unique is a French term developed as part of a critique of certain political tendencies in France and elsewhere. 2000). 2000). Jeremy Rifkin. But it has become. Cf. to Love Me. is a purely subjective fact.' a feeling as of something limitless. Civilization and Its Discontents. he says. an essential vector of global calendarity in the service of consumption. and doubtless also exhausted by them. Translators' note. The World Cup was created in 1930 with an essentially sporting goal in mind. The Hidden Persuaders. Freud. p. Press.. p. 25· Andre Leroi-Gourhan. he adds. 64 and following. 397. translation modified. 6+ Freud cites someone who responds by letter to his book on religion as an illusion. rightly . Part II 1. It refers to the convergence of mainstream political discourse around what is broadly referred to as neoliberalism and to the feeling that there is in fact less and less difference to be found between ostensibly "opposed" political parties. it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality. Ibid. Andre Gorz. The Age ofAccess: The New Culture ofHypercapitalism Where All Life Is a Paid-For Experience (New York: G. to Love Us. 7. which he finds confirmed by many others. Putnam. vol. 2. p. directed by them into particular channels. 'oceanic. not an article of faith.' This feeling. agreeing with the judgment but offering his own account of the true source of religious sentiment: "This. p. Vance Packard. 23· 24. L'immateriel: Connaissance. To Love. and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. which he himself is never without. p. Ibid. unbounded-as it were. with television. 2003). valeur et capital (Paris: Galilee.. 16. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin. December 12. 26-30. And in this regard one must reflect on the remark of Pope John Paul II: "God does not reveal much. The Space ofLiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press." Cesure (September 1995). 48-50. 15. seeming to hide in his heaven. 1949-1951. Gilbert Simondon. 2002. the masculinity of which Stiegler is referring to in what follows. 21. and in La Technique et le Temps. What is being translated here as "the he' is. note 10. The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. seemingly disgusted by the actions of humanity. a defunct French political party. this is because the text elaborates on this "third" in terms of God and of Lacan's symbolic order (also termed by Lacan "the name of the father"). I personally explored these questions as well when I was director of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) and at the University . 66. L'individuation psychique et collective. 1998). Ibid. I distinguish between in-significance and a-significance above. On the hegemony of the average. I thank Patrick Talbot for having brought this article to my attention." cf.tre. in French. lIivre et penser comme des porcs (Paris: Exils. 1930). both senses are important to Stiegler. Symboles et diaboles. and it is the relation between them that he is attempting to think. c£ Maurice Blanchot. translation modified. Of course. On the ii.. even if one rejects every belief and every illusion. In English in the original. forthcoming from Editions Galilee. pp. pp. 12." which of course could also be translated as "the it. I outlined this in "Ce qui fait defaut.See above. Translators' note. one can read with profit Gilles Chatelet. on the "awfully ancient." 8." and thus contains a reference to the artifactual. p. in silence. 14. 18. 1993). 71. p. Blanchot. Louis ]ouvet. 19. 13. "Cours au Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique. The Mouvement Republicain Populaire." Revue de fa Societe d'Histoire du ThM. If we prefer to retain the sense of the masculine rather than the artifactual in this translation. 17. La Republica. 4. Cf. 9. 229. 1982). II. 20. or technical basis of what Stiegler calls the "third" (person). Max Weber. 10. p. "le il.88 Notes call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone. the he." Cf. Translators' note. Massimo Cacciari. prosthetic. ou la guerre des esprits. On this question. In English in the original. The lecture on which this text was based was delivered in the library at the chateau of Cerisy-la-Salle. See notably "La numerisation des objets temporels. 1998)." in Cinema et dernieres technologies (INNDe Boeck University.)." Intellectica (1999). 22. In September 2001." in Christian Jacob (dir. 25. 2003)." Futur Anterieur (Spring 1994)." under the direction of Frans:ois Ascher and Francis Godard. . 24. in the colloquium "Modernity: The New Map of the Times. 23. "Technique et individuation dans l'oeuvre de Simondon. see also Bernard Stiegler.Notes of Compiegne. technique et individuation dans la pensee de Simondon. and "Societes d'auteurs et semantiques situees. reprised in another version under the title "Temps. Des Alexandries 2 (BNF. here in Cerisy. Simondon did not himself propose this epiphylogenetic dimension of the preindividual of psychic and collective individuation. and continued to do so at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Q . Leon. 48-52.1O Bush. 6 Barthes. J. 41.80 cardinality. 48. 71. 81. 86n. 24-25. 22. 73-74. 35 adoption. 14. 78.1O. 5960.85 n ·7 Alphant. 63-65. 5.24 epokhe. 55-56. 85n. 80 Char. 65. George w. 19. 56-57 consumption. 83n . L. 31. 34 Anytus. 10. 45-46. 7-8.71. 23-24. 13-14. 72-74 consistence. 3.47. 33. 52..7 o . I composition.68 . 42. 74-75. 18. Jean-Pierre. 21. 23. 32. 4. 17.8 Crito. Richard. 2I Chevenement. 51. 16 epiphylogenesis. Osama. 23-24. 32. 35. 7-8. 80. 48-49.4 Epictetus. 60 bin Laden. 16. 30-31. 65.8 disadjustment. 81 calendarity. 79. 29 evil. 31 Bergson. 15. 16-18. 55 default. 28. 51-52. 76. Edward. 49. 66. 81 Blanchot. 31. 20 Epimetheus. 26 asceticism. 33.8 9I .24 culture. 68-69. Henri. 14. 44-45. Maurice. Marianne. 85 n . 52.Index accidentality. 83 n . 50 Brillouin. 1O-II.20 Durn. 30. 20. Rene. 60. 47. 52. Ray. 53. 52 Bernays. 21 Austin. 10-12. 59. Roland. 68 Bradbury. Catherine. 3 Aristotle. 80. 31 desire.I5 Clement.. 84n. 43. 41-46. II-12.75. 60-61.74 artifact.I 3 Derrida. 21. 63-64. 82 extraordinary. 86n. 48-50. 39-40. 47. 71. 26. 71.2. 77. 22. I.82 Diotima. 64. 23. Jacques.I anamnesis. 74 disbanding. 89n. 45-46. 85n . 85n. 84n. 42 performativity. 69. 60. 42-43. 28.46. 60 Pascal. Friedrich.79. 22 Gulf War. 72 -73. 71. 15. 39-40. 21. 28.7 6 Packard. II. 44-48. 21 Lortie.13 Leroi-Gourhan. 53-54 hypomnesis. 14-16. 34 Index Mallarme. 33 Klein. 30. Louis. 12 reminiscence. 30 logos. 24. 15-16.71 locality. 41. 2. Jacques.20.49. 84n. 22 Plato.75 Jouvet. \!ance. 9. Andre. 52.69 Proust. 64-65 freedom. 76 individuation. 8sn. 68 passer a l'acte. 15-16. 23-26. 61. 48. 17-19. 26.. 42. 30. Marcel.49. 64. Naomi. 69. I. 31. Karl. 31. 86n. 60. 35. 33-35. 31. 17. 18. 27-28.12. 60. 25 narcissism. 23. Jeremy.24 phenomenology. 75 ill-being. 68. passage to the act. 9. 14. 18-19. 51-52. 30. 21. 39-42. 68 forgetting. 31. 21-23. 52.28-29. 62-63.67-69. 81. 7°. Blaise.66-68. 57.76. 66 justice. 45-46. 8-9. 24 Prometheus. 85n. 60. II-I2. 26 Lauxerois. 32 Kant.16. 17-18. Martin. 39-42. 53-55. 28. 21-22. 34. 3-6. 18-20. 53-54. 24.24 industrial temporal object. 34 Franklin. 63-65.I5 Lascaux. 20. 24. W F. 51 negentropy. 13-15. 16 Protagoras. 49.64-65 . 80. 23. 24-25. Denis. 60 Lacan.74. 52.47. 13. 81 mortality.75-7 6 retentional finitude. 28-29 Meno. Edmund.4 92 fiction. 62-63 retention.IO Nietzsche. 60 Granel. 64. Gerard.56-59. 28 Marx. 30. 18 metastability. 89n. 82 milieu. Jean. 34 Renan. 61. 67. Stephane. 6. 6. 31-32 melete. 2. G. Andre. 52-55. 63 Gorz. Ernest. 8-9.56-57.I3 National Front. 78-80. 32. 75. 88n. 29. 67. 17. 15-16 protention. 4. 68. Immanuel. 28. Sigmund. 7-8. 69 Heidegger. 29-30 . 71. 29. 85n. 44 responsibility. 80 materialism. 84n . Thierry.I 4 Husserl. 70-71.32-34. 19-20. 16. 18.I3 fidelity. 20. 25. 16. 87n·7 Gaudin. 85 n. 60. 61-62 Phaedo. 9-10. 67. IO. 7. 77-7 8 mnemotechnics.7. 20. 62 Hegel. 55 Freud.59. 55-56. 38. Benjamin. 40. 48.2 love. 8s-86n. 44. 34 Rifkin.48. 5-6. 33 Weismann. 74. 61-62 Wittgenstein. 7 2 -73 Tocqueville. 6 tendency. 84n. 67 witness. 24 spirit. 41. 7 8. 9. 3-6. 57. 7 6 . 59. 25-31. 14 Xenophon. 22. 73-76 time. IS. 1-2. 64. Erwin. 71. 63-65. 53. 32 vocation. 69. 9-12. 20. 60-62.:ois. 74-75. Paul. 41. 4. 38. 44 Truffaut.8 technics. 30. 59. 81-82 suffering. II. 69-70. 20.Index Saussure. 75. 65 symbolic misery. 50-53. 80. 30. Zinedine. 85n. 70. 3. 60-62. 32. 40-42. 7 6-77 Socrates. 14. 52-53. 13-16. 55. 80 93 television. 46 . 3-4. 12. 89 n .14 Simondon.IO significance. 19. 55. August. la-II Valery. 56 synchronization. 50 truth. 16 Zidane.13 soul.25 Sophocles. 55-56. 52 Schrodinger. 72. 52. 69. 43. 87 n . Alexis de. 16. 17. 85n. 85 n . Ferdinand de. 66. Gilbert.2 4 singularity. 24. 21-22. 55.9 Zeus. 82. Fran<. 44 virtue. 70-7 2. 28. 15. Ludwig. 44. 30. 42-43. 78. 49-51.