Part 1: System of Pleonectic: Interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (EN)
In Spring 2024, Technophany commissioned the independent researcher Benoît Robin to interview Mehdi Belhaj Kacem during the former’s trip to Tunisia, where the philosopher is now residing. The long interview covers Kacem’s own philosophical project as well as his evaluation of the development of contemporary philosophy. The interview was translated into English by the Technophany editorial team, and it is published in two parts. Read the original interview in French at the link below.
Benoit Robin: So, I suggest we dive straight into the notion of the system. Let’s do a brief recap of the critique of the concept of system in modern thought, probably starting with comrade Hegel.
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: Well, as I was saying off-mic, and one day I’ll write a book about it, for me, academic Hegel is truly the one who compromised the understanding of the word “system” in the history of philosophy. The anti-system critiques in philosophical modernity (by Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc.) are exclusively the result of Hegel’s conception of philosophical systematicity. And I know I’m going to shock many people, but for me, it’s a false system. The main focus of my critique is The Science of Logic, which I’ll mainly discuss. I have always had a great deal of admiration for the Phenomenology of Spirit, but for me, academic Hegel, the one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, is a disaster. He presents something as a system that, in my view, isn’t one, for various reasons that would be too tedious to discuss here.
I’d like to quote Deleuze, who is sometimes considered part of this whole deconstructionist movement, alongside Derrida and Foucault, with whom he was close, as well as Lyotard—they are all philosophers known for criticising systems. However, Deleuze said precisely the opposite: “No, the notion of the system in philosophy is not outdated. Philosophy must continue to propose systems.” The most influential thinkers for Deleuze, like Spinoza or Bergson, were incredibly systematic—so was Nietzsche, who is often credited with being anti-systemic in philosophy... I remember a discussion with Badiou where he told me: “More systematic than Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, you’d die!” Deleuze presented his philosophy as something eminently systematic.
What Deleuze also said, which is highly relevant—and this is the point I’d like to emphasize most—is that the notion of “system” differs entirely from one philosopher to another. We’re not talking about the same thing when we refer to a system in reference to Spinoza, or if we’re talking about a system in reference to Kant; it’s like comparing Hebrew to Chinese. Again, it’s because of Hegel that we’ve inherited a certain “unified” concept of system, leading to the idea of “the” philosophical system as the enemy to fight against. This is because Hegel presents his “system” as one that absorbs all other philosophical systems. For me, this is where the grand and brilliant Hegelian imposture lies, and it has done significant damage to modern philosophy. On this point, I fully agree with Schopenhauer’s early and insightful critiques: he argues that German speculative idealism—Fichte, Schelling, and especially Hegel, this “charlatan of philosophy”—is an attempt to undermine Kant’s proposition of a new beginning for philosophy.
So, when we pronounce the word “system,” we haven’t actually said much. I call my work “System of Pleonectic,”[1] and the pleonectic system targets the real. It’s not me contrasting my whims with what exists; it’s what exists that operates systematically, and my concepts are just responses, echoes of this functioning. The kind of phenomena that primarily interest me are transgressive, malevolent, seemingly aberrant phenomena that nonetheless constitute the essence of human experience: war, torture, harassment, persecution, exploitation, etc. All of these function in a highly systematic way. In fact, your question reminds me of another somewhat unique aspect of my work, that we have discussed previously. Without it being the result of a conscious decision or volitional effort, I realised that, compared to what is almost always done at the University—that is, commentary on other philosophical texts, an exercise to which I’ve sacrificed a lot in the past—my work is now primarily focused on describing the things themselves. Commentaries on other texts are now secondary and subordinate to direct phenomenology, to direct ontological observation, which now forms the core of my writing.
Let’s forget the term and be Hegelians for a moment: all that is real is rational, especially the kinds of phenomena that seem inexplicable and scandalous to us, those that we instinctively categorise as “Evil.” The haunting focus of my philosophical work is the question of Evil; I could have called it the “System of Evil,” as I noted long ago in my book marking a break with Badiou[2]... and with Badiou, it’s the same kind of intense polemic that sets me against Hegel. It’s interesting to consider what Badiou calls a “system” in his own framework. Since he bases his ontology on mathematics, identifying ontology purely and simply with the unfolding of historical mathematics, well, at first, you are dazzled by the apparent coherence, thinking: “Of course mathematics is systematic; of course, logic is systematic.” But to call something a “philosophical system” that integrates, let’s say, mathematics as a pure ontological science, suggesting that being operates systematically… on the surface, it seems logical, even irrefutable. Badiou also claims, “logic is the science of appearance,” implying that it dethrones Husserl’s phenomenology. But the question I eventually posed about what Badiou calls a “system” is: in what way is it a philosophical system if the philosopher is merely handing the reins to mathematics and logic to explain what being and appearance entail?
Here’s the thing: the term “philosophical system” has multiple meanings throughout the history of philosophy, to paraphrase Aristotle.
BR: What do you mean by “historical mathematics”?
MBK: Good question. We are already in the midst of a dialectic. It’s a kind of oxymoron. Badiou says that “mathematics is the history of eternity,” which is a rather enigmatic phrase. I eventually realized that this strange formulation went hand in hand with another element that intrigued me in his philosophy, which is the concept of the event as a pure irrational emergence, symbolized by mathematical self-belonging, which is a pure impossibility, since no element, that is to say, no existing thing, can belong to itself. I ended up resolving this aporetic and somewhat superstitious conception of the event by introducing, at the right moment, the notion of appropriation: mathematical belonging is too rigid to account for the logic of the event, about which Badiou always says things that are quite superstitious; there is a sort of “religion” of the event in his thinking, as if it would arise purely and simply out of nothing, dependent on nothing that preceded it, etc., which is absurd. Whether in science, politics, art, or love, the event always depends on what preceded it. Hence, in my case, a revisiting of Hegel's concept of Aufhebung, knowing what abolishes and preserves at the same time, which is exactly the correct definition of an event, whereas in Badiou’s view, the event is simply what abolishes what preceded it. During the time of our friendship, we could not agree on this; there is truly a sticking point in his thought, an ontological absurdity. Cantor needed the mathematics that existed before him to establish his discoveries; Schönberg does not merely erase the music of the past but extends the best of it; psychoanalysis has taught us that love stories are always conditioned by countless unconscious factors that overdetermine them (while Badiou, in a way, believes in pure “love at first sight”), and the political events he comments on, starting with the Bolshevik revolution, are in reality coups d’état prepared long in advance...
I’m telling you all this because, by this mise en abyme of the central impasse in Badiouian philosophy, which is his pious conception of the event, you understand what he means by “mathematics is the history of eternity”: it is, in fact, man’s appropriation of the eternal forms of being. Mathematical discoveries are inscribed in temporality, but what they discover, from Archimedes and Euclid to Cantor and Gödel, escapes temporality entirely. Mathematics historically inscribes that which escapes history.
In this respect, we also realize what eventually disappoints in Badiou’s “ontology,” which is happy to say that ontology is not the philosopher’s domain but the mathematician’s: it is mathematics that exhaustively explains “being-as-being” (a formula Badiou borrowed from Aristotle, despite him being his sworn enemy along with Kant). And here again, and always in depth, it was a friend, a high-level mathematician and great thinker, Vincent Pavan, who enlightened me by saying that mathematics is the writing of the pure forms of inanimate matter. They do not account for, for example, the innumerable forms of the living, which greatly limits the scope of Badiou’s doctrine, since the emergence of life is an event that Badiou’s philosophy precisely cannot account for.
So, when reading Badiou, you are initially dazzled by what you take for a fait accompli, you think: “Of course mathematics is systematic; of course, logic is systematic.” But to call a “philosophical system” something that incorporates, let’s say, mathematics as pure ontological science, thereby claiming that being functions systematically… on the surface, it holds up, it’s unassailable. But the problems start when you try to understand why his concept of the event is so problematic.
Badiou will still say: “logic is the science of appearance,” thus real phenomenology, which again, according to him, dethrones Husserl’s. But precisely, the question I ended up asking about what Badiou calls a “system” is: in what way is it a philosophical system, from the moment the philosopher merely hands over to mathematics and logic to tell us about being and appearance? Answer: by defining, in the wake of Heidegger and Schurmann, the event as appropriation rather than aberrant “self-belonging.” Mathematics is the appropriation of the invariant formal laws governing inanimate being, logic the invariant laws of appearance, biology manages to extract enduring laws from living beings, art is an appropriation of the sensible that suppresses its “natural” side and yet preserves something of it, etc.
But finally, to return to your question about the system: the philosophical system has several senses in the history of philosophy. It was Hegel who gave the word a bad reputation by popularizing a “monolithic” vision of philosophical systematicity, whereas there are, from Aristotle to Spinoza, philosophical systems irreducible to one another, not topped by any terminal system, as Hegel wanted to make believe. And Badiou is a kind of “hardened” Hegel...
BR: And on the basis of this critique, could you provide a definition?
MBK: No. Firstly, for the reasons I just mentioned, I obviously cannot provide a generalised definition of “system”; but also, I could not even summarise what the “pleonectic system” is in just a few sentences. You have to read the entire book. I am about to embark on a revised, corrected, and expanded version... What I call a system, in this case, in addition to being a phenomenology in the way I described it before, is a philosophical universe where all the concepts respond to and support one another. You cannot grasp any one of these concepts without understanding its inextricable link to all the others. That’s what I call a system. From this point of view, the disputatio with Hegel (or with Badiou!) is extremely important in my work.
BR: That being said, you talk about the “system of pleonectic,” but why not the “system of transgression,” the “system of mimesis,” the “system of...”?
MBK: For me, the most important ontological trait is what I call “pleonectic,” which comes from a Greek compound word meaning “to have more” [avoir-plus].” It’s a debate, another polemic, with both Marx and Nietzsche involved. Marx, because he reduces what I consider the fundamental ontological trait, which I define as “appropriation,” to its purely economic, political, or material dimensions (what is called “dialectical materialism”). And with Nietzsche, the “will to power” is, for me, a concept that’s far too psychological, too vague, and overly poetic in the worst way. What I call “pleonectic,” which, beyond its original definition, means for me “always having more [avoir-toujours-plus]” is a sort of rationalisation and clarification of what Marx and Nietzsche, despite their brilliant and unparalleled insights, in my opinion, only glimpsed: why is it that humans—much more than any other animal—are that which I call maximal appropriationist? This is the fundamental ontological question that, in my view, that Marx and Nietzsche only began to address, which, surely has its historical significance, however, philosophically and politically, it’s insufficient, as shown by the events of the twentieth century and “really existing socialism versus fascism,” as Lacoue-Labarthe summarises with his usual incisiveness. Ethically speaking, Marx’s most serious error was to purely and simply demonise the unbridled appropriationist tendency of the human animal (leading to what I see to be an ontologically absurd horizon of “the end of private property”). This is what I call “pleonectic,” leading to the politically disastrous consequences we know—or should know. Nietzsche’s ethical mistake on the other hand, which is just as serious but diametrically opposite, is that he unconditionally condones the pleonectic, under the guise of the “will to power,” leading to similarly disastrous political consequences. My latest book[3], which was a huge undertaking, explores the traumatic taboo where French thinkers, from Bataille to Didier Franck, including Deleuze, Foucault, and many others, kept quiet about Nietzsche’s crucial influence on the doctrines of Hitler or Mussolini.
My fundamental ontological question is this: why is it that the appropriation phenomena we observe in humans, which I call “anthropological enclosure,” cannot be found, at this level of intensity, in any other being, not even in our closest ontological relatives, the animated beings aptly named “animals”? The appropriation regime in other animals is nevertheless quite intense when compared to that of inanimate beings—where, following modern mathematicians, I prefer to speak more of “belongings” than appropriation, which Whitehead in his ontology called “prehensions.” For example, a tiger or an elephant appropriates much more within the “animal enclosure” than a tick or an earthworm.
This leads us back to the debate with Marx and Nietzsche. In the pleonectic regime that specifically characterises the human being, there is, unlike other animals—all of which are clearly limited in their capacities of appropriation—an appropriation phenomenon in humans that is without bounds. This is why the first phrase in the history of philosophy, that of Anaximander, is a phrase about the pleonectic, which I discuss at length in my work. I would somewhat pretentiously define what the Greeks called the “apeiron” as the proto-concept of pleonectic.
There would be a lot to discuss about the age-old ontological debate between the notion of unlimitedness and infinity. But again, it would be too tedious to delve into that here. However, it’s clear that with the emergence of the human being, there’s a kind of quantum leap from the structural regime of inanimate belongings and animated appropriations that define everything that exists in the cosmos.
This brings us to another, more contemporary, polemic where I strongly oppose what is called “speculative realism,” which is hardly realistic and instead excessively speculative, in the pejorative sense Kant attributed to the term. It is an ontological flattening of all beings, with the premise that the human being is no more ontologically interesting than a wrench or a grain of sand. This is, of course, completely false, but “speculative realists” tend to rely on shock value—the bigger the claim, the better. My work is a counter-demonstration of the sophistry of speculative realism, that follows a certain metaphysical tradition, where humans were placed at the centre of philosophical concern, which, as we know, was later reinforced by religion, namely, “man made in the image of God.” My aim is to clarify what was relevant in the metaphysical or religious tradition, not to endorse it. To clarify its anthropocentrism, because my philosophy is not anthropocentric. But it does loudly declare: the human being is an absolutely astonishing event in the sense of what was long called creation. This is where theology begins, in the sense that, rationally... It is very difficult to explain solely through contingency, for example, with [Quentin] Meillassoux, what Father Teilhard de Chardin calls “the human phenomenon.” Teilhard, who is a somewhat shamefully and unacknowledged (laughs) crucial influence on Meillassoux’s work. Meillassoux is like an “atheist Teilhard de Chardin,” if I may say so; but all of Meillassoux’s fundamental ideas come, in my view, from Teilhard, though he never admits it (laughs).
In any case, both of them pose the same question: for Teilhard, the purely scientific and rational conjunction of billions and billions of factors and coordinates means that the condition of human existence cannot in itself be rational; there must be something else that overdetermines this literally miraculous conjunction. Since it would suffice for just one of these coordinates conditioning our existence—let’s say, a tiny change of wavelength—for us to cease to exist immediately. Life would disappear, our planet would be an inert crater like all the others. So, nothing can explain this... except God. Teilhard doesn’t explicitly say this in his work, but his readers are able to see clearly what he means. Meillassoux says the same thing, except he removes God: for him, life on earth, and then that human existence emerges “above” animality in all its other forms, is due to pure atheological contingency, and it is for this reason, according to him, that these phenomena are rationally extraordinary statistical miracles.
That’s why I don’t consider Meillassoux part of “speculative realism” at all, despite what’s publicly claimed. In other words, Meillassoux has published very little, but in his essential and unpublished text titled L’inexistence divine, he develops a philosophical anthropology where man is explicitly the being for whom the question of being itself is at stake. Essentially, like Teilhard or Whitehead, or even Heidegger, who, despite waving the banner of “anti-humanism,” these thinkers place the astonishing human phenomenon, its emergence that makes it an event, at the heart of ontological inquiry and treat it as a mind-boggling miracle. Meillassoux, perhaps more than the others, is entirely incompatible with the common interpretation of ontological indifference in “speculative realism.” I think it’s a complete misunderstanding to include Meillassoux in this movement, or—to be more accurate and cynical—as using him as a figurehead for this movement, for the simple reason that his philosophical talent is incomparably greater than that of the other representatives of this current.
Meillassoux, in truth, grants a truly unique [insigne] status to the human being. For him, the human really is a miracle. And deep down, as he publishes so little... this is the first time I’ve thought about it, but he has a real wound, the same as mine: the shock of the existence of Evil, injustice, etc. Justice is the central ethical concept of his unpublished work. That is, how is it that this statistically remarkable being, the human specifically, remarkable as long as one adheres to strict rationality without resorting to theological explanations, how can this ontological miracle simultaneously be capable of the worst horrors, the worst atrocities, to the point that, at certain moments, you can’t help but, out of despair, think: “Well, let’s end it. The earth would be better off without us” (laughs).
And this is the insoluble tension that permeates my philosophy, which is why I am utterly opposed to Hegel on this matter. This is very much inspired by Adorno and his negative dialectic. That is, to revisit the brilliant intuitions of the young Hegel, this kind of orgiastic belligerence of consciousnesses, that never provides a dialectical resolution. To not resolve intra-human conflicts into a supposedly superior outcome, which is the Hegelian myth par excellence.
BR: Do you agree with Nietzsche’s statement in The Gay Science, which says that a philosophy ultimately boils down to the biography of its author?
MBK: No. Biography is but one element; I almost want to say: a pretext. I’d prefer to say, playing devil’s advocate, like Badiou, that “philosophy is a universalized singularity.” But upon further reflection (laughs), even on that point I don’t fully agree with him. Because, for me—and this is really the crux of my polemic with Badiou—we don’t share the same understanding of the notion of singularity. In my view, singularity is what is produced by the universal, while at the same time escaping it. It’s a bit long to explain; it’s really at the heart of my work, and yet it’s not yet fully formed, it needs refinement. It’s one of the things I need to work on in the next version.
But let me try to explain a small part of it: what I call in my work “negative universality.” In an interview I listened to with Yuk Hui and Aleksander Dugin, Dugin mentioned that there’s always this Western pretence—and philosophy is Western—toward universalism, noting that “catholic” comes from the Greek katholikos, which means “universal.” And I completely agree. You can observe the persistence of this Western hegemony over the world with one simple fact: the calendar used by countries all over the world without exception is the Christian calendar.
But, returning to the question of negative dialectics, for me, the human phenomenon is defined, compared to the rest of the ontic realm—especially the rest of the living and animal world—by the existence of science. This is the decisive break that separates us by an unbridgeable chasm from the rest of the ontic realm. Mathematics, physics, but even the so-called “soft” sciences like biology. Science truly determines universals. And I would readily say that philosophy begins where science ends. This doesn’t mean that philosophy is superior to science or vice versa; it’s not interesting to think in those hierarchical terms. What I’m saying is that my work explores, through long and meticulous phenomenological inquiries, the negative effects of the positive universals of science. Science never studies the singular, even in biology, but only the particular, which is always an instantiation without remainder of the positive universals of science, which involve laying down laws that apply uniformly to all beings whenever the law is applicable. And what remains, precisely, from this instantiation of beings by the universals of scientific statements is exactly what I define as singularity. What I call “singularity” is precisely what escapes this generalisation, but because it suffers from this generalisation.
This brings us once again to the negative dialectic: according to the French philosophies of difference, difference—what I call singularity—is what’s good but oppressed by the generalisations of metaphysics (for me, it is science), I take a different approach: first, singularity is a difference negatively produced by science. I don’t have a positive view of difference, like Deleuze or Derrida; for me, singularity is primarily marked by a sign of negativity. And in relation to what I mentioned earlier: singularity, in Badiou’s work, is something different from Deleuze’s or Derrida’s notion of difference, but it’s always something entirely positive: he calls “singularity” the being most likely to produce an event. This is one of the aspects of the ontological debate: Badiou doesn’t account for the fundamental dimension of negativity that affects every event, whereas for me, it’s crucial. The greater the event, the more traumatic the negative charge it carries with it. Just look at what human history, that “slaughterhouse,” as Adorno put it, is made of.
The positive universal in hard sciences like mathematics, logic, or mathematized physics is self-evident: a mathematical law universally applies to the sets it subsumes, the law of the excluded middle or of deduction does not admit of any ontological derogation whatever they are, and physics applies indifferently and without exception to all particles in the universe wherever they are; there’s no “alien” particle (i.e., a singular particle). Even the so-called “soft” sciences, like biology, articulate universally applicable laws. We can precisely describe how predation, nutrition, or reproductive cycles work in a given animal species.
In any case, my work in phenomenological observation involves examining how what I call “negative universalism” operates—that is, everything that escapes the positive universalism of science, but as a result of its limitations. This is the negative dialectical tension that drives my philosophy. Science states that A+B=C, this particle or that sheep is exactly the same as another, etc. However, in reality, especially within the anthropological domain, but also in the animal realm, when human beings intervene, we witness singularizations that can be monstrous. This can be genetic manipulation. It can happen in zoos, slaughterhouses, or factory farms. Little by little, even plants, elements, and the environment can be monstrously singularized by science; but science itself is absolutely incapable of accounting for these singularizations and their often-monstrous dimension. This is where philosophy takes over.
This is where I outmanoeuvre “speculative realism,” and also analytical philosophy, which are philosophical practices that are poor imitations of science in that they claim that everything is equal, that everything is the same, that concrete beings are merely indifferent and interchangeable cases of a concept. But that’s obviously false. In the anthropological realm, you can easily see a profusion of differences, precisely what the philosophies of difference failed to grasp, and which I, in my own way, try to clarify by showing that there are singularizations, as I call them, in the anthropological realm, that don’t exist in the living and animal realms. In the animal kingdom, for example, you will find an absolutely incredible diversity of animal species: What relation is there between an ant and a mammoth, a leopard, a lizard, and a bird, etc.? There are connections, but very few: they are animated, they are born and die, they must eat and reproduce... everything else is explosively difference, pure diversity, the original gift of what the Greeks called phusis.
At this stage of the pleonectic, there is an extraordinary diversity, an explosion of differences such as is not seen in the infinite universe of inanimate objects. It’s the ecstasy of difference in Deleuze and Derrida (Foucault was much more concerned with the negativity associated with difference than those two); it’s also the ecstasy of nature as we all know it, and which Rousseau or Kant so beautifully described (and Kant takes it from Rousseau, a fact that’s often overlooked). However, within each specific animal species, you don’t have singularization in the sense I mean. In dogs, there are characterizations. A Saluki isn’t a Doberman. Schopenhauer said: animals are characterised; only the human being individuates. Individuation in the intuitive sense of individualism, egocentrism: it’s the historical sense of eccentrism, for example. Or, closer to us, what we define as punk, as freak... what I call singularization. But in reality, it goes much further than this trivial sense: it’s the phenomenal diversity, within the sole anthropological realm, of cultures and civilizations, customs and mores, rites and spiritualities, ideologies and traditions, etc. This explosiveness, which occurs only within the anthropological realm, the technological realm, is a fireworks display of second-degree differences compared to the pure profusion of phusis, which has been translated since the Romans as “nature.”
Such a proliferation of singularizations has not been observed, within a single isolated animal species. In nature as a whole, yes, there’s a dazzling proliferation of differences. But not within any single animal or plant species when seen in isolation. It’s only within the anthropological realm that you can observe such a process, or more accurately, infinite processes of singularizations to this degree of intensity. And that’s why—in fidelity to a certain metaphysical and religious tradition—you cannot reduce the human being to other living and animal beings.
BR: How do you respond to thinkers who reject what you claim about anthropological enclosure? What do you think motivates this?
MBK: For me, it’s the faci... I was about to make a slip and say “facilitation,” which would also be true. I meant to say that for me, all these “philosophers” who seem original, are actually very conformist, academic, and follow the trend, guilty of pure and simple falsification. It’s academic convenience. It’s a long story: since Nietzsche and Heidegger, there’s been this great wave of anti-humanism, which has a lot to unpack because Nietzsche’s anti-humanism is not the same as Heidegger’s, which is not the same as Badiou’s, which is different from Lévi-Strauss’s, which has nothing to do with Lacan’s, which is also quite different from Foucault’s... each of these thinkers had an anti-humanist strategy, but for different reasons each time.
The problem today is that this anti-humanism in certain contemporary academic productions—but also in analytical philosophers who venture to propose ontologies—ends up leading to metaphysics in the worst sense of the term. “Speculative realism,” and also analytical philosophy, end up in what modern philosophy, since Kant, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer (but not the speculative idealism of the Prussian state), fought against: the flattening of differences by a single uniform law, which I call the trap of subsumption. This consists of confusing philosophy with a science, whereby being is never more than a particular instance of a concept, which equalises all these particulars under a single determination (for example, today’s statements like: “everything is an object,” “everything is a thing,” “everything is nothing,” “everything is contingent”). Everything is just a case of the concept. And Badiou, by “copying” the ontological discourse from the scientific discourse, has facilitated such a regression in philosophy, allowing the return of the “natural metaphysician within us,” as Reiner Schürmann puts it: the one who easily confuses the bladders of his judgement with the lanterns of the real that he subjugates. In this respect, I completely agree with Dugin’s point that the West seeks to subjugate everything that is not like it. Provided that we add, which he would probably readily agree, that a certain academic tradition of philosophy, from speculative idealism to speculative realism via analytical philosophy, is the conceptual projection of this inveterate propensity of the West to annihilate what is external to it, to reduce all genuine otherness to the already-known of the “concept” understood in this subsumptive sense.
The question all these philosophers are asking is: “What is the best subsumption?” One might say it’s the object, another might say it’s nothingness… just like yesterday they said absolute spirit or absolute idea. In analytical philosophy, which is heavily overdetermined by logic (the most formidable tool for point-blank subsumption!), it's a machine for flattening all beings. And so, we have the principle of general equivalence in embryo, which projects, at the economic level, this general indifferentiation of all beings under the law of the market. As in “speculative realism,” where a twelve-year-old child working in a mine to make our smartphones has the same ontological status as the smartphone itself. In Western ideology, everything is equivalent; the concept of “nihilism” in Nietzsche merely draws this out. As one representative of speculative realism stated: “Thinking is that for which everything is equal.” He should have been more precise—let’s say, more honest—and written: “Western thought is that for which everything is equal.” This statement is obviously the gravest ontological falsehood one can utter, but it has the merit of revealing the whole of Western metaphysics, albeit in a somewhat crude and naive way.
The pleonectic is a philosophy that opposes the ease and falsification that subsumption represents. It is an ontology of the event, which is a pure oxymoron: always negative dialectics, the insoluble tension of opposites, because an event is by definition what defies any ontology that is fixed once and for all. In Badiou, being and event are radically distinguished, while Heidegger sometimes wrote: “Being: the event.” But Heidegger specifically rejected the idea of a philosophical system.
To resolve this and not sacrifice my systematic rigour to the incompatibility between being and the event, I desubstantialise ontology, as my best readers have noted: for me, ontology is always adjectival—there is something ontological, but no fixed “ontology,” as so many of my colleagues and therefore competitors hold (laughs). In ontology, in the metaphysical sense as it is understood today as well as yesterday, things are like this, things are like that. But that’s a discourse to which only science has the prerogative; and I wonder if we can define metaphysics as philosophy’s pretension to replace science. Metaphysics is a replacement science, an Ersatz of science: this is the essence of Kant’s legitimate indictment against it.
This is the profound impasse of an “ontology” like Badiou's, indexed to logical-mathematical invariants: it behaves as if life were not an absolute event-based exception to inert matter. This is what he means when he writes, against Deleuze, in Logic of Worlds that we must “wrench the event from life to return it to the stars.” This is why the pleonectic is not an ontology but an ontological process. Indeed, if there were only inert planets, no life, if the death drive were successful (which, at its core, is Badiou’s fantasy), and we returned to the tranquility of pure materiality, without this eruption of life and, above it, the emergence of the human phenomenon—two events that produce both wonders and horrors to almost mathematical proportions—then Badiou’s ontology might be relevant. It is not, because life is an exception to the universality of inert matter, which mathematics can indeed describe perfectly. And, with life, comes this regrettable collateral effect of suffering; but, with the human being, there emerge sufferings that are absolutely unthinkable in the animal realm alone.
This is how I define Evil, without wordplay: it is suffering not necessitated by... by the mere need for natural and animal survival. Torture, war, diseases that didn't exist without technological advancement, psychiatric disorders—these are sufferings that have no place in simple animal survival.
Notes:
[1] Système du pléonectique (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2020).
[2] Après Badiou (Paris: Grasset, 2011).
[3] Nietzsche et la psychose occidentale (Marseille: Fiat Lux, 2014).
Read part 2 of the interview:
