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Translated by Franson Manjali

Philosophical chronicles

Philosophical Chronicles

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Series Board

Francis J. Ambrosio Karl Jaspers

Michael D. Barber Richard Kearney

Jeffrey Bloechl James H. Olthuis

Ilse N. Bulhof Michael Strawser

Thomas W. Busch James Swindal

Trish Glazebrook Mark C. Taylor

Kevin Hart Edith Wyschogrod

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John D. Caputo, series editor

PERSPECTIVES IN

CONTINENTAL

PHILOSOPHY

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J E A N - L U C N A N C Y

Philosophical ChroniclesTranslated by Franson Manjali

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2008

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Copyright � 2008 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by anymeans—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or anyother—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without theprior permission of the publisher.

Philosophical Chronicles was originally published in French asChroniques philosophiques, by Jean-Luc Nancy, Copyright � EditionsGalilee, 2004.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nancy, Jean-Luc.[Chroniques philosophiques. English]Philosophical chronicles / Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated byFranson Manjali.

p. cm.—(Perspectives in continental philosophy series)Includes bibliographical references.ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2758-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Philosophy, Modern—21st century. I. Title.B792.N3513 2008194—dc22

2007046913

This work has been published with the assistance of the FrenchMinistry of Culture—National Center for the Book.

Ouvrage publie avec le concours du Ministere francais charge de laculture—Centre National du Livre.

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Contents

Translator’s Foreword xi

Philosophical Chronicles 1

Notes 71

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Philosophical Chronicles

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These eleven chronicles were broadcast on theradio between September 2002 and July 2003, onthe last Friday of each month, as part of FranceCulture’s program ‘‘Philosophy Fridays.’’ Thebroadcast was directed, on behalf of the CollegeInternational de Philosophie, by Francois Noudel-mann, whom I thank for his invitation.

The texts published here correspond almost ex-actly to the texts that were actually delivered (andrecorded for the Web site and the archives ofFrance Culture). In each case, the context of speechled to some improvisation; some of these changeswere written down and are reproduced here, othersremain only in the spoken version.

The musical accompaniment for the chronicles,suggested by Francois Noudelmann, was the aria‘‘In lagrime stemprato il cor qui cade,’’ from Anto-nio Caldara’s Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo.

Some of these chronicles have been published inseveral issues of Rue Descartes, the journal of theCollege International de Philosophie.

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Translator’s Foreword

This book, comprising texts of monthly talks or‘‘chronicles’’ presented over a period of elevenmonths on France Culture radio, connects up phi-losophy with several nodes of contemporary life.The chronicles of an old discipline—perhaps theoldest living discipline—cannot but relate thechronic problems and crises it faces in its very act ofsurvival. Though philosophy’s very existence de-pends on its being unconditioned, in its course ofdevelopment, philosophers tend to submit it to var-ious conditionalities, including a cultural condition-ality that is much in vogue today. However,

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philosophy lives and survives its crises by continu-ally withdrawing itself from all given conditionali-ties, without ever being able to hook itself onto anypermanent notion of the unconditioned. Therhythm or the pulsation of philosophy always takesit outside of itself, opens it toward what Nancy callsthe ‘‘time of thought,’’ where it encounters the ‘‘ab-solutely non-given.’’ These chronicles point to achronic opening up of philosophy toward the unde-cidable time to come.

The movement toward an unknown exterior thatphilosophy requires today is not merely of a tempo-ral kind. Behind the current crisis (certainly not a‘‘clash,’’ as it is claimed) of civilizations manifest inunprecedented religious and nationalist fervors orglobal capitalist maneuverings, Nancy identifies theaging of a culture of autonomy. As the autonomousform of life and the associated auto-motive tech-niques of this culture are approaching senility, phi-losophy may well suggest the reinvention of anentire mode of existence. Exonomy is the name thatNancy gives to this alternative law or mode of exis-tence, distinct from heteronomy but conceptuallyakin to exogamy. The space of exonomy is outsidethe space of both self and other; it is an in-betweenspace, always not yet given.

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If philosophy can guide us into another time andanother space, what, then, is it to life? Is philosophya part of it, or outside? Does it guide the conductof life or stand aloof as a conceptual guide? Is it ofthe order of actions or of reasons? All such questionsand the tensions to which they give rise are internalto philosophy, according to Nancy, making philos-ophy something like an intimate ‘‘form of life.’’ Itis not, however, a prior form, available either tran-scendentally or empirically, but it appears out of lifeitself as its possible formation. Philosophy insertsitself into and emerges from the space of discoursesalready given, whether of religion, of the quotidian,or of politics, science, or art; it is the spacing ofthese discourses. As spacing, its sense exceeds everygiven sense, not only in and of life, but even indeath, and of death.

The question of philosophy’s response to reli-gion—one of the most ancient and most profoundaspects of civilizational existence—is posed in thecontext of the renewed war cries in the name ofreligion in the contemporary world. Nancy analyzesthe problem in terms of the very character of mono-theism: in the name of a single and all-encompass-ing god, it abandons man to solitude in a state ofgodlessness. And then it seeks to ‘‘gather’’ these

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abandoned human beings into the totality and uni-versality of a newly found truth. Even while colonialexpansions and conquests are undertaken in thename of truth, the bogus assurance of religious sal-vation is still held forth, only reinforcing man’sabandonment. Such is the context that demands adeconstruction of monotheism, in order to extractwhat is repressed in it, denied by it, and left outsideits own totality.

The decline of the meaning of the word politics isnot of a different kind. In the politically chargedworld of today, where every sphere of life has neces-sarily become ‘‘political,’’ nothing is seriously dis-cerned as political, except in an overused sense ofthe word. The current critical sense of the word po-litical, Nancy notes, was introduced recently in ourlanguages, in order to understand the process be-hind what used to be considered the art of politics.In order to retrieve the specificity of a contemporaryart of politics, we might well have to retreat fromthe current totalitarian notion of politics, as apply-ing everywhere at all times.

The best example of a major philosopher goingastray in his understanding of the conjunction be-tween politics and history is Heidegger. Betweenpolitics’ call for justice, and history’s call for action,

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where have philosophers, at least since Hegel, puttheir stakes? And with what consequences? Can themechanism of history and the affirmation of itsstruggle, perceived from the given position of thephilosopher, usher in justice without subjecting theother to the will of the self ? On this question foun-dered, not only Heidegger the reactionary, but per-haps various Marxisms too, though in differentways. How can the necessity of a politics of justicecope with the unfolding of historical events?

History’s everyday events are even more difficultto interpret in a philosophical or political sense.Philosophers’ dilemma, that is, when they have todeal with the everyday, is in deciding whether mun-dane daily events are to be inscribed into a higherlevel of—philosophical, historical, political, or aes-thetic—sense, or left as insignificant. Though onoccasion one can make some everyday events ‘‘ap-pear,’’ nonappearance is the essential mode of theeveryday. It vascillates between hiding in the openand chance appearances in creative works. Yet nowand then the everyday makes an unintended appear-ance in catastrophic and mortal events, such asearthquakes and wars. It is in such situations thatan unmarked life is in silent contact with the non-apparent lives of all those who are living and dead,

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without this event ever rising beyond the level ofeveryday appearance.

The context of the ongoing war in Iraq is, forNancy, the painful motivation for an inquiry intothe meanings of words that govern contemporarynational and global situations. Actions and denun-ciations on the basis of the prevailing sense of termslike war, totalitarianism, democracy, and so on willnot do. This is because war now, more than everbefore, is part and parcel of capitalist calculationsand is aided by the augmentation of its technics.War is now part of capitalist production and man-agement, a process without ends, save to increase itsmeans. Even ‘‘democracy’’ is engineered for the sakeof capital, whose politics is backed by a theology offoundational unity. Resistance to the avaricious warof a single theodemocracy will require more thanan appeal to peace: we shall have to reinvent ourcherished political words and alter their exhaustedsenses.

Perhaps this very notion of a ‘‘we’’ can be ob-tained only as negativity, as the affirmation of animpossible ‘‘we.’’ In today’s world, countless indi-viduals die unseen, unattended, and unmourned.The increasing number of these ‘‘hidden deaths’’ isdisconcerting, since human culture everywhere

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began by inscribing death in a social milieu. At thesame time, modern society wants to offset the inex-orable negativity by a sort of commercially viablepositive attitude. Everywhere, even in the Hegeliandialectic, negativity must be transformed into a po-sitivity. Rather than denying negativity—which isan undeniable part of life—either by rejecting it orby transforming it, the role of an ‘‘unemployed neg-ativity’’ would be to affirm the other of what ismerely possible, that is, to affirm the impossible. Inthis way, we can inscribe the hidden as well as dis-tant deaths of others as ‘‘our’’ deaths.

The idea of ‘‘art,’’ too, must continually integrateand acknowledge its every emerging form in everyunfolding of time. Art as we understand it today isitself a relatively new invention—barely two centu-ries old—and it has been an invention of relentlesslyproliferating senses. This external proliferationshould be attributed to the ceaseless productivity ofa desire situated in the very being of man: the desirefor an overflow of meanings and a desire for what isyet to be sensed. This ceaseless denouement ofsenses yields, in parallel, varieties of ‘‘us’’ beyondour given sensible selves.

The concluding talk of the series, pronounced atthe onset of France’s devastatingly hot summer of

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2003, is a discourse on the sun. The sun has beenthe source of numerous defining metaphors of theOccident—etymologically the place of the sun’s de-cline or setting. The Lumieres or the Enlightenmentwas, for the West, a reorienting toward the sun,given that orient means birth or sunrise. The play oflight and darkness has been seminal in the progressof Western thought. Luminosity rules virtues likeknowledge and beauty. The sun rules with its sharpedge of luminous bedazzlement. However, the Oc-cident has also sought to avert the blinding powerof the sun and to turn to the blind point behind it.This blind spot, Nancy notes, is indeed the sourceof its poetry.

I would like to acknowledge help and guidancereceived from the following sources: Aıcha LivianaMessina, who during her sojourn in New Delhi,took time off her research to correct an early draftof the translation; Myriam Rasiwala, a near-perfectFrench-English bilingual and translation specialist,who worked through every one of the construc-tional ambiguities in the original text; Jean-LucNancy, who while providing generous hospitality inhis Strasbourg home, found time to discuss the

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sense of difficult philosophical expressions; the ad-ministration of the Maison des Sciences del’Homme, Paris, where the major part of the trans-lation was completed during the spring of 2006;and last but certainly not least, Jeff Fort, who did aremarkable job of vetting my final version of thetranslation.

I express my sincere gratitude to these individualsand the institution.

—Franson Manjali

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A chronicle of philosophy: What can this reallymean? A chronicle is a rubric indicating somethingpunctual and periodical, whose content has to doeither with a particular specialization (gastronomy,gardening, etc.), or with a subjectivity (the worldaccording to the mood of the chronicler). But phi-losophy, in whatever manner we envisage it, aspiresto be removed from specialization as well as fromsubjectivity. From the beginning and in principle,it demands the universal and the objective. That isto say, it asks how the universal can be an object ofthought and how any object, whatever it may be,can be thought according to the universal. Thus,

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even if thought adopts the principle of multiplicity,heterogeneity, and the incommensurability of be-ings, it still thus posits a form of universal object.

Kant had a word for this: ‘‘the unconditional.’’Reason demands the unconditional. That is its pas-sion. It demands that which does not depend onanything prior, on any condition already posited. IfI admit a condition, a prior given, I cannot beginto philosophize.

How, then, can this exigency be made to vary inthe course of a chronicle? Either universal objectiv-ity is given, and it cannot vary. Or else it is onlya vague and inconsistent disposition, a porridge of‘‘values,’’ ‘‘virtues,’’ and common sense that can bewarmed up and dished out on every occasion.Today there is a cultural mode of ‘‘philosophy’’ thatendlessly warms up this very light broth, while let-ting the vague promise of an unconditional finaltruth float about in its vapor. Thus one entertains acheap ethico-pragmatic consensualist ideologywhile boosting the market value quoted for ‘‘thephilosopher.’’

I do not claim that I can avoid the cultural perilwithout remainder or without risk. I have chosento brush up against such ambiguity because this

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cultural danger must be confronted on its own terri-tory—by speaking on the radio, for example. Thisis not just a matter of strategy. It is also because thecultural development of philosophy itself opens upa question of some philosophical importance.

Indeed, the cultural development of philosophyhas this importance because it is in fact a chronicillness of philosophy (and I will also take up theword chronic from this angle).1 There have alwaysbeen Platonisms, Stoicisms, Averroisms, or Kantian-isms, idealisms or utilitarianisms, which configuredthe opinions and the media of their times, salons,schools, and political offices. These conformist as-surances become eroded and collapse on a regularbasis. But why these chronic crises—these crises inthe chronicles of philosophy?

The reason for them is itself chronic. The exi-gency of the unconditioned regularly allows what issimply unacceptable in it to fall back and to becomefixed in a preconditioned consensus. This chronicpulsation, or even illness, is the alternation betweenan unacceptable demand and the responses destinedto disappoint it or to betray it.

Why is the demand unacceptable? Not becauseof any philosophical heroism (Socrates against the

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power of the Sophists, Descartes against Scholasticmight), but by virtue of an internal constitution.Philosophy demands the unconditional because itis itself the effect of a withdrawal from givenconditions.

Philosophers, Marx said, do not emerge from theearth like mushrooms. Philosophy is not the resultof a ‘‘Greek miracle’’ or of a sudden revelation ofthe logos. It is born out of a withdrawal from theconditions found in a world of gods, sacrifices, hier-archies, hieroglyphs, and hierophanies. It is bornout of a withdrawal of the reasons of the world.Philosophy represented what remained without rea-son as Being stripped bare, or as the logos, and lateras the certainty of the subject, or as transcendentalintentionality, or as history, and so on. But in eachcase, what the desire for reason in reality translatesis this: that the world has entered into the absenceof reason.

What has since then become chronic—or subjectto a chronicle—is the compulsion to demand anunconditional where, in effect, every given, everyorigin, every filiation is withdrawn. The uncondi-tioned is demanded because we are in fact without

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a given condition. There remains only, if we canput it thus, the gift in a pure state: the world, his-tory, and man as gifts that nothing precedes.

What was called ‘‘the death of God’’ and later‘‘the end of metaphysics,’’ or even ‘‘the end of phi-losophy,’’ consisted in bringing to light the follow-ing: there is no first or last condition; there isn’tany unconditioned that can be the principle or theorigin. But this ‘‘there isn’t’’ is unconditioned, andthere you have, if I dare say, our ‘‘humancondition.’’

That is how the possibility of chronic crises, inwhich one philosophy succeeds another, comes toan end, in a sense. That is how a turning point isinitiated. But if philosophy can no longer be thechronic disease of a succession of ideologies, then itmust understand its own constitution differently.

For it is no longer a matter of curing an illness.Some people believe that it is, and they think thatit is enough to hold onto what is reasonable and tothe discourses that are capable of validating theirown meanings. However, reason wants more thanthe reasonable, and truth is beyond every validatedor sensible meaning. Here there is a certainty that is

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also chronic: it opens up before us, once again, thetime of thought. The nongiven, the absolutely non-given, that is to say, the gift of being in which exis-tence without reason demands its due—which isincalculable and is not even due . . .

27 September 2002

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For this second chronicle, I will be a chronicler inthe sense that I will try, albeit as a philosopher, toaddress aspects of our current situation that, if theyare not altogether immediate, are at least those ofthe present day in the broad sense. I mean the cur-rent situation of murderous and/or financial terroragainst the background of an overvaluation of God(whatever name he is given) and a devaluation ofmoney (that of the shareholders, but even more themoney of those who do not have any). This situa-tion needs to be considered in a philosophicalchronicle because it constitutes a philosophicalactuality.

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Hegel wrote—this is his famous sentence aboutthe owl of Minerva—that philosophy appears whena form of life has become old. Since late antiquity,there has never been a growing-old as manifest asours. The capitalist economy accumulates impasses,abscesses, and uncontrollable disorders. The societyit governs does not believe in itself anymore. Wordsand concepts that were still valid fifteen years ago,like ‘‘the rule of law,’’ ‘‘human rights,’’ and ‘‘democ-racy,’’ are losing visibly and on a daily basis theirpractical as well as theoretical and symbolic credibil-ity. Scientific, technical, juridical, and moral progressimmediately displays, at every step, ambivalencesthat suspend the name ‘‘progress,’’ and along with it,those of ‘‘humanity,’’ ‘‘reason,’’ and ‘‘justice.’’

That’s when one brandishes idols, that is to say,ideas reduced to a kind of belch. On one side,‘‘God’s will,’’ on the other, ‘‘human freedom.’’These expressions provide a front, of course, forlarge-scale maneuvers aimed at seizing power andwealth. But this front is marked with figures ofidentification (or rather, of subjection) and of mo-bilization (or rather, of compulsive repetition). Andthese figures are painted on bombs.

God, man, will, freedom: who does not see thatthese are the four terms of a metaphysical order

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whose combinations saturate the horizon of a worldof autonomy? The form of life that has grown oldis that of autonomy. Autonomy of premise, autoc-racy of choice and of decision, auto-management ofthe identical, auto-production of value, of sign andof image, auto-reference of discourse, all these areused up, exhausted, just as the automobile, whenone takes a closer look, is already given over tosenility.2

To speak of a ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ is a sign ofthoughtlessness. It is the same civilization that ex-ploits oil and the God of Abraham and Jefferson,that declares us all equal and leaves each one to fendfor himself, that pretends to cheat death by phan-tasm or by denial. Civilization of self-sufficiency, ofself-satisfaction—and of self-division.

Discerning what is happening, the aging of a cul-ture of autonomy that at the same time forms theethical and symbolic baggage of globalization (yes,it is an old animal that is globalizing), does not pro-vide any means of action, but should allow us toimagine where to look, if this is possible, for thesigns of another youth.

It seems to me that we might at least say this: wewill not oppose autonomy with heteronomy, with

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which it forms a pair. Being heteronomous towardanother subject that is itself autonomous changesnothing, regardless of whether this other autono-mous thing is named god, the market, technics, orlife. But, in order to open a new path, we could tryout the word exonomy. This word would evoke alaw that would not be the law of the same or ofthe other, but one that would be unappropriable byeither the same or the other. Just as exogamy goesoutside of kinship, exonomy moves out of the binaryfamiliarity of the self and the other.

This would be a law always linked to the outsideof law, of which we have a few images from thepast in the Moira of the Greeks,3 in the election ofAbraham, in Dante’s Beatrice, or in Hamlet’s lucidmadness. These are sharply contrasting, even con-tradictory images. But they all sketch an outsidethat is not an autonomy, that is not a mastery, thatis neither the same nor the other. These are notclear images, I know, and besides, they too havegrown old. That is why we must, for today, drylyand enthusiastically give the last word to Beckett:‘‘Imagination dead, imagine.’’

25 October 2002

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Is philosophy a form of life? Or, according to anexpression closer to Aristotle than to Wittgenstein,does philosophy give form to life? This question im-mediately receives two opposite responses. Yes, ac-cording to one doxa or a widespread feeling thatphilosophy should give meaning and strengthen aconduct regulated by this meaning. No, respondsthe opposite sentiment, which sees philosophy asthe practice of a discourse of meaning or truth, butby right or in fact deprived of any mobilizingenergy.

Both of these postulations are to be found amongphilosophers. Descartes holds that one should

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philosophize very little, but with the goal of firmlyascertaining the reasons for acting in the world, inlife, by way of medicine, mechanics, and morality.Heidegger, by contrast, declares, even as he speaksof putting existence into play, that one should notbelieve that this putting into play will be effectivein the book that speaks about it.

In one case, one supposes that the order of rea-sons generates energy, and in the other, one affirmsthat the effectivity of this energy is of an order dif-ferent from the order of reasons. One thus poses theproblem of the passage from one order to the other.

There are periods and figures of philosophy inwhich the indication of a form of life is quite vivid:in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for Schopenhauerand Nietzsche, and for others in whose work thisindication loses visibility, as though veiled by con-cepts, analysis, and theory. ‘‘The concept or life’’—this seems to be the alternative, about which it hasbeen very common, in fact, to hear complaints madeto the philosophers, who themselves sometimes addto the complaint and the anxiety about it.

We must note, rather, that this tension is internalto philosophy. No philosopher can ignore or dis-dain the form of life. But no philosopher—no one

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deserving the name philosopher—can assume thatsuch a form is an idea, a schema that can be takenout of the drawer or the book and be applied on thestreet.

But this is not a matter of difficulties of applica-tion or mobilization. It concerns the fact that a phi-losopher immediately disqualifies the notions ofboth ‘‘form’’ and ‘‘life’’ understood as frame andcontent or even as signification and experience.

Neither of these notions is given at the begin-ning, nor for that matter, at the end. Philosophyconsists precisely in working within a space wherethere is neither a configuration of meaning, nor afelt immediacy—nor, consequently, the possibilityof mediating one through the other. In other words,neither the authority of religion nor that of ‘‘livedexperience.’’

Between religion and lived experience—in aspace, let us note, where one also finds politics, sci-ence, and art—philosophy has the task, if I may sayso, of spacing as such. Neither form, nor life, norconcept, nor intuition, but from one to the other,or rather, from one within the other, through theother, but also one against the other, a tension with-out resolution. It is not a question of relieving this

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tension, for it delights in itself as much as it suffersfrom itself. Neither a modeling of life nor a pathosof the immediate. It is not a happy medium, it isthe exacting sharp edge of the philosophical deci-sion, that is, of an entire civilization.

But in confronting this, the philosopher under-stands that it is precisely life that is put into playand that may thus lose its way without any of theassurances provided by what is revealed or felt (orby some mixture of the two). It is a living being thatphilosophizes, and if life consists in being affectedby itself, then in the act of philosophizing, it is af-fected by its own vacancy of sense. It takes, there-fore, a certain form, and with it a certain force: theform and the force of holding oneself before thisnecessity—namely, that its meaning is never givento it, and that this is precisely what dictates its truthto it. A truth, consequently, that is never simplyavailable but is always caught up in its own practice.

Transcribing the final proposition of Spinoza’sEthics, however roughly, we can therefore say that‘‘sense is not the reward of philosophy, but its verypractice.’’ Thus philosophy is less a ‘‘form of life’’than life forming itself, that is to say, thinking itself,in accordance with its excess over every given form

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or signification. Which also means, of course, thislife thinking itself even in its death.

I recall that, one day when I was being trans-ported in an ambulance, the driver asked me whatmy profession was. He then had this to say: ‘‘Philos-ophy—that should be of help to you in your presentsituation.’’ At once I thought, almost in spite of my-self, that basically he wasn’t wrong. And I still thinkthat in fact he was right, even if I don’t know howto unravel this reasoning. But I also think at thesame time that in this statement, my ambulancedriver proved that he also is a philosopher. His con-fidence in philosophy, which one might well con-sider naive, contained an act of thought by whichhis life took form, transformed its ordinary form,just as it transformed my life at that same moment.The proof of this transformation is that I have notforgotten it.

22 November 2002

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Today’s theme will be monotheism. Why? I imaginethat the motives are clear: the names of God, utter-able or not, are invoked everywhere—Allah akhbar!In God we trust! Yahweh Sabaoth! Dieu et mondroit!—like emblazoned shields in the furious assaultfor domination. This domination does not even hideits stakes behind religious pretexts, since it nowseems clear that the security and the dignity of exis-tence would have an interest in reference to religion,and that one god would be inseparable from the free-dom of comfort just as another is from the cry ofpoverty, while a third would provide the guaranteeof a state after having promised a territory.

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The wars of old were the deeds of princes. Eachone brandished his religious banner, but it hap-pened at some distance from the people. I wouldeven exaggerate and say: the parishes or the com-mon people were not directly affected. Today, thetechnical and economic forces struggling for globalmastery or servitude are reinforced by religious orspiritual forces in the sense that these words hence-forth signify issues that no longer bear upon ‘‘na-tions,’’ ‘‘classes,’’ or ‘‘peoples’’: life lived in spite ofits harshness, the recognition of the self in spite ofits uncertainty, in short, a condition not of ‘‘sense’’but of a sustained decision to exist.

It was in fact this new phenomenon (or whatseemed like a new phenomenon) that led MichelFoucault, twenty-three years ago, to salute the ‘‘willto renew the whole of one’s existence,’’ which heclaimed had swept through the Iranian people whenthey rose up against their former regime. We mustnot be too quick to laugh at him; rather, we shouldclosely reread his statements of this period. Thisdoes not mean, however, that he was able to thinkthrough what was being played out there in its im-plication for monotheism. On the contrary, therather conventional Marxism that he relied on un-doubtedly limited his perspectives.

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Whatever we make of this episode, today we canno longer avoid examining this supposedly religiousreference. Indeed, the more important it becomes,the less we know what we are saying when we speakof religion, monotheism, or God, whether it is saidin fits of exaltation or of denunciation.

Two questions arise: (1) How can we analyzemonotheism today? (2) How do we understand andjudge the mobilizations of which it is the object—orthe subject?

I will merely lay out a few indications.

First of all, and fundamentally: Monotheism inthe strictly Western sense is not the religion of asingle god. ‘‘Western’’ here means what the Qur’andesignates inclusively as ‘‘the people of the Book,’’Jews and Christians, together with Muslims, thespiritual stock of Abraham (still according to theQur’an). It is not the religion of a single god as if itwere a pantheon of gods reduced to a single entity.On the contrary, uniqueness eliminates every pan-theon, as it does pantheism, and finally, strictlyspeaking, any theism. There is no more place for aparticular being bearing the name ‘‘god,’’ present,in its own proper mode, somewhere in this world

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or in another. With uniqueness, god loses his dis-tinction as Being [etre] or as a being [etant]. Thisgod is not another god—he is neither other nor,therefore, the same in relation to other gods. He is,inasmuch as he is, the one who is not present. Noris he absent (far away, elsewhere). He responds orcorresponds, if I can put it this way, to the depar-ture of all gods. The departure of the gods—the endof a world of agrarian and sacrificial cults, by all andfor all—opened up a world (that of the cities, ofcommerce, of the alphabet) where the multiplicityof singulars involves the question of what Ibn ’Arabicalls ‘‘the one within the one.’’ Man is henceforthalone, that is to say, strictly speaking, atheist, orgodless. The ensemble of principles, both theisticand atheistic, is dismissed, for the sake of an anar-chic position (in Schurmann’s sense) of the singularexistent. We might call this absentheism.

It is man abandoned to himself, without anymeans of rescue, without even any recourse tomourning a tragic destiny. Alone and lonely to-gether, human beings are left to a conditionstranger than fate or assurance: to a staggeringenigma. If there is something divine in this, it is asthe sign of this enigma. A god infinitely withdrawn,

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or even dispersed, the name of God written undererasure.

The second question has to do with the variousmobilizations of monotheism. The response is nec-essarily double.

On the one hand, monotheism, born out of thedesertion of the gods, hastens to remake the reli-gious at the gates of the desert. Yet it is different, forit posits itself as truth and not, like the others, asassistance or as threat. Truth entails universality andtotality: hence the expansionist and colonizing atti-tudes at the very moment when a distinction isdrawn between the political and the religious. Thisis a new principle for war.

But on the other hand, the same postulation con-tradicts the anarchism of the totality of singular be-ings, and finally denies absen-theism for the sake ofa hoax that holds up as ‘‘salvation’’ the exposure toabandonment that ought to be assumed as our own.Monotheism is the religion par excellence whose ex-clusion is internal to itself.

My conclusion will be brief: what remains for usis not to destroy monotheism (it does so on its own,

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by tearing itself apart), but to deconstruct it. Thatis to say, to extract from it, in spite of itself, what itconceals through ignorance, repression, or denial.We must retrace and furrow out the erasure of thedivine name. We must push forward with the irre-versible alteration of this name.

27 December 2002

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Let’s speak of ‘‘politics.’’ I mean: let’s speak of theword politics [politique].4 It is no doubt a good andeven a necessary means of speaking of the thing it-self. Indeed, certain linguistic phenomena involvingthis word deserve our attention. To give an idea ofwhat I intend to do, it is enough for me to pointout the following: when I say, ‘‘let us speak of theword ‘politique,’ ’’ you do not know whether I amusing the adjective or the substantive, or whetherthe latter is to be understood as feminine or mascu-line. Now, these trivial considerations involve sev-eral problems at once.

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Let us begin with the adjective. An excessive useis made of it today when, in domains that are notin principle defined as ‘‘political,’’ we affirm an es-sential political implication. In the artistic domainin particular, it is often seen as necessary to declarethat a work or an intervention has a political rele-vance, a political sense, or even a political nature.Whereas in the past we would come across the no-tion of the political commitment of an artist (of awriter, a philosopher, or a scientist), today we mustrefer to a necessarily political dimension in theirpractice itself. What cannot be said to be ‘‘political’’appears suspect in being only aesthetic, intellectual,technical, or moral. But what one calls ‘‘political,’’or the ‘‘political dimension,’’ remains most of thetime without any other precise definition. This isbecause the meaning of the word seems to be im-plicitly established: ‘‘political’’ would mean thatwhich goes beyond all the particular delimitation ofdiscipline and activity, operating at the level of theentire society (even that of humanity), of its condi-tions of existence and meaning. ‘‘Political’’ is thusinvested with a potentially unlimited content.

This usage of the word derives from a more orless conscious belief in the idea that everything isor should be political. Now, this idea constitutes

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nothing other than the content of what one calls‘‘totalitarianism.’’ Many would be very vexed tolearn that they speak—even if they do notthink—in a ‘‘totalitarian’’ manner. However, it de-serves to be said. Every time ‘‘political’’ refers tosuch a totalizing property, there is indeed ‘‘totalitar-ianism.’’ That is to say, the horizon of this thoughtis that of a ‘‘political’’ absorption or assumption ofevery sphere of existence (I am pointing here moreor less to a formula of the young Marx).

The simplest logic allows us to conclude thatsuch an assumption of every sphere of existence inits entirety takes away the very specificity of thesphere of the assumption itself. If everything is po-litical, then nothing is anymore. And this is perhapsin effect the real situation in which we find our-selves. But then we should no longer be able tospeak of what is ‘‘political,’’ except as an abuse oflanguage and with a view to exploiting the ac-cents—flattering, heroic, and charged with histori-cal destiny—that are associated with this big wordpolitical.

That is, moreover, why the philosophical scenetoday is so intensely occupied with works that un-dertake to redefine and reanalyze the field and thesense of what is ‘‘political’’ in order thus to pull the

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word out of its dilution in what would have to becalled social immanence.

What haunts the unreflective totalitarianism in-volved in the abuse of the term is in fact an obses-sion with the suppression of the separation.Everything must be political because politics as aseparate sphere must be suppressed. Whether it isin the form of the state or that of parties, in theform of ‘‘politicking’’ or ‘‘the politician’s politics’’(a very remarkable tautology that one could analyzeat length) or even that of subversive actions, everyseparate instance is now set to disappear—that is tosay, quite naturally, every separate instance of com-munal existence. Communal existence must then,in the end, or at least in the regulative principle,ensure—on its own and as such—its own end, itssense and its fulfillment.

Now, this is precisely what must be placed indoubt, and it is indeed what we do in fact doubt,more or less consciously. The very people whoclaim that everything is political are often also thosewho think that democracy is not an end in itselfand that our question is rather one of knowingtoward what ends (or even toward what surpassingof the very idea of ‘‘end,’’ which would involve an-other register of analysis) to direct it.

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At this point we can touch upon another linguis-tic phenomenon. For a little over twenty years now,we have commonly spoken of ‘‘the political’’ [le pol-itique], and this usage relegates ‘‘politics’’ [la poli-tique] to the subordinate level of the execution oftasks (or even maneuvers). ‘‘The political’’ seems torepresent the nobility of the thing—which therebyimplicitly regains its specificity, and thus its relativeseparation.

We thus fail to recognize that this word in themasculine, a newcomer to the [French] languagewith this meaning, was introduced to refer to theconcept or the essence of the political thing or do-main—but precisely to the extent that this concept,or indeed this essence, required examination, analy-sis, interrogation. We began to speak of ‘‘the politi-cal’’ in this particular way from the moment wefound it necessary to question the foundations ofwhat we had previously called either the ‘‘science ofgovernment’’ or ‘‘public law.’’ ‘‘The political’’ be-came the name of a problem, and one of no smallimportance. A problem of grounding, of founda-tion, or, on the contrary, the laying bare of an ab-sence of depth. But it is also because of this problemthat ‘‘politics’’ [la politique], losing all dignity as artin the old sense (of techne, of savoir faire), has

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become ‘‘politicking,’’ whereas this art (of politics)was so noble and so powerful.

This is not the case in the personal vocabulariesof the philosophers that I invoked a moment ago,each of whom questions, according to his own ap-proach, either the masculine or the feminine, theessence or the art of the thing called politics / thepolitical. My objective today was not to summonthem—or the thing itself—to be judged. It was sim-ply to suggest, very modestly, that we should not beusing the terms politics / the political without at leasttrying to clarify what we are talking about. For, tobe frank, the meaning of the word is lacking in ourordinary language, except in the form of a nebulousand totalitarian notion, in a consensually somnam-bulistic manner. But precisely this, the ordinarymanner of speaking, produces political effects.

Political rigor and exactitude, today, begin withthis critique of our language, even if we initially findit frustrating. How can we speak knowingly of ‘‘pol-itics’’ and the ‘‘political’’? I leave off deliberatelywith this question for today.

24 January 2003

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Among the ‘‘affairs’’ that have cluttered our publicscene for several years, there is one that is philo-sophical in nature. This is the famous ‘‘Heideggeraffair’’ which it seems impossible seriously to clearaway from the horizon or at least the backstage ofthe French intellectual scene. (For it must be notedthat this is not always the case in other countries,far from it, a fact that also deserves to be analyzed.)Beyond the impressive collection of works that havebeen devoted to it, and that have also broadly exhib-ited and analyzed the items in the dossier, there stillseems to be a necessity, recurrent and periodic, toset the defendants and accusers against each other

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once again in an unending trial in which there is,of course, no higher authority to which one mightappeal.

What is difficult to unravel is whether this neces-sity is an emotional or a logical one. The tones areemotional, without a doubt, and the sources ofthese emotions ought to be interrogated. Both sidesare far too emphatic for us not to inquire into themotives involved. But the basic theme is logical,since it involves nothing else, clearly, than legitimiz-ing or delegitimizing a philosophy on the basis ofthe political commitment of its author. In any case,this is the underlying tendency of the debate—or ofthe confrontation, since the ‘‘affair’’ in questionoften appears as such.

This is only an underlying tendency, since mostof the time both sides are ready to distinguish be-tween levels and to introduce some reservations.But the global effect has nonetheless remained, forabout twenty years now, the following: a major phi-losopher was a Nazi, and his philosophy is thereforevirtually contaminated in every respect; or else it isnecessary to claim that he was not a Nazi, or justbarely, and only as a blunder, if we wish to maintainintact the image of a thought as pure as the Greekdawn whose brilliance it rediscovered.

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It seems to me that the debate, in this state, itselfharbors a philosophical and historical error, andthat it is time to pull ourselves away from it, for thestakes are important.

But I am not going to dismiss the parties sum-marily without distinguishing between their argu-ments. Indeed, the defense shows quite clearly howa certain piety can blind one or push one into denialaccording to the Freudian formula, ‘‘Oh, I know,but still.’’ The accusers, by contrast, take up the is-sues—except in a few rather crude cases—in a morefrank and careful manner. Moreover, remarkableand penetrating analyses have been produced onthis side, precisely because here the analysis has notbeen avoided on principle. Having said that, I donot want to go further into distinguishing and dif-ferentiating their works. Irrespective of persons, Iwould like to express my astonishment at this: Whyis the question detached, or why does it appear tobe detached, if not completely separated, from thecondition of possibility, theoretical or historical, forsuch a grave political mistake on the part of such aphilosopher?

(I note in passing that the same question shouldbe posed with regard to Carl Schmitt, concerningwhom we have recently seen sketched out the

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preludes of an analogous affair. These are certainlydifferent cases, but they resemble one another.)

To pose the question in this way, we must firstadmit the political fault and at the same time thedecisive importance of the thinker. From now on, Iwill argue on the basis of this double preliminaryadmission. The political fault cannot be disputed,nor can the importance of a philosophy whose markis indelible, to say the least, on and through Sartre,Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida,Lacan, Granel, and many others.

How is it that this philosophy could set out, in1933, down the path of the Third Reich? We canfocus our analysis on one central problem, itself po-litical or rather of direct political significance: a cer-tain idea of the ‘‘people.’’ We see clearly in Beingand Time how the people come to take over from a‘‘being-with’’ lost in anonymity and equivalence, inthe undifferentiated mass that David Reismanwould later call the ‘‘lonely crowd.’’ The ‘‘people’’could appear then as if they bore the possibility ofrecapturing a history, which is different from an en-tropic and melancholic scattering of ‘‘individuals,’’these countless mutilated multitudes of the modernworld. More than anything else, Heidegger was sen-sitive to the modern turn—or fracture—of history

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(what constitutes the ‘‘modern’’ as such): the factthat history encountered its own obscuring withoutbeing able to return to the ahistorical modes repre-sented by the diverse forms of continuity or eter-nity. (Rimbaud, the modern, already articulated forhis time the desire for eternity.)

It will be objected, and rightly so, that the fas-cisms did not reopen any history but captured thetechnical and socioeconomic development of themodern in the immobile display of a dramatic andmillenarian apotheosis. Heidegger quickly realizedthis, just as the Nazis realized that his discourse washardly utilizable. However, Heidegger neverstopped thinking stubbornly in a direction thatwould continue this initial vein. Why? One cannotget rid of this question without serious cost. Andcertainly not without all of us paying out of ourown pockets.

I mean to say that no thought of this time—fromHeidegger to us—has been able to recapture thisquestion of history, but that everywhere around ustoday we can see it resurfacing and insisting, as thequestion of ‘‘democracy’’ or of the ‘‘world,’’ as thequestion of the ‘‘event’’ or of what is left or not of‘‘revolution,’’ as the question of ‘‘sense’’ or of the

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‘‘political’’—all great signifiers of our aporias andour exigencies.

The question therefore is: What happened to his-tory in the time of the fascisms? The answer is sim-ple: it passed into the various forms of Marxism.The latter are thus characterized by a double dispo-sition: of justice on the one hand, of history on theother. Between the two, there was a fissure, and per-haps this was already there with Marx. We can say,roughly, that justice was Kantian and history wasHegelian. Not only was there no conjunction, buthistory had become even more mechanical andanonymous than in Hegel himself. The ‘‘cunningof reason’’ was being given free rein. This is indeedwhat made up the intimate drama of so manythinkers for whom Marxism took a turn of thwarteddesire (Benjamin and Bataille represent this mostclearly). One could sum up thus: the crushing ofthe Spartakists in 1919–20 had its double or itssymptom in an impasse encountered by the philoso-phies of history.

This is also what weighed upon the thought ofthose who began to form the Frankfurt School,since the foundation of the Institute by Horkheimer

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in 1923 (which is also the year when Lukacs’s His-tory and Class Consciousness appeared). In thoseyears, Marcuse, under the supervision of Heidegger,was writing his thesis, Hegel’s Ontology and the The-ory of Historicity. But Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit ofUtopia was already published in 1918, and it is pos-sible to view the contrasts between these directionsof thought as revealing the oppositions between anautonomous, mechanical or organic history, pro-gressive without a subject, and the postulation of asubject who was not only the agent, but actually theeffective term, here and now, of the march of his-tory. History—history as actualization, as event, aswhat comes and arises [le venir et le survenir]—indeed no longer had any rightful heirs. Husserl,the least suspect of all the non-Marxists, still spokein his lectures of 1935 of a ‘‘self-actualization’’ anda ‘‘self-illumination’’ of reason as the infinite move-ment of its progress. In 1935, Wittgenstein traveledin the Soviet Union and Freud was working on hisMoses and Monotheism, which he called a ‘‘historicalnovel.’’ Civilization and Its Discontents appeared in1930. This gives an emblematic picture of thesituation.

Of course, I do not wish to deny that there werethose who opted for immediate struggle, those who

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were sent into exile (but they did not return fromit with another history), and those who implacablydenounced the infamy. The question to which Iwould like to limit my conclusion is precisely thatof denunciation.

Denunciation is necessary. But so is enunciation.Heidegger enunciated a problem, and all histhought—on ‘‘being,’’ ‘‘technics,’’ or the ‘‘poem’’—was a struggle with this problem. The stubborn oreven obtuse obstinacy of this visceral reactionary isonly the most visible face of a tenacity of thoughtthat did not want to give up on this knot that I havecalled ‘‘history.’’ The fact that he ended up evoking‘‘a god,’’ as we know—even this cannot be de-nounced without remainder. It was the terse andsharp statement of another aporia—but what mat-ters above all is that this aporia or this knot is ours.This splinter falls into our garden. Whether itpleases us or not, we are concerned by it, for herebefore us, with or without Heidegger, history bothcontinues to break apart and is happening onceagain.

28 February 2003

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In the previous chronicle, I spoke of history: of thecrisis or the aporia of history that the flat represen-tations of progressivisms or the mythological fren-zies of fascisms have echoed, but without providinga response. I wish to bring up today an indispens-able corollary, which must be viewed under the con-cept or at least under the index of the everyday.

It was by contrast with the everyday that Heideg-ger brought up the exigency of history, and it wasagainst the presumed ‘‘inauthenticity’’ or ‘‘improp-erness’’ of the former that he set up the no less pre-sumptive ‘‘properness’’ or ‘‘authenticity’’ of apeople capable of history. This pejorative attitude

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toward the everyday was anything but obvious,however, since this very everydayness was supposedto constitute the preontological ground of the onto-logical experience, that is, of ‘‘existing’’ in thestrong sense. In other words, instead of standingfirm on this ground, Heidegger ended up invertingdaily coexistence into the solitude of being-toward-death, in order to overcome the latter in the histori-cal community of a people. There was, then, notruth of the everyday that was not itself everydayand therefore banal, mediocre, and vulgar.

Later, however, in spite of Heidegger or becauseof him, we witness the resurgence of certain at-tempts to apprehend the everyday in a differentway, as though out of a necessity that was felt assoon as one began to mistrust progressivisms as wellas apotheoses or catastrophisms. There was some-thing of this in Sartre, as there was in Henri Lefeb-vre and the situationists, or in other ways in Michelde Certeau or Foucault. Blanchot also pondered thedifficulty of the everyday.

This difficulty is made manifest by the fact that itappears to be impossible not to submit the everydaysometimes to the infamy of insignificance andsometimes, in order to save it, to the hyper-signifi-cance of absorption into history, into the aesthetic,or even into the religious. In such an accession, the

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everyday loses its everydayness. The former caneven be turned against the latter, by demanding adisruption of the course of life in order to convertit into ritual or into obsessional neurosis. It can also,most often, remain flatly quotidian. We can speak,with Hegel, of reading the newspaper as the ‘‘dailyprayer of modern man.’’ We can elevate the dailylife of an epoch and a region to the dignity of a greathistorical subject. We can, like Perec, write Life: AUser’s Manual, or we can also, with or without psy-choanalysis, convert the small change of our dailyforgettings, delays, and slips into a signifying trea-sure. But nothing will prevent the wearing down of‘‘the humble life of tedious, simple work,’’ whicherodes and disperses the exceptional moments with-out any hope of rescue.5

But must we rescue the everyday? Or, at least,must we rescue it by rescuing ourselves from it—byescaping it? And if this is not necessary, how canwe think it without thinking in a mediocre manner(which is no longer to think)?

In other words, how can we think insignificance,if that is what constitutes the proper mark of theeveryday?

As we know, Heraclitus invited his visitors tocome into his kitchen, insisting that the gods could

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be found there, too. If these words have been re-ported, or invented, it’s because they are part of aconstant—one that is philosophical as well as politi-cal, religious, and aesthetic—according to which thetrue, the good, and the beautiful must as a generalrule be linked to exception, to the brilliance of whatappears only in sovereign conditions and whose cor-ollaries are astonishment, an old philosophical vir-tue, or the respect that Kant calls a ‘‘feeling ofreason.’’ We want to feel that we are admiring theappearance of what exempts itself from a generaldullness. In a certain way, all our versions of mani-festation (the Platonic Idea, Husserlian transcen-dence, Christian revelation) are imprinted with thislaw of supreme distinction: the thing or truthshould rise up and constitute an event, a coming-to-be. Appearing is a necessity for this register ofthought, and all phenomenality, however modest,contains within it a reserve of the phenomenal inthe sense of the spectacular.

The everyday, however, remains in its nonap-pearance. Or rather, it does not subsist in appear-ance as some hidden thing, but is itself nothingother than this nonappearance. It forms its nonap-parent unfolding, or it weaves a nonappearing

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texture, and what appears is only a brief sparkle ofthis texture. What appears also disappears. But thenonapparent, for its part, persists—without, how-ever, subsisting. As soon as we make it appear—ina thought, a painting (just as one used to speak of a‘‘theater of everyday life’’)—we lose it, we make itcome forth as an event, or we make an event springup in contrast to it, eclipsing it.

But if the annulling of the everyday signals theevent and its exception, the obstinacy of the every-day can also testify, not to an annulling of the event,but to the only real inscription that it is allowed.When life goes on—as Kiarostami’s film aptly putsit6—and only when life goes on, can the event beinscribed. Only then, after the fact, does it takeplace. That is why, for example, there are two waysof accompanying the departure of the dead: withthe suspension of and abstention from the everyday,or with its renewed affirmation. We fast, or else weeat; we are silent, or we talk. And sometimes bothalmost at the same time. In certain cultures, onereturns to prepare a rustic meal on the tomb of thedeceased, who is given his share of the food.

In an analogous manner, one mode of resistancethat is most proper to the everyday is manifested

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during wars or other forms of catastrophe. I do notknow if I can say this today, even as a blind historyhas unleashed a war in Iraq (on the eve of the dayon which I am recording this chronicle). But Iknow that the emergence of the everyday in war,when this can happen, is what is most contrary tothe goal of war—the internal goal, at least—insofaras war exemplifies the exception actualized and theexcellence as much as the grandiloquence ofheroism.

Perhaps, we must try to retain the language ofwhat would not even be a modest heroism. For her-oism always claims to stare down destiny, even ifthis means contemplating a terrible facelessness. Butthe everyday takes narrower and more secret andhidden paths, which are not for all that an evasivehiding away.

What the everyday hides is its own accession orits own hypostasis, as much as it hides the accessionand hypostasis of a destiny or an absolute. In speak-ing of ‘‘the everyday’’ we do not succeed in namingany essence, or even an agency or authority, still lessa truth, a good, or a beauty. Undoubtedly it hap-pens, and it should happen, that the everyday is

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made into works [fasse oeuvre], and by means ofthese works it passes into exception and into its sov-ereign elevation. That is how Hegel saw in Flemishpainting ‘‘the Sunday of life,’’ and that is how,thanks to Andy Warhol, Campbell Soup has takenits place in the house of the Muses. In any case, theaccession is limited, for it signals its own fugitive-ness. The soup cans and the days pass by, whetherthey resemble each other or not, and their filing pastdrags the work into unworking [desoeuvrement].

Within the everyday, there subsists neither work,nor event, nor exception. Nothing of what consti-tutes law or faith. Or only the minimal forms ofeach of these, as though condensed or calcified. Thelaw that says, ‘‘Every day has its share of grief,’’ andthe faith that says, ‘‘Tomorrow is another day.’’ Em-piricism and resignation, or a quiet resource forthinking otherwise? This is what must be put to thetest.

One day it happens that grief reaches the pointof giving up even the wait for tomorrow. That dayis the most everyday of all. Its grief fills it withoutremainder, and ‘‘another day’’ becomes for it theother of all days, without, however, ceasing to

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be—as long as we have a glimpse of it—a day likeany other. So even the exception, its law and itsfaith in the ‘‘sovereign instant,’’ comes to be quitestrangely confused with the everyday.

‘‘Appearing’’ is confounded with ‘‘disappearing,’’or, in a more subtle way, it shows itself as neverhaving appeared in truth. Nonappearance is immo-bilized. At the same time, at the same instant, a lifeappears for an instant in its singular exception, andit rejoins the nonappearance of all other lives, thoseof the dead as well as those of the living. We mightsay that nonapparent lives as a whole are eternalizedwithout any brilliant manifestation, but also with-out annulling their works or their truths. Spinozasays that we experience our character as eternal be-ings. We must add that this is an everyday experi-ence, which immediately means that this experiencedoes not appear to us.

28 March 2003

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The previous chronicle was simultaneous with thebeginning of what one calls ‘‘war’’: today’s chronicleis contemporaneous with the immediate postwarsituation. Within a month an act has been per-formed that has serious chances of eventually be-coming a landmark, both symbolic and real, inretracing the history of the great turn that the worldhas been experiencing for about thirty years. Re-volving or toppling over, transformation or col-lapse, we are unable to decide, for it is no longerpossible for us to believe that we can master a clearlymarked course of history.

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That’s also why it is impossible for us to seek topresume that behind the invasion of Iraq there issome sort of Hegelian ‘‘cunning of reason,’’ as somepeople have ventured to assert. For in order to beable to maintain such a presumption, there must betwo presuppositions: on the one hand, that Ameri-can democracy represents reason in the process ofits self-development; and on the other hand, thatthis presumed rationality can, in the end, be trans-planted outside of America.

To the extent that it is forbidden for us to beHegelian in this sense, we are also not allowed to bebeautiful souls. But there are certain motivations tofear this danger: the indignation aroused by thewar—amplified to an exceptional degree by theforce of a world public opinion that is rarely so con-sensual—is likely to act as a lure and a trap. Now Icertainly do not mean that we should not be indig-nant. This invasion is loathsome, cynical, and bru-tal. Thousands of deaths, and many more injuredand orphaned, the thirst and the pain of the Iraqipeople, the humiliated grief of the ‘‘Arab nation’’(as one used to say), the devastation of the testi-mony provided by our early writings and our earli-est cosmogonies, not to mention the tearing openof Europe, all these cry for justice—and the cry is

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all the greater since this desolation is carried outwith a crude assurance that is quite properly bar-baric and that would be pitiful if one could feel anypity for this outburst.

But what may risk functioning as a lure is thesystem of accusation that points to absolute Ameri-can evil as the sudden emergence of Satan in aTexan hat. This accusation sometimes reaches thepoint, among Arabs, of referring to ‘‘Nazism’’ and‘‘totalitarianism’’; everywhere it is directed at thefigure of George W. Bush, who is attacked as apreacher full of fury. Either way, one is far frominquiring into the real issue behind the event.

The lure begins with the word ‘‘war.’’ We shouldhave known for a long time now (Carl Schmitt di-agnosed it from the so-called first ‘‘world’’ war) thatthere is no war in the real sense whenever a claim ismade to an international policing mechanism,whether it be economic, strategic, moral, or all ofthese together. There is then the assumption of aglobally applicable right, but one whose jurispru-dence as well as its effective operation are in thecommand of a single power (abetted by those whosubmit to it). It is no longer the right that governedrelations between sovereign states; rather, it is thelaw that a virtually global democracy arrogates to

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itself as the law of what is not even an ‘‘empire,’’ intruth, but rather a general enterprise of logistics.This logistics is regulated according to an intermi-nable a priori calculation of the increase of meanswithout ends implemented by a two-sided self-pro-ductive power: the self-production of technics andthe self-production of cost as general equivalence. Itis a matter of management and, in fact, every bombwill have been an investment.

This used to be called capital, and we no longerhave the right to be lured into believing that it canbe reduced to the name of Bush or Wolfowitz. Cap-ital, on the contrary, informs us better than ever ofits anonymity. For the rest, we know how thenames of Saddam Hussein himself, of Bin Laden,and so many other political and religious names ofthe Arab world, not to mention other names fromother worlds, become fused together within thisanonymity.

We should also not be lured into ignoring thefact that capital is self-produced and is self-repro-duced also as ‘‘democracy,’’ while at the same timebeing baptized as divine service. In Iraq, after all,democracy today is crushing the remnants of whatin the beginning was the Baath party’s attempt to

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introduce, in the time and in the shadow of so-called ‘‘real’’ socialism, a democratic modernity. Ina parallel manner, the invocations of God underone name or another do nothing but reveal moreclearly what is in fact the religious essence of a poli-tics that wants to submit and, strictly speaking, tosacrifice our diversity to the foundational Unity ofan indefinitely self-productive equivalence, or of anindefinitely tautological equivalence, as one maywish to call it.

In other words, we no longer have the right todelude ourselves regarding the fact that for the pastthirty-odd years the process of capital has been con-spicuously eliminating and eroding everything that,in principle, was promising in our democracies andour (a)theologies, even if some of these promises re-quired a rigorous internal deconstruction. Themovement since the Second World War can besummarized as follows: unable to strengthen de-mocracy and atheism, we have given or abandonedour rights to the powerful forces of a single theode-mocracy, which is tearing itself apart under thecover of a supposed ‘‘war of civilizations.’’

This self-management of barbarism, in which weare all caught up (French and German politics are

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not exempt from it, after all), forbids us to be de-luded about something essential: the words democ-racy and atheism no longer refer to anything solid,no more than do socialism or religious faith. Let usnot imagine that we can denounce the war on thebasis of a peace guaranteed by significations. As forwords and concepts, we must remake them all.Sense is before us like a night into which we mustenter with eyes wide open and which neither En-lightenment, nor Revelation, nor the flash of blast-ing weapons can illuminate.

25 April 2003

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This chronicle could be given the title ‘‘On the Pos-sible Use of Negativity.’’ Before beginning it, Ipause to say that I am speaking on the day afteran earthquake in Algeria, which has left at least athousand people dead according to first estimates,and more than seven thousand wounded. My rea-sons for mentioning this will soon be clear.

Two weeks ago, in the building next to where Ilive, a man died in his house, alone, and was discov-ered only after several days. Some time earlier, else-where in the city, a young man had died under thesame conditions. A neighbor in my block wanted to

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know how many people die in this way, isolatedfrom all presence, deprived of any testimony to thelast moment, this moment whose witnesses, whenthere are any, are the first in charge of the mourn-ing, the first ministers of this service thanks towhich we bring into our midst the void that can nolonger be admitted among us or received anywhereat all.

Death without possible mourning has always be-fallen those who disappeared without witnesses, ordied by extermination, whose witnesses have sooften been stricken in their capacity, or in the verysense of their position, as witnesses.

Hidden death, which is, in a way, the death ofdeath, the negation of the inclusion or inscriptionof death in life (in language), has perhaps become asocial or cultural fact (let us add here medicalizedhospital death, where the only witness is the record-ing apparatus). If human culture began with the tes-timonial inscription of death, then in our day thisculture is perhaps vacillating on its most extremepoint.

This can be stated in another way, and with afurther elaboration: we are ill at ease with negativity.

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We are obsessed with death, war, science, absence,emptiness, solitude, excess, and infinity, and it is abad obsession, for in it a morbid vertigo seems tobe combined with the impossibility of inscribingthem in an economy, that is to say, also in an ecol-ogy, and, in general, in an oikos, in a dwelling, in ahabitation, and within a familiarity (which is some-thing other than familiality).

The evidence for this impasse is precisely the factthat the word ‘‘economy’’ means to us nothingmore than the ‘‘icy waters of selfish calculation’’[Marx, Capital], whereas the word ecology floats onthe same waters devoid of compass and concept.

That is why, on every side, we rail against nihil-ism, against negativism, against all forms of retreat,suspension, finitude, or impossibility, judgedwrongly or rightly—and most often wrongly andconfusedly—to be either morbid or suicidal. Intheir place, we ask for affirmation or value, decisionand resolve, and from this perspective a symmetricalhaziness could suggest that one wishes at all cost tobe positive, to use an expression that has beenforged, by no means at random, by advertising.

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Between positivation and negation—equally uni-lateral and abstract—between these, or rather overand above their opposition, itself no less simple andabstract, is another attitude possible?

As we know, Hegelian dialectic has representedthe moment that can be spoken of as the full em-ployment of negativity. I say ‘‘full employment’’thinking of Bataille’s expression ‘‘unemployed nega-tivity’’ [negativite sans emploi], an expression inwhich we might still find a formula useful to us.

Hegelian dialectic supposes a transformation ofnegativity into a positivity raised above the level ofpositive immediacy. Death is engendered in it asthe life of the Spirit, and devastation prepares theway for a further blossoming. But today we knowof a negativity without any transformation orblossoming.

That is why we can say that after Hegel there isno other major philosophical problem than that oftransforming the dialectic, of displacing it, replacingit, rupturing it, or deconstructing it. Whether it is amatter of revolution, or of hidden death, of love orart, or of economics, the structure of the problem is

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the same: there is an excess of negativity, a loss or aremainder in surplus, something supernumerary inrelation to all calculation that it is impossible for usto submit to reason. In a sense, technics has thecharacter and the structure of this indefinite wasteor loss: it disassembles, destroys, and displaces, notin order to remake, but in order to displace further;thus it is not governed by the possible but by therepeated possibilization of the unprecedented (per-forming more, informing more, transformingmore).

But perhaps this is not as new as we might be-lieve. If the death that is hidden from testimony isbitter and cynical in the midst of our never-extin-guished networks of communication, at the sametime this cannot fail to remind us that death wasalways hidden—and along with it love, meaning,knowledge, and the divine.

If it is necessary to place ourselves within affir-mation—and it is necessary, without any doubt, ac-cording to an imperative which is that of thoughtitself (I would dare say that thought, like the Freud-ian unconscious, is in fact unaware of negation,since it is always at least the power to affirm the

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negative)—if it is thus necessary, then, to affirm,then may our affirmation be precisely an affirma-tion of the impossible.

In affirming the impossible, we do not dialectic-ize it, we do not domesticate it, we do not transformit into the possible, and yet we also do not fall intothe trap of nihilist despair.

If I affirm as impossible the recuperation, the re-appropriation of death, of love, of justice, or ofbeauty, I do not fall into the melancholy of a lost orabsent possibility: on the contrary, I affirm that theimpossible itself is the price of death, of love, ofjustice, and of truth. Here, instead of the impossible(the negative) being swallowed by affirmation andmade positive in it, it is affirmation that is inscribedin the impossible.

And this too is not new for philosophy. WhenPlato leads Theaetetus up to the point of knowingthat knowledge of knowledge is not given, he re-veals two faces of the same aporia. On the one hand,the knowledge of impossibility, with the necessityof an absence, a mourning, a renunciation. But onthe other hand, the impossible as knowledge: a

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knowledge of self as knowledge without object, andtherefore all the more subject, but subject of noth-ing and subject to nothing, ‘‘such that into itselfeternity finally changes it’’ [Mallarme, ‘‘The Tombof Edgar Poe’’]. The exact subject of a coincidencewith the self so extreme that it becomes the vacuityof a point.

Philosophy has always known and always prac-ticed (even with Hegel, if we were to read him alittle better) this exactness, which does not trans-form negativity, but which punctuates it, whichpricks it or pins it on pages covered with our fever-ish writings, our discourses and our poems. That’swhat is beautiful—with a true beauty that is notsatisfying but extenuating.

Can I hope that by telling you this, by givingthese words over to chance and to the hazard ofyour listening, I am rendering some justice, how-ever minute, to this unknown neighbor whosedeath was hidden from us? A justice rendered tohim and therefore to us, that is to say, to the possi-bility never assured, always risked, of uttering this‘‘we’’ which entrusts all of us to the impossible.

23 May 2003

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The season of festivals, biennials, and other art fairsand markets has revived here and there the furiousquarrel ignited about twenty years ago around whatwe call, in a singular manner, contemporary art.The most manifest sense of this expression, ‘‘con-temporary art,’’ is to designate an art constantly intune with its own debate, contemporary with itsown questioning or its own suspension; in short,contemporary with this distancing from itself, withthis intimate dissociation that one must have inorder to experience oneself, in whatever domain, asthe ‘‘contemporary’’ of something or someone.

I like this quarrel, whose violence simultaneouslyreveals and conceals the importance of the issue—it

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reveals this importance through its intensity, butoften conceals it with the noise it makes. Let us tryto discern, without making too much noise, the im-portance of what’s at stake. ‘‘Art’’ is the name for apractice with a double specificity: on the one hand,it can be identified, in the final instance, only interms of works (productions, constructions, cre-ations, tangible things) and not in terms of catego-rized objects (as would be the case with knowledge,power, salvation, happiness, justice, etc.); on theother hand, this practice has its unity only in thediversity of its concrete modalities (painting, music,cinema, performance, etc.). The specificity of ‘‘art’’is thus found twice over in exteriority and in diver-sity, or even in disparity: it has neither the categorialunity of the object, nor the intuitive unity of thesensible work. Nonetheless, there’s a certain unity,a certain ‘‘unitary’’ content designated precisely bythe word ‘‘art’’—a word that, taken in this sense,has been around for barely two centuries, as weknow (but the history of this word undoubtedlymarks out a great shift in history as such, even if the‘‘one’’ thing found in ‘‘art’’ is as old as humanity:the early life of this word evokes a power that hasbeen nurtured from the very beginning . . . ).

The manifest and obscure sense of the word artis precisely what foments the quarrel. It is the sense

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of an impossible unity, the sense of a missing sense.Or rather, it is a lack of sense that never ceases mak-ing sense, obstinately—at the very least the senseof this quarrel that furiously argues over its propercharacter in exclamations divided up among variousvoices: ‘‘This is art!’’ or ‘‘This is not art!’’ or ‘‘Whatactually is art?’’

We learn something essential from this: amongthe various human activities, there is one practicewhose meaning cannot be categorized (submitted toa signification) but whose sensible effectivity is al-ways both irreducibly multiple and compellinglynecessary: this necessity, indeed, is not that of indi-viduals who wish to be ‘‘artists’’ without being con-jointly that of a common world that wants to enjoyworks of art (whether it be popular art or, on thecontrary, esoteric art is another question).

We could say this: we have an exigency to giveourselves the sense or the feeling—together andeach by himself—of an overflow of meaning. Wehave the desire to sense and to feel according to atruth that no meaning can saturate (neither knowl-edge, nor salvation, nor justice, etc.) and that nounity can sublimate.

Thus contemporary art, with its quarrel, bringsforth a desire that is neither the desire for an objectnor the desire for a meaning but a desire for feeling

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and for feeling oneself feel—a desire to experienceoneself as irreducible to a signification, to a beingor an identity. A desire to enjoy, in sensibility, thevery fact that there is no unique and final form inwhich this desire would reach its end.

Perhaps psychoanalysis provides us a valuableclue about this desire. Not by attempting to analyzeart—we know all too well the poor results of suchattempts—but on the contrary, by describing art, orat least the artistic gift, as ‘‘unanalyzable,’’ as Freudinsisted on several occasions. The unanalyzablecharacter of this gift corresponds to the fact that thework of art appears in the place of the symptom, ashe also says. Replacing the symptom means movingout of the order of interpretation. A work of art isthe failure or the disconnection of interpretation (orits infinite rebeginning and opening up, whichamounts to the same). The work of art is thus akinto the ‘‘navel of the dream,’’ which Freud refers toas the point at which interpretation will and mustbe lost without return. (I add here, mischievously,that Freud himself refers to analysis as an ‘‘art ofinterpretation’’ . . . which should then appear as theformula of a contradiction—unless, pushing a bitfurther, we can deduce from it that art is, in thefinal account, the desire and/or the dream of Freudand of psychoanalysis as a whole . . . which thus

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becomes a symptom for the contemporaryperiod . . .)

The desire for art—like the dream-wish, and per-haps, if I dare say, like the dream-wish of the com-munity or, if you prefer, of the ‘‘us’’—would thenbe the desire beyond every sensible object, the desirefor the sense of desire itself. Spinoza perhaps wouldhave recognized in it his conatus, Nietzsche his willto eternal return, Heidegger his decision ofexistence . . .

But, at the same time, no philosopher could ad-here to this without also eventually freeing himselffrom the greed for knowledge contained in his con-cept of desire. A philosopher or an analyst, as muchas an epistemologist, a theologian, or a political sci-entist, encounters at this limit the insistence of anonknowledge, the impulse and the pulsation of anescience, multiple and sensible by nature, which isthe only way to comprehend the denouement of sensethat must be apprehended in every possible sense.What is taken in charge in this denouement, in thisunbinding that creates a sensible work, is nothingless than the energy that brings us into the world,that puts us in relation to ourselves, each one andeveryone together, in a silent protest against all im-position of sense and in the affirmation of a speechalways moving beyond itself and directed against

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every form of ‘‘last word’’ that would like to fix thetruth.

Freud used to say that he could say nothing ofmusic, not even analyze it, as he believed he coulddo with painting. He thus reluctantly recognizedthat what approaches speech without taking on sig-nification, what allows us to hear [entendre] how itis a matter of listening without understanding [en-tendre] anything, what proposes a presence in a stateof permanent imminence and thus in the rhythmicrepetition of its effacement, of its slipping away—that this and this alone is what opens our ears, aswell as our eyes, and every part of us that can beopen.

27 June 2003

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July twenty-fifth: this is the last chronicle. Onecould call it supernumerary. Besides, I did notknow, a month ago, that it was planned. Eventhough I hardly stop working in summer, I did notimagine that philosophy would continue on theradio until almost the beginning of August. Withan altogether academic ingenuousness, I was reason-ing as though the sun should place thought insuspension . . .

But we know that the exact opposite is the case.Thought has suspended the sun ever since itlaunched the earth in motion around it. More ex-actly, having ceased to ‘‘rescue the phenomena’’ and

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to explain the appearances, calculating thought hasrelated the celestial bodies and their movements tothe general ordering of an expanding universe wheresuns proliferate, frozen as well as incandescent ones,apparent and nonapparent ones . . .

This has hardly shaken the congenital heliocen-trism of our thought, however. Occidental, as we sayand as it called itself, which means ‘‘declining’’ or‘‘falling’’ (in Greek, Latin or Arabic), this thoughtis still represented in a fatal distancing in relation toan ‘‘Orient,’’ which is to say, to a birth or a sunrise.Or else it has seen itself as turning or turned backtoward this Orient, reoriented toward a sun that ittook for itself, whose Lumieres or Enlightenment itcaused to rise by means of its own forces.

We are so accustomed to the recurrent catachresisof light and sun that we no longer pay much atten-tion to it. It is taken for granted that knowledge,truth, right, and beauty are luminous.

However, photocentrism and heliocentrism donot amount to the same, and this too we know—but this knowledge is more obscure, which is not bychance. The metaphors of light, clarity, and evi-dence, like those of transparency or limpidity, are

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related to the order of vision. The visible comes tobe discerned by a correct dividing up [partage] oflight and darkness. Even if it is still a matter of pro-gressively dissipating all obscurities, one accepts thenecessity of a dark region, concerning which onesays that there is no question of reaching it.

It is yet another matter with the sun itself. If onethinks about it for a moment, one realizes that thesun exceeds the logic and the gnoseology of the visi-ble. From Plato up to Nietzsche at least, our culturewas also ordered according to the desire or the willto go beyond the luminous visible in order to con-sider the luminous source (in Latin lux, distinctfrom lumen). The latter cannot be divided by anyshadow, and that is why the early observations ofdark spots on the sun were charged with blasphe-mous impiety—an accusation in which, bizarrely,Apollo came to shelter the God of Abraham, whopreferred to be enveloped in clouds.

For Plato, the sun is the analogon of the Goodin the visible world, and what it communicates tomundane realities is not only luminous visibility butalso generative and nourishing warmth. The bril-liance of this metaphysical sun shines all the way upto Hegel and Nietzsche, but we should also discern

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it in everything that corresponds to the concept ofan ‘‘intellectual intuition’’ or an ‘‘originary giftingvision’’: that is to say, whenever the subject is notmerely the one who recognizes objects in the light,but the one who makes them appear in his light andbecause of it.

In philosophy, this sun no doubt gives form tothe metamorphosis of the divine—which is almostalways primordially solar in the mythologies out ofwhich philosophy emerged. And, of course, a resid-ual scoria of this star and of its sacred or even sacri-ficial power was also formed. Insofar as the sun isnot sight, as Plato emphasizes, it cannot itself beseen without bedazzlement—and it is Plato who at-tests to this as well. When, on the contrary, sight isrepresented as originary and giving, it must becalled ‘‘vision’’ in quotation marks, ‘‘penetrating vi-sion’’ or ‘‘insight’’ (Ein-sicht in German), or else‘‘evidence,’’ this great word of a tradition that, fromDescartes to Husserl, made an effort to fix the pointwhere sight surges forth as its own light.

Now, this point is necessarily blind, and the tra-dition knows this too. In the order of the solar ana-logon, one cannot look at the daytime star without

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burning one’s eyes. A tearing contraction is pro-duced at the point of evidence: the eye is destroyedby the sun that thus comes out of it. It is this coinci-dence that is willed—Nietzsche’s ‘‘noon,’’ the mo-ment of the greatest thought, ‘‘exactly under thesun,’’ as Gainsbourg sings so well—it is the solsticethat is awaited, and when it happens, the sun dark-ens in its own vision. It is just the same with ourmetaphysics in general as with the sundance of theDakota Indians: the dancers look at the sun whilepulling at the strings hooked to their skin until thelatter rips open. (But today, on summer beaches, donot people offer their skin to dangerous blades ofbronze?)

It is well known that La Rochefoucauld repeatedthis maxim of the ancients: ‘‘Neither the sun nordeath can be looked directly in the face.’’ But per-haps the question is: What thing can be looked atdirectly in the face? If looking something ‘‘in theface’’ means seeing its ‘‘truth’’ or ‘‘evidence,’’ thenthere is never any direct face-to-face. Every face is abedazzlement, terrible and marvelous.

Soleil cou coupe (‘‘Neck-severed sun’’): this fa-mous line from Apollinaire summarizes it all.7 The

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sun is a bloody slice that interrupts discourse andevery order constructed as a body. A slice and asharp edge, in the absolute coincidence of its evi-dent burning in which the gaze, in effect, is hol-lowed out, sees itself hollowed out [se voit evide].That is the end but also the beginning of the poem.Homer, thus, was blind.

25 July 2003

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Notes

note: All notes have been supplied by the translator.1. The French word chronique means both ‘‘chronicle’’

(noun) and ‘‘chronic’’ (adjective) in English. Thus, chroniquephilosophique means ‘‘philosophical chronicle’’ and maladiechronique means ‘‘chronic illness.’’

2. The connections among this series of words, all ofwhich begin with auto (‘‘self ’’), including automobile, are moreapparent in French than in English.

3. ‘‘In the Homeric works, Moira is the personification ofDestiny, the power that determines the fate of man from thetime of his birth. It imposes itself even on the gods and aboveall, Zeus; sometimes it appears identical to their will and onethinks that they can transgress it.’’ La Grande Encyclopedie,vol. 23, s.v. ‘‘Moira.’’

4. In French, the word politique is used both as an adjec-tive (‘‘political’’) and as a substantive (‘‘politics’’). The mean-ing of the word as substantive also changes according to

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whether it is feminine (la politique) or masculine (le politique).La politique can mean either ‘‘politics’’ as an activity or ‘‘pol-icy,’’ while le politique refers to the domain of politics, as op-posed, for example, to that of social welfare (Harrap’sUnabridged French-English Dictionary).

5. Paul Verlaine, Sagesse (Wisdom), bk. 1, poem 8; this isthe first line.

6. The reference is to Abbas Kiarostami’s film titled La viecontinue in French and Life and Nothing More in English.

7. The quote is the last line of the poem entitled ‘‘Zone.’’

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