Does non-philosophy need a “manifesto” like philosophy does? At the moment of carrying out a more rigorous technical and scientific turning, testing out a second existence by making itself into a “generic science,” involving quantum thought within it, it is useless to recall some motifs that have guided its investigation. They have a generality: the generality of the philosopher’s discontent or dissatisfaction in the face of the philosophy of their time. This is the negative or “loss” part of the balance sheet; from this point of view, it is an assured guarantee of banality that does not deprive any philosopher who works. This kind of confession by which they reluctantly assume the deficiency of a tradition that they have not made cannot be saved from the sad fate of the topos except by the promise that it contains and follows it that they give: reform or rectification, revolution or empire, a new principle or foundation, system or vision, position, or terrain. Philosophical manifestoes are in general balance sheets and the balance sheets of digraph works that are more or less rationally distributed: it is a modern genre, the Discourse on Method that serves as a paradigm. “Modern” therefore implies that the manifesto is by definition an auto-justification or is itself grounded as a style and thematic content, that it vigorously expresses its philosophical “sufficiency.” It will be enough for a decision of thought to be affected by an absolute alterity, those who command rather than those who make the exception of truth, to withdraw its pertinence from it. It is difficult to imagine a manifesto in a good and due form of deconstruction; by contrast, it is natural in a materialist-and-modern position (Badiou). As for non-philosophy, the exposition of its deception has no determinant function except as simply occasional or material and, within these limits, as necessity rather than negative. Like each-and-every-one, we practice the litany of our deceptions, but it accompanies an angry act of formulation of an entirely other origin and scope and does not determine it like a manifesto does. Very exactly, modernity cannot break with a deficient (bastardized, academic, artificial, intellectual, media-friendly, doxic, sophistic – worldly) history if not through an act that risks resoldering it in a specular way instead of radically de-suturing from it. This “preface” is no doubt an intervention, making up an integral part of the thing itself, but if it must be included in it without delay, it is in the sole means of struggle proposed to humans and only within the means – not in the concept of these humans. The science that has philosophy as its object is throughout a struggle of subjects against its sufficiency of the world-form, at the same time as a new validation of this thought by its transformation, that is, its “emancipation.” The emancipation of humans contains as an effect – and not condition, if this is not occasional – the emancipation of philosophy, which is never the condition of-the-last-instance of their own emancipation. Distinguishing “the” philosophy as an Idea to re-affirm from the varying forgetful “philosophies” of Truth (Badiou) reprises Plato’s combat and, in this extent, Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s, Heidegger’s too. It would be from our point of view wanting to save an origin and a purity, an Idea. Wanting to save philosophy or an Idea is in some a curious enterprise. If it is truly so pure, does it not need to be saved, or will it save itself and its subject with it? Why would an Idea need advocates and redeemers? Is it not because it is nothing but an instrument between hands with opposed gestures and intentions, a poorly used instrument for barely human ends and ends of oppression, “evil, all-too-evil human” ends, because it is urgent to take care of it according to humans?
Within the conjuncture, we oppose at least two ways of “treating” it: one consists in placing it “under condition,” by restraining and emaciating the concept up to the Idea by ascetic subtractions of objects (mathematical and logical) that one separates and treats separately not without appealing to some of its services, but by affirming it more than ever in its sufficiency and stellar solitude. The other also places it “under condition” but a determinant condition, therefore forcing it to participate in a more complex dispositive, a scientific posture that, as determinant in-the-last-instance yet involving the subject, deprives it therefore of its sufficiency and it alone, conserving its materiality for other more useful functions than guaranteeing the order established within thought. Rather than making it suffer a cure from anorexia, it is then possible to ask it to assume its history, to engross it with its worse becomings, its sorriest history without clearing it by who knows what exceptional grace. Depriving it of its sufficiency, conserving its materiality and its powers of relaying with the world for it, assumes that within it we very carefully distinguish its operative part or working force, that is, its transcendental heart under varying anatomical organizations, and elsewhere the body and languages which are not the specific of philosophy but projections or parts of the world that it assumes, the varying sciences and divinities. Rather than leaving it to its harassing and self-nagging re-affirmation that it submits its subjects to tyrannically, it is to make it serve for a science that is nevertheless generic, lived, and in defense of humans. Who makes the exception? We do not ever dare responding that the Truth makes the exception. It is humans who make an exception to the exception itself, and the ones who elsewhere belong more to the order of the Ultimatum or Ultimation than the Exception, the Last Instance rather than Holiness.
The science of philosophy and knowledges of the world that involve it as their form is the encountering point of three or four objects taken up between obsessions and refusals, enveloped as it should be fantasies. This rage that is called the defense of the human race against the enterprise of the world cannot be controlled except through the continuous elaboration of this other enterprise that advances under the “reason” of “non-philosophy.” It is partly a table of grievances that we address to philosophy, perhaps a scientific rude remark because it concerns a ”pathology” of a personal lived experience, that it gathers affects; in reality, it is as worthy of interest as the famous ontological wonderment whose underside is philosophical deception. Subverting wonderment somewhat bewildered in the face of the “miracle” of being engages the whole philosophical style and in no way out of habit as a determined position, particular doctrine or system wants. This means that this combat is “transcendental” and is more over “against” the transcendental. Here is a brief table of its negative and positive motivations.
1) The classical wonderment of the philosopher takes on the following symptom-forms of a sort of counter-wonderment: a) the disgust of philosophical rehashing, a certain sterility of a vicious circle, a fundamental hermeneuticism in which is soon registered to the deconstructive and in general critical overdose; b) the need for an invention, intensification or multiplication of philosophical decisions beyond existing systems; c) the refusal of a dominant academic practice, the levelling history of philosophy and the scholastic activity of the labeling of positions, the normalization of studies by reading and commentary without the thought of texts (the scholarly heritage of Hegel and Heidegger); the refusal of the other side of its academic practice, its intellectual-media-friendly and conversational decadence, its fall into a doxa without righteousness, its famous obliqueness fading away at best into transversality, its “twisting” and contortions, its liberal commodification, its celebritization [starisation] of the fallen queen offered to the prostituting concupiscence of all. All philosophers would be motivated by this nausea to varying degrees. At least as much as by wonderment? No doubt, but here, we persist, now we insist, we elaborate the means of the analysis of these symptoms. Rather the stellarization [stellarisation] of philosophy than its celebritization, rather popular philosophy than pep-polar [pepolaire], rather a rigorous democratic discipline of thought than the stupid soup of “hybridization” that serves fast-philosophy. In a general way, neither critical by itself of philosophy or its deconstruction, neither authoritarianism and asceticism by privation and subtraction, auto-control and self-surveillance. The cup of the critique and critical style was filled to satiety by Derrida; critique has a very policing function by helping itself with the classical, very normative logic or axiomatic. A science of philosophy is franker and more direct, and controls philosophy not as an internal police, civil guard or critical tribunal, but in view of making a better use for humans and not for itself. Now with Deleuze and beyond him, we need to invent, to practice an opening within philosophy for fiction as thought. Non-Philosophy utilizes many critical elements provided by deconstruction, Heidegger, and Deleuze, but its destination is not there; its destination is in the invention of a science of philosophy that is human in-the-last-instance, the only means to reactivate philosophical creation, not to kill it, to the contrary; it is necessary to destroy the auto-limitation of philosophy and emancipate it itself. Philosophy has been one of the most self-surveilled forms of thought, it is now paid for by unpacking and a media-friendly laissez-faire that increases its turnover like never before. Many are the philosophers who have attempted to go beyond the century of critique, to “close its parentheses,” but without giving themselves the means to get out of the classical objectives of this type of thought, as if therefore the only inevitable issue was finally the media-friendly abasing, and the only solution was self-stiffening.
2) On the opposite end, the free creation within the closest thoughts of philosophy offers some artistic models (serial music and abstract painting) and scientific models (quantum physics) that all the more regret a certain philosophical conformism. Hence, the fantasy of a free creation of philosophical decisions, the “philosophical invention” opposed to the interpretation and rehashing of positions,” to the art of labeling and shelf presentation.
3) An apparently contrary argument to the previous ones, but we have demonstrated that it is one with them, is the arbitrariness of the philosophical decision, its circular and vicious auto-foundation, its civil and permanent turf war. Hence, the necessity to civilize without norming it, a refusal of the incessant call to the order of wisdom, virtues and truth, rationality, such that it is done through the disorder of foundational voluntarism (the philosophical throw of the dice, the symbol of the iron law of chance), all this as the atheist and worldly substitute of divinity, which is opposed – fantasy or not, it doesn’t matter – to a certain rigorous liberty of scientific research. It is not above all the crowned anarchy of philosophy, but rather the uncrowned rigor of science.
4) To comprehend these insufficiencies or symptoms, we must admit that the philosophies of science and epistemologies do not touch the “real” by themselves but only through their combination with science, and they are illusions of a new type when they are delivered from their operation alone. We need to grasp them as a transcendental abuse of philosophy over the sciences (but not only over them). Hence, the intention that was constant not to ruin their project but to demonstrate the limits and analyze their symptoms within a science of philosophy that would eliminate its vicious circle and refuse to be confounded with logical or mathematical reductions, with epistemological combinations or philosophies like Idealism and Materialism. This was the search for a science of “Thephilosophy” as an imaginary yet consistent Whole, a discipline univocally valid for all systems, a sort of unified theory of philosophical reality or knowledges as there is a science of the reality of psychism, psychoanalysis. It is a non-positive science that has a universality that will become generic and not transcendental. This primacy of science, that is obviously modified as a primacy and as a science, over philosophy would assure us, we hope, of being able to invent new decisions.
5) Another form of this project was the unified theory of philosophy with other decisions with an equality of-the-last-instance. This was a democratic will assumed by the scientific project, science as the only probable model of a democratic activity if not in the facts, at least in the theory. Therefore, we must institute democracy within the sphere of theory and, to do so in any case, to bring down the sentiment of superiority and sufficiency of philosophy, leading back all knowledges to their univocal cause, to their cause of-the-last-instance. Obviously, this was a matter of “democracy within thought” of the subject as Stranger and not of this imaginary democracy that political philosophies speak of, a generic democracy or an equality in-the-last-instance alone.
6) A “pilot” fantasy, a directing utopia of this labour, a dominant pathos, would from the start resemble these objectives that risked being contrary: making science, art, and politics, with philosophy as a material. The identity of the theoretical project, the political project, and the artistic project was assured by a global yet controlled devaluing, a “surgical” wound administered by philosophy. This was more than the famous “traumatisms” that had affect man as the center of the world, for this time it was the world that was questioned. Hence, the unfailing resources of gnosis that were nevertheless abominated by the Church. Since the beginning, we have identified the cause of-the-last-instance capable of this identity against philosophical divisions without being able to clearly explain its nature. It was Man-in-person (or generic Man), accompanied by the Stranger-subject who suited Man but with which they were not confused. The point was not to negate philosophy with a scientistic positivism or even with scientific positivity, nor to admit its end as philosophical thought and which, by definition, is sterile and “sufficient.” Otherwise, the confusion was always possible with one of these tinkered hybridizations to which philosophy lends itself by vocation, when it is not with a pop-philosophy of the Americano-liberal style. The life and death of philosophy barely mattered to us otherwise, these themes didn’t make up a part of our motivations. A science neither makes its objects live nor die, and in any case, philosophy always survives by consuming its servants one after the other. Philosophy is the model of the survival of thought in a hostile milieu. However, these are all precisely the concepts that we want to change: thought, milieu, and hostility.
Half anamnesis, half intellectual reconstruction, such is the exposition of our motifs within their improbable philosophical coherence, for none of these motivations are “purely” philosophical, if this exists, but all testify to a dissatisfaction to the classical locality as elsewhere the contemporary underside of thought. Despite the de facto blend of affects, it is inevitable that a science rather emerges from an affect of dissatisfaction and deception because its subject is lacking this science that is relatively exterior to it (nothing otherwise distinguishes on this point from the one that creates it and the one that receives and assumes it), and that philosophy, pressed with being happy and is often so, even if it means satisfying its subject with appearances. The non-philosophical rage is also the generic fruit of a certain deception and an unheard-of hope.
The ensemble of these objectives is partially realized by the invention of a new theoretical form, sometimes said of unilaterality or unilateral duality, and sometimes said of determination in-the-last-instance, and through a new concept of agents [instances] capable of effectuating it: Man as generic and the existent-Stranger-subject. However, there remains to be found the main scientific means capable of rigorously converting these fantasies: this is quantum thought, extracted from quantum mechanics, and introduced into a matrix called “generic.” The essence of non-philosophy must be called generic, precisely not “philosophical” or sufficient. However, it establishes a type of special correlation or complementarity between philosophy and quantum thought, under the most general following form: generic science is the fusion of science and philosophy under science; and under the most restrained and specified form of the following way by the quantum: generic science is the fusion of the quantum and the philosophical subject under the quantum. We will say that this generic science is the science of philosophy that it treats as its object, as the material of symptoms, but also as a hermeneutic contribution. It is perhaps worse for we who are accustomed to the confessions of humanist or materialist, cosmic or Judaic faith: all these objectives are finally tied or simplified within Generic Man as messianity, a human messianity that the philosophers resolutely refuse to confess in. Because this quasi-physics of philosophy is completed within Generic Man but not within the philosophical “subject” (individual ego or consciousness) is surprising, it is explained by this trait of the matrix that the quantum is there in a double and “same” position: both an object or a positive means in the face of philosophy, and precisely a thought as quantum (of) self, a formula that will require some explanations.
We are all in search of a “method” to produce something new. We are condemned to invention within philosophy as elsewhere: with it, against it, by epochal destiny or another. It is not shocking that the quantum turn of non-philosophy is produced. It was expected and programmed, but without being realized. It’s done: do we then need a manifesto for what does not “return,” one who doesn’t need it because they already came-in [en-venue]? This means that the death of philosophy could not interest us except under the death of “the old man” and his ills, that his survival could not shock us except under the insistence of the world.
translated by Jeremy R. Smith
taken form here