Bernard Aspe is one of the most interesting figures emerging from contemporary French political philosophy. Born in 1970, agrégé in philosophy, he is the author of L’instant d’après. Projectiles pour une politique à l’état naissant (La Fabrique, 2006) and more recently, Les mots et les actes (Nous, 2011). He has written in various magazines such as Alice, Persistances, Chimères and Multitudes and published influential articles on the work of Gilbert Simondon. His thesis, La pensée de l’individuation et la subjectivation politique (2001), was supervised by Jacques Rancière.
This interview began in the summer of 2011, in the Brittany countryside, and was then continued by electronic means. Between his account of Rennes’ political occupations of the early 2000s, his critique of the neurotic time of capital, his confrontation with speculative constructivism and his remarks on the question of the soul and the transindividual in Simondon’s work, Aspe develops a coherent and original philosophy or way of thinking articulated around a fundamental question: what is a political act? 1 2 — lm
The need for action
By way of introduction, could you sketch out a brief overview of the course your thinking has taken: what are the questions that have carried you through your philosophical journey? How has your relationship to the academic world unfolded? And above all: how did politics impose itself in your life?
Politics imposed itself to me (to us, I should say, because at the time we were two, inseparable) as it did for many others, that is to say through the need for action, the necessity of intervention in the real world. It was by meeting, in the mid-1990s, activists close to Toni Negri who at the time were working on the idea of guaranteed income, that we found this ultimately very singular (to a point we hadn’t measured before) type of activity that is revolutionary politics. Fifteen years ago, the term “revolutionary” made everyone smile. Today, it is starting to be taken seriously again: let’s say it is becoming clear to many that the idea of a revolutionary disruption is in no way more delusional than having to prolong the existing state of affairs and its suicidal tendencies.
Until then we had been students of philosophy very focused on study, focused on the promises that a philosophical life seemed to hold. Like many others at that time, we wanted to see how one could “overcome” phenomenological and deconstructivist postures, this could be understood as a desire to get back to the point of view of the absolute. Of course, this rediscovery of the absolute had been at the heart of the post-Kantian thinkers’ attempts, and it seemed that a similar operation was underway with the work of Deleuze and Badiou, the two thinkers of “infinity”, the two great metaphysicians of our time (that’s what we thought then, as many did). And that it was also underway with the re-readings of Spinoza, as Deleuze then suggested, of course, but also Alexandre Matheron and Pierre Macherey especially, whose book Hegel ou Spinoza was seminal to us. Spinoza was the paradigm of an affirmative thought that did not need to go through the workings of negativity and mediation to adopt the standpoint of the absolute.
For years, the discovery of politics went alongside such philosophical work, for which the reference to Simondon had become central. It is only later, after our PhD work ended, in the early 2000s, that the incompatibility between the pursuit of this philosophical project and the discovery of what a political life requires became clear. We thought we could easily reconcile this project and this requirement, but we soon realized that we were in denial of the incompatibility between the two.
Indeed, we could no longer go on participating in the deception that says that doing metaphysics – albeit positive, affirmative, pure presentation of singularities as singularities – is working for political revolution. Therefore, we firstly had to criticize this deception. (It is also at about this time that we both had to relearn how to not exclusively say “I”.)
The words and the acts, or the embodiment of what is true
The title of your latest book is very suggestive and shows its colours clearly: it is about “marking the heterogeneity of saying and doing”, to experience (in acts) the chasm separating words and things. As both Foucault and Wittgenstein (to which you appear to be very close) would say, you stand for the necessity of a “friction” with reality, through holding a “discourse of truth”. You go so far as to say that in the current economic regime of our societies, which you define as the triumph of “generalized skepticism”, it is impossible for words and acts to be congruent. Is that to say that outside of the political, there cannot be coherence between what we say and what we do?
To hold together words and acts – to hold them together no matter what, that is to say despite the fact that there actually is an abyss between them – is not only about coherence between what we say and what we do. It is above all about not covering up the difficulty that lies in the existential leap that makes us go from one another. In this sense, one might almost say the opposite of what the question seems to indicate: it is politics, against the economy, that restores the hiatus, the impossible coherence between saying and doing. But this is the very thing, of course, that allows us to speak of “truth”. In this sense, the subjects of the economy are less incoherent beings than beings deprived of truth (political truth, at least) – and that’s why their speech is constitutively floating. There is truth, there is truth-speaking only where it is not sufficient to say, and where it requires to be established in an inscription in the real, not by being “applied” to it but by extending it by means that speech itself cannot anticipate or prescribe. How is the passage from speech to existence being made: that is unsayable proper, it has to be shown (here I paraphrase Wittgenstein); we cannot “theorize” this passage. And for this to occur, one living must make of his very existence (and not what he recollects of it in his speech) the paradigm of such an inscription. The “literal” inscription of speech is always a transposition of it, a radical move. The speech of truth-speaking always becomes something else when it is experienced and embodied.
There is truth only where there is incarnation of what’s true, being understood that it can never be reduced to an “application” of what will have been said or thought. From this point of view, I can only follow the view developed by Foucault in Les Mots et les choses on the state of “modern” thought: it does not get its ethical content from prescribing rules of action; it has irremediably lost this prescriptive ability. It is “from the start”, Foucault says, that thought “hurts or reconciles”, it is from the start that it has ethical content. It does not add up like a set of precepts that would result from “theory”. Modern thought implies subjective positions that are implemented as such by the deployment of thought (for example, here one can think of the text “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” that Foucault wrote in 1971 in response Derrida). These subjective positions are not activated after the fact by the application of what would function as “precepts”, they are rather the immediate effect of subjective movements inherent to the route of the thought as thought. The problem is to conclude from this that the question of the act, of the action in existence, therefore dissolves. If Foucault rightly mocks the innumerable entanglements the famous question of “the relationship between theory and practice” gives way to, he also considers, perhaps less rightly (at least at the time he wrote Les Mots et les choses), any questioning of the relationship between thought and existence as irremediably outdated.
In the fifth and last chapter of your book, entitled “works and acts”, you write: “The plinth of any speculative thought, as ‘critical’ it wishes to be, or is perceived, is nowadays a choice siding with the economy, that is to say the choice to not make the choice of politics.” Would you then say, in stride with Peter Hallward or Jacques Rancière, that there cannot be a Deleuze-inspired politics?
Peter Hallward recently defended this thesis: politics deals with the contemporaneousness of the world. A thought that defines itself in keeping “actuality” at bay to free the pure consistency of the virtual as virtual is constitutively a thought that is hostile towards politics. Indeed, from this viewpoint, we can’t see what a “Deleuze-inspired” politics could be. I quite agree with this; I would nuance only by saying that the “politics of minorities” has been able to claim the becoming-minorities as they are thematized in Mille plateaux. It seems to me that, quite rapidly, this politics has showed its limitations. At no point was it able to substitute itself to revolutionary politics, which was still attached to the “worker” referent until the beginning of the seventies. The figure of the worker can no longer be a focus for the crystallization of revolutionary enunciation, but this in no way signifies that we would have moved from the One (the working class) to the Multiple (minorities or becoming-minoritarians). Today it is about knowing what are the ways of unification that can exist, that are not the crushing of singularities but that are able to trace a parting line enabling us to spot the positions of the enemy. As Tronti says, there is politics only where there are two camps. Politics is not the One or the Multiple, it is Two. But two is not “the contradiction”(another error, that of Maoist rhetoric); it is separation, the parting line demarcating an enemy position.
How are political acts such as you conceive them different from the infinite divergence of “practices”, in the strong sense Isabelle Stengers gives to this term?
Stengers’s position remains the one of the speculative philosopher: it is about knowing how the differences are composed as differences, or singularities as singularities (therefore once the speculative scheme is rid? of the idea of “totalization”). It is not about taking sides inside of these differences, these singularities. “For her and, in this perspective, as for Bruno Latour, the problem is to find ways for compossibility. The problem we inherited from Kierkegaard is exactly the opposite: it is about finding the ways through which our intolerance can be expressed. This is not enough to formulate a critique of the term ‘tolerance’, as justified as it may be.(…)” (I think of “To be Done withTolerance”, in Cosmopolitics II, University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
You set up a radical separation between the work and the act. But there is another way of asking the question of the act, in relation to the idea of magic (see Stengers, Sloterdijk or Tiqqun for example), which implies thinking our presence in a continuum with the world. How would you place yourself in relation to this way of thinking about the act?
There are two main types of thought: enveloping thought and cutting thought. The first deploys an imaginary space that we can inhabit only with those who share the existential disposition that consists in admitting that this space exists and that it matters. The latter is primarily concerned with taking us back to the point where thought can no longer be contemplation of its own space, and has to figure out a way to designate what is not an outside (one could very well have a speculative approach of the Outside immanent to thought), but a leap. To me, this Kierkegaardian term seems irreducible here. In Tiqqun’s perspective, there is an attempt to synthesize these two types of thought. This attempt appears to me to be constitutively bound to fail, even if the term “magic” is solicited.
It seems obvious to me, to put it differently, that politics requires a thought of cuts that cannot be reconciled with the gesture “of thinking our presence in a continuum with the world.” There are many points of unseparation, between beings, or between beings and a given section of world. I agree with the idea that we need to begin from such points of unseparation to grasp what a transindividual relationship can be. But politics calls for discontinuity. The mistake would be to believe that this discontinuity necessarily summons the schema of the “anthropological break” that Badiou, for example, solicits to the extreme with his concept of the “empty”. The discontinuity is not between the world and what belongs to “man proper”, it is not between the objective world and the perceiving or thinking subject. It is in the real of time: the instant (Kierkegaard).
At the beginning of your book, you clearly indicate that you are not speaking to those considered to be caught in the web of the society of the spectacle, but to the enlightened intellectuals and other “men of culture”, of whom you say that they have forgotten the difference between what you call the “works” [œuvre] and the acts themselves. How is this requirement of the act laid down in the context of the “cultural economy”? Or, without wanting to put salt in a wound which, I close to home: to write a book like yours, is it a work or an act?
On this point, there is no ambiguity: to write a book is not to act: it is laying a milestone in the construction of a work (regardless of its value). One could retort rightly that in some situations, the writing and publishing of a book or text is strictly inseparable from an action: for example, in places where a certain kind of writing is prohibited and such disclosure requires a concentration between people who are, nevertheless, setting up a strategy to disseminate these writings, etc. This is quite true, but in this case the act lies not in having thought, suggested, or exposed one’s thinking: that should never be confused with an act. An act imposes a choice on at least one other than he who made this choice. This is what happens in any relation that involves the effectuation of a transmission, or a healing, or a romantic relationship. So there are, in fact, acts outside of politics, but it could be said that politics presents the paradigmatic form of the act: a choice that imposes itself on he who did not choose it, and more so on those who had explicitly refused it. Where there is political action, there are 1) people who don’t want anything to do with it, and 2) enemies who would like to see it disappear (as a political force, at least), those who set it in motion; and there is the necessity to impose the effects of this action to the first and the second.
What is cultural economy? Let’s say it’s the alleviating space of the side-effects that can be attached to the exposure or making public of a work. Side effects, because once again, a work exhibiting itself as a work is never an act as such: it is at best a proposition of existence, it is never the imposition of a bifurcation on a trajectory of existence. There may be, however, side effects to this exhibition: you can never know in what ways, nor how far, the influence of a work can go. But the cultural economy is there to channel them, that is to say literally to describe the channels through which these effects will be able to flow. Seminars, conferences and journals all are examples of the space where this flow is collected.
There is political act only where you are not, or are no more, in cultural economy. My book is in no way a political action. No book can be, unless it constitutes a proposed arrangement to carry an action, or to amplify it; and yet, even then, it itself is not action, it is becoming it by what was involved in the event of its elaboration or of its exhibition (when such a book has the status of political “manifesto”, for example).
The neurotic temporality of capital
One last question, on the theme of cultural economy: your book is full of shrewd characterizations of the modes of subjectivation required by capitalism. For example, you say that “economy is the dispersion of pathways of existence that became profitable”, or that “the source of valorization, in cognitive capitalism, is the work that individuals have to operate on themselves, struggling with their structural inconsistencies, in order to fit their suffering and depression to their creative abilities, so to ‘stay in the race’”. Finally, you conclude by saying that “the temporality of capital is nothing but neurotic temporality”. Does the conversion to politics appear, ultimately, to be the only real therapy against the anxieties produced by globalized capitalism?
I do believe that there is no real therapy in the world of capital outside of the one that goes through politics. It does not confuse itself with a therapeutic practice; but a therapeutic practice that excludes politics is bound to maintain properly pathogenic illusions. What I say now was obvious to many in the 1960s and 1970s. We can only observe all of what has been lost since this obviousness has left.
It seems to me that more than ever, the subject of the capitalist economy is subject to a contradictory injunction: we expect him or her to live the time of his life as the time its accomplishment (the only one given to him, the “remaining time” in this sense) and at the same time, to submit to the generalized acceleration that characterizes the present state of world of capital (I am thinking of an important book by Hartmut Rosa, Accélération. Une critique sociale du temps, La découverte, 2010) that relentlessly thwarts this accomplishment by delaying it indefinitely. An acceleration that simultaneously obstructs all dimensions of time: the future must not be welcomed in his own unthinkability, but managed; relationship with the past is no longer maintained by an art of memory (which could for example restore their absent presence to those that Simondon called “the living of the past”), but an object of a commemoration (or a repression); and the present, which seems more privileged than ever (sociologists even speak of “presentism” to describe the inability of the subject to refer to a horizon that exceeds the experience of the moment), is actually dodged, bypassed, averted. For there is no present without a resolution (I know this is a Heideggerian motif, but we find its origin in the Schelling-Kierkegaard lineage) that makes us to be exactly where we are, fully there [sans réserve]. Yet the subject of economy cannot “enjoy the present”, as he continues to proclaim, if he doesn’t at the same time keep many life possibilities in reserve, maintaining several open doors – insofar as he knows that what he experiences might some day not suit him anymore. He needs to reassure himself by saying that the life he has is not the only possible one, that he can always “change”. Thus he trusts what he has yet to experience, like others in other times placed their faith in another world which they had yet to experience. The world has become fully immanent, the false transcendence remained: now it is hardly “otherworldly”, but rather that of the life experiences that remain to be explored. Being somewhere –to be situated in the world– is an object of panic for our contemporary subject.
Let’s just say that the subject of economy has misread Spinoza: he believes he should let himself be driven by the question “what do I desire?” If necessary, he goes to a psychoanalyst for advice. But he did not understand that the question of what he desires could not lend itself to being resolved except from the understanding of a necessity. It is when I’m in adequacy with what could be called a subjective necessity (because here I am not talking about necessities that would be imposed by the “order of things”) that I can finally find my way through what I call “my desire”.