Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism

Atopias

Atopias

Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism

Frédéric Neyrat

Translated by Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner

Fordham University Press

New York    2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press

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This book was originally published in French as Frédéric Neyrat, Atopies: Manifeste pour la philosophie, Copyright © Nous, 2014.

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First edition

For Monique

Contents

Foreword by Steven Shaviro

Critique of Pure Madness

Book I: Toposophy

The Undamaged and the Contagious • Saturated Immanence and Transcendence ≈ x • Socratic Divergence

Book II: Theory of the Trans-ject

Being-Outside • Coalitions • Ab-solved Freedom • Language and Disjoining • On the Subject of Animals

Book III: The Metaphysical Proposition

The Transgression of the Principle of the Excluded Middle • The Leap and the Loop • The Unlocatable • The Madwoman of the Out-of-Place • Science(s), Art, Politics

What Cries Out

Notes

Index

Foreword

Steven Shaviro

Frédéric Neyrat’s Atopias is an important book. The contribution it makes to critical thought today is evident in its subtitle: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism. A manifesto is a short declaration of principles and a program, rather than a fully extended analysis. Neyrat characterizes the present work as a worried intervention in the field of theory, rather than a declaration of eternal truths.

There have been other philosophical manifestos published over the past several decades: most notably, two Manifestos for Philosophy by Alain Badiou. Within the context of contemporary French thought, Frédéric Neyrat’s position and perspective are strikingly different from those of Badiou; but both thinkers are motivated by the conviction that a renewal of philosophical thought is especially urgent today, at a time when the sciences seem to present themselves as the only reputable sources of knowledge, and when the economic and ideological constraints of our society cast doubt upon philosophical reflection, as upon anything that is not of immediate profit and utility.

Atopias offers us a deep analysis and critique of our current political and intellectual situation. It seeks to develop a new way of thinking that will be adequate to the predicament in which we find ourselves today. We live in an era of advanced computing and communications technologies, which are revolutionizing every aspect of our daily lives. We face the mode of governance and control that has come to be known as neoliberalism: a condition in which market competition is promoted as the sole possible solution to all difficulties, and in which corporations seem to have human rights while human beings themselves do not. In addition, we face an ecological crisis. Global warming is already changing the very shape of life on our planet; in the years to come, we are likely to witness the flooding of coastal regions, the continuing extinction of large numbers of living species, and the destruction of millions of people’s livelihoods and modes of survival.

Frédéric Neyrat does not address any of these conditions directly in the present work. But although Atopias is the first of his works to be translated into English, he has published quite prolifically in French. All these issues are developed at greater length in his other books. He has written at length about our obligations to the Earth and to other species, as well as about the suffocating conditions produced by our drive to dominate the planet, our restless consumerism, and our auto-immune drive to ignore our own vulnerabilities, and our willful blindness to our nihilistic tendencies. In Atopias, he seeks to establish a philosophical basis—or perhaps I should rather say, a non-basis—that might allow us to address these issues, and to be equal to the challenges we face.

Neyrat is clearly indebted to his philosophical forebears, including Badiou and, above all, Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless, he proposes a new sort of philosophical project, one that is strikingly different from those of his predecessors. Deleuze, following Nietzsche, belongs to the great tradition of post-Enlightenment demystification. He mounts an attack upon the idea of transcendence and the belief in absolutes. The major effort of Western philosophy, from Plato onwards, has arguably been to judge human life from a standpoint superior to life, to abolish all vestiges of chance and contingency, and to establish norms for correct behavior. In all of these cases, Deleuze says—following Nietzsche—that the forces of life are deformed and repressed. Every entity is subjected to arbitrary, external constraints, and separated from what it can do (to use a famous phrase of Deleuze’s that Neyrat directly quotes). Against all this, Deleuze proposes a philosophy of radical immanence, one in which there is no Beyond. Things and processes of this world must be valued (or not) for their own sakes, rather than judged in accordance with externally imposed criteria.

But perhaps the struggle against transcendence has been all too successful. Today, when I ask my students to read Nietzsche, they are neither scandalized nor exalted. Instead, they find him banal. They take it for granted that everyone has their own opinion, and that no particular opinion is better than any other. And they cannot see that anything more is at stake. Of course this is a poor misreading of Nietzsche, but that is beside the point. Relativism is no longer shocking, subversive, or transgressive, as its was in earlier centuries. Rather it is something that we take for granted, with a blasé shrug.

Or, as Neyrat puts it, in more rigorous language than mine: immanence, as a category necessary for contesting the spiritualties that negate life, has instead come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences, a mill for grinding out a sort of ontological flour, an ontology spread flat. Nietzsche and Deleuze must be spinning in their graves at this degradation of their ideas. In effect, Neyrat says, Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s battles against transcendence have been won. But the result is a situation that both of those thinkers would have detested: one in which radical change has become impossible, and in which thought has been thoroughly instrumentalized, made nothing more than a tool for the efficient fulfillment of pre-given utilitarian goals. We live in a world where every trajectory seems geo-localizable, where every knowledge must be situated and efficient, every obscurity cleared up, every real singularity suspect.

Neyrat calls this condition saturated immanence. Everything is caught up in the flows of capitalist monetary equivalence; there is no outside any longer, no separation between one thing and another; there is no sense of otherness whatsoever. Everything is in flux, as we are told over and over again. And yet, these are fluxes in which nothing ever really changes. When flux is the sole characteristic of everything and anything, when everything is flexible and everything is interchangeable, then nothing is really different from anything else, nothing ever makes a difference. Other thinkers have characterized globalized and financialized capitalism in this way; Neyrat sees it as a dilemma for critical thought as well.

Saturated immanence is the condition against which Neyrat seeks to mobilize philosophy. In a world where anything can be anyplace, and anything can switch places with anything else, philosophy must insist on its power to be, not everyplace, but noplace. It must never fit in, but always disturb its context. Neyrat uses the word atopia for this condition, in order to avoid the undesirable connotations—perfection and changelessness—of the etymologically similar utopia. In Neyrat’s account, philosophy works by avoiding any sort of fixity or rootedness, and by maintaining a relation with the very Outside (dehors) that our dominant social, economic, and intellectual conditions seek to deny or suppress. An atopic philosophy does not reinstate the old forms of capital-T Transcendence, the claims to an Absolute, that thinkers like Nietzsche and Deleuze so successfully attacked; but nonetheless, by maintaining a link with otherness, with outsideness, and with displacement, it offers us a (small-t) transcendence as an alternative to saturated immanence. It seeks to dig holes, and open up gaps, in what is otherwise a suffocating (and even totalitarian) world of hyper-presence.

For Neyrat, philosophy does not itself create the Outside. What it does is give us a route of access to this Outside. It opens the doors that our current social system has closed. Thought does not define the outside, Neyrat says, but prolongs it, draws it out. Outsideness is not a transcendent condition; indeed, it is nothing more than the simple fact of existence. To exist is to stand out; the ex- etymologically indicates emergence, outsideness, or coming-forth. Any living thing, or anything that exists, is singular in some way: It differs from everything else, or it deviates from all that came before. This means that the internal being of any existing entity is also its external relation with all the things that it is not. Philosophy is a way of exploring the divergence or dis-joining attested to by all existence.

In Atopias, Neyrat develops these ideas carefully and generously. In the first chapter, he proposes them in relation both to the history of philosophy, and to the contemporary situation of absolute flux or saturated immanence. In the second chapter, he explores the existential dimension of being-outside and of radical contingency and radical finitude. Finally, in the third chapter, he places his argument in relation to the meta-question of what sort of role philosophy—and especially the much-denounced branch of philosophy known as metaphysics—can have today. Atopias is a short book, but a rich one, dense with ideas and suggestions. There is much exuberant invention here, in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s maxim that philosophy should be the creation of concepts. But above all, Atopias is a work of ethics, exhorting us to recognize and find room for the many forms of existence with which we share our planet.

If you do not hope for the unhoped for, you will not find it. It is hard to find, and inaccessible.

—Heraclitus

Envoy.—In a world declared to be without an outside, where every trajectory seems geo-localizable, where every knowledge must be situated and efficient, every obscurity cleared up, every real singularity suspect, philosophy can only appear as heresy. This is because philosophy is dangerously atopian: bizarre, haunted by something like a non-place, which enables its improbable displacements. Philosophy is only possible on the basis of a disjunction, an exile, a madness commensurate with the extra-vagance of being. Without this dis-joining, there would be no thought, speech, or existence. To exist means to experience atopia—to be destined to the outside, in the manner of every living thing. Without atopia, no world, no being-in-common, no political coalition is possible: This is what philosophy must declare today.

Philosophy must declare atopia against everything that would prevent us from existing: All the persistent beliefs in the absolute, in substance, and in immortality that have in no way disappeared but have proliferated, having been realized by technological and social means. Philosophy must declare itself in favor of the living [le vivant], the fragile and singular living, versus the fantasy of the intact. In favor of trans-jects versus objects. Of imagination versus the logic of identity. Of the excluded middle versus non-contradiction. Of translation versus information. Of unpredictable spirals versus controlled flux. Of transcendence ≈ x versus saturated immanence. Of existence versus being. Of eccentricity versus norms and their exceptions. For societies today are dying of two principal evils: a belief in an immunity that enables human beings to destroy everything, and the programming of behaviors, which