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Pericles and Verdi:


The Philosophy of Franois Chtelet
Gilles Deleuze
Franois Chtelet always defined himself as a rationalistbut what kind of rationalism? He refers incessantly to Plato, Hegel, and Marx, but is above all an Aristotelian. What then distinguishes him from a Thomist? Undoubtedly, it is his way
of impugning God, along with all transcendence. Chtelet terms all forms of transcendence, all beliefs in another world, outrecuidances [arrogance]. There never
was a more quietly godless philosopher, except of course for Nietzsche. His is a
tranquil atheism, that is, a philosophy in which God is not a problemthe nonexistence and even the death of God are not problems, but rather conditions that
should be treated as givens so that the real problems can then emerge: this is the
only humility. Never has philosophy located itself more firmly within a field of
pure immanence.
In our philosophers jargon, the term for a principle that is posited as both a source
of all explanation and as a higher reality is transcendencea pretty word, which I
find quite suitable. Presumptuous types, great and small, from the leader of a tiny
fringe group to the president of the United States, run on transcendence like a
wino runs on red wine. The medieval God has been dissipated without losing any
of his force or deep formal unity: his avatars include Science, the Working Class,
the Country, Progress, Health, Security, Democracy, Socialismthe list is too long
to give in full. These forms of transcendence have taken his place (which is another
way of saying he is still there, omnipresent), carrying out their plans for organization and extermination with increased ferociousness.1

Immanence, the field of immanence, consists of a relation between Potentiality and Actuality [un rapport Puissance-Acte].2 These two notions can only exist in
relation to one another; they are inseparable. This is the sense in which Chtelet is
an Aristotelian. Indeed, he seems to have had a kind of fascination for power or
potentiality: man is power, man is matter. . . .
Political power does not attract me at all. Being against power, seeking to check
its activityin my view, these are traps. What interests me is power as potentiality,
that which makes power what it is. Now, potentiality is, strictly speaking, one for
all. I enjoy actualizing my potentialdoing what I canin order to understand
and disclose the mechanisms of the imprisonment of power, here and there, when
I have information. Maybe this keeps my taste for potentiality alive, and awakens
it around me. Potentiality was once a word for freedom.3

Copyright 1988 by Les Editions de Minuit. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt Inc. for
Les Editions de Minuit.

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How does one act on something, and what is the act or actuality of this
potential? The act is reason. Notice that reason is not a faculty but a process,
which consists precisely in actualizing a potential or giving form to matter. Reason
is itself a pluralism, because nothing indicates that we should think of matter or
the act as unique. We define or invent a process of rationalization each time we
establish human relations in some material form, in some group, in some multiplicity.4 The act itself, qua relation, is always political. Reason, as a process, is
political. This may well be the case within a city, but it goes for other, smaller
groups as well, or even for myselfand nowhere but in myself. Psychology, or
rather the only bearable psychology, is politics, because I am forever creating
human relationships with myself. There is no psychology, but rather a politics of
the self. There is no metaphysics, but rather a politics of being. No science, but
rather a politics of matter, since man is entrusted with matter itself. The same
even applies to sickness: we have to manage it when we cannot conquer it, and
thereby impose on it the form of human relationships.
Consider the case of sonorous matter. The musical scale, or rather a musical scale, is a process of rationalization that consists in establishing human
relationships via this matter in a manner that actualizes its potentiality and it
itself becomes human. Marx analyzed the sense organs in this way in order to
demonstrate through them the immanence of man and Nature: the ear
becomes a human ear when the resonant object becomes musical. The very
diverse group of processes of rationalization is what constitutes human
becoming or activity, Praxis, or practices. We do not know in this regard if
there is such a thing as a human unity, whether from the historical or the
generic point of view.
Is there a properly human matter, pure potential, distinct from actuality, that
has the ability to fascinate us? There is nothing like freedom within us that does
not also appear as its opposite: as something that imprisons us, as Chtelet is
always saying. It would be quite obtuse of potentiality to oppose the act capable of
realizing itan inversion of reason, more than its opposite, a privation or alienation. It is as if there were a nonhuman relationship that nevertheless was internal
or immanent to human relations, an inhumanity specific to humans: freedom
that becomes the capacity of man to vanquish man, or to be vanquished. Potentiality is pathos, which is to say passivity or receptivity, but receptivity is first and foremost the power to receive blows and to give them: a strange kind of endurance. To
be sure, one can draw up the history of systems of domination, in which the activity of the powerful is at work; but this activity is nothing without the appetite of
those who aspire to give blows in the name of the blows they have received. They
fight for their servitude as if it were their freedom, as Spinoza put it. Thus,
whether exercised or endured, power is not merely the activity of mans social
existence; it is also the passivity of mans natural existence. There is a unity of war

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and land, the traces of which Chtelet detected in the work of Claude Simonor in
Marxism, which never separated the active existence of man as a historical being
from its double, the passive existence of man as a natural being:
Reason and its irrationality: this was Marxs own theme, [and] it is also ours. . . . He
wants to produce a critical science of the actual, fundamental passivity of humanity. Man does not die because he is mortal (any more than he lies because he is a
liar, or loves because he is a lover): he dies because he does not eat enough,
because he is reduced to the state of bestiality, because he is killed. Historical materialism is there to remind us of these facts, and Marx, in Capital, lays the foundations for what might be a method enabling us to analyze, for a given periodquite
a revealing period, in factthe mechanisms at work in the fact of passivity. . . .5

Arent there values specific to pathos? Maybe in the form of a despair about
the world, something which is quite present in Chtelet, underneath his
extreme politeness. If human beings are constantly in a process of mutual demolition, we might as well destroy ourselves, under pleasant, even fanciful conditions. Of course all life is a process of breaking down, as Fitzgerald said.6 This
of course has the ring of a verdict of immanence: the inhuman element in
ones relationship to oneself. Chtelets only novel, Les annes de dmolition (The
Demolition Years), has a profoundly Fitzgeraldian motif, an elegance in the
midst of disaster. And indeed, if one is to die, why not invest, not desire, but the
death instinct, in the sublimity of something like music? Once again, this has
less to do with psychoanalysis than with politics. We must take account of this
vector of destruction, which can traverse a community or a man, Athens or Pericles. Pricls was Chtelets first book.7 Pericles was always the very image of the
great man, or great hero, for Chteleteven in Pericless passivity, even in his
failure (which was also the failure of democracy), even in spite of his disturbing
trajectory [vecteur].
Another value proper to pathos is politenessa Greek politeness, in fact,
which already contains an outline of human relationships, the beginnings of an
act of reason. Human relationships begin with a reasoned system, an organization of space that undergirds a city. An art of establishing the right distances
between humans, not hierarchically but geometrically, neither too far nor too
close, to ensure that blows will not be given or received. To make human encounters into a rite, a kind of ritual of immanence, even if this requires a bit of schizophrenia. What the Greeks taught us, and [Louis] Gernet or [Jean-Pierre] Vernant
reminded us, is to not let ourselves be nailed down to a fixed center, but to acquire
the capacity to transport a center along with oneself, in order to organize sets of
symmetrical, reversible relations established by free men. This may not be enough
to defeat the despair of the world, for there are fewer and fewer polite men, and
there must be at least two for the quality itself to exist. But Franois Chtelets

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extreme politeness was also a mask concealing a third value of pathos: what one
might term goodness, a warm benevolence. The term is not quite right, even
though this quality, this value, was deeply present in Chtelet. More than a quality
or a value, it is a disposition of thought, an act of thinking.
It consists in this: not knowing in advance how someone might yet be able to
establish a process of rationalization, both within and outside himself. Of
course there are all the lost causes, the despair. But if there is a chance [at establishing a process of rationalization], what does that someone need, how does he
escape his own destruction? All of us, perhaps, are born on terrain favorable to
demolition, but we will not miss a chance. There is no pure reason or rationality
par excellence. There are processes of rationalizationheterogeneous and varied, depending on conditions, eras, groups, and individuals. These are constantly being aborted, receding, and reaching dead ends, and yet resuming
elsewhere, with new measures, new rhythms, new allures. The inherent plurality of processes of rationalization is already the object of classic epistemological
analyses (Koyr, Bachelard, Canguilhem), and sociopolitical analyses (Max
Weber).
In his late works, Foucault too pushed this pluralism toward an analysis of
human relationships, which would constitute the first steps toward a new ethics
from the standpoint of what he called processes of subjectification: Foucaults
analysis emphasized bifurcations and derivations, the broken historicity of reason, which is always in a state of liberation or alienation as it equates to mans
relationship to himself. Foucault had to go back as far as the Greeks, not in order
to find the miracle of reason par excellence, but merely in order to diagnose what
was perhaps the first gesture toward a process of rationalization, and one that
would be followed by many others, in different conditions, under different
guises. Foucault no longer characterized the Greek polis in terms of the organization of a new space, but as a human relation that could take the form of a
rivalry between free men or citizens (in politics, but also in love, gymnastics, or
justice . . . ). Within this sort of process of rationalization and subjectification, a
free man could not govern other free men, in principle, unless he were capable of
governing himself. This is the specifically Greek act or process, which cannot be
treated as a foundational act but rather as a singular event in a broken chain. It is
undoubtedly here that Chtelet, having taken the Greek polis as his point of
departure, meets Foucault.
Chtelet defines the Greek polis with reference to the magistratenot only in
terms of how he differs from other functionaries, such as the priest or the imperial civil servant, but also with respect to his correlative duties, which belong to a
corresponding process of rationalization (for instance, the drawing of lots). No
one has analyzed how the process of drawing lots captures the gist of reason better
than Chtelet. For Chtelet, rationalization is also a historical and political

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process, in which Athens is its key event yet is also its failure and its erasure
namely, Pericles, from which other events spin off and are absorbed into other
processes. Athens was not the advent of an eternal reason, but the singular event
of a provisional rationalization, and is as such all the more striking.
When we posit a single, universal reason de jure, we are falling precisely into
what Chtelet calls outrecuidancea kind of metaphysical rudeness. He diagnoses
this ailment in Plato: even when we recognize that reason is a human, solely
human, faculty, a faculty tailored to human ends, we nevertheless continue to
grant it theological transcendence. We draw up a dualism of processes instead of a
pluralism of processes; this dualism opposes discourse to violence, as if violence
were not already concealed within discourse itself, providing it with its various
impetuses and ins and outs. For a long time, under the influence of Eric Weil8
and according to a Platonic and Hegelian model, Chtelet believed in the opposition between violence and discourse. But what he discovers, on the contrary, is the
ability of discourse to give voice to mans distinct inhumanity. Indeed, it is the
purview of discourse to engage the process of its own rationalization, but only in a
certain becoming, and due to the pressure of certain motivations and events. This
is of extreme importance in Chtelets La naissance de lhistoire (The Birth of History)9, because the image of discourse or Logos that he presents there is closer to
Thucydides than to Plato or Hegel. Indeed, he never ceases challenging the two
corollaries of a doctrine of universal reason: first, the utopian need to invoke an
ideal city or a universal State of right, which would prevent against a democratic
future; second, the apocalyptic impetus to locate the moment, the fundamental
alienation of reason that occurred once and for all, comprising in one stroke all
violence and inhumanity. It is one and the same outrecuidance that grants transcendence to both reason and to reasons corruption, and, since Plato, renders the
one the twin of the other.
Chtelet puts forth a rational empiricism, or an empirical, pluralistic rationalism. What he calls empirie depends on two principles, defined negatively: the
abstract explains nothing, but must rather itself be explained; and the universal
does not existall that exists is the singular, only singularity. Singularity is not
the individual but rather the case, the event, the potential, or better, the distribution of potentials in a given matter. Draw the political map of an individual, of a
group, or of a society, and there is no essential difference: the aim is to extend one
singularity toward proximity with another in such a way as to produce a configuration of events, that is, the richest, most consistent whole possible. We can do
this as historians, for instance, in the case of Athens. But we are historians only if
we know how to retrace the doings of Pericles himself, since this particular connection, this conjunction of singularities, would have remained latent and isolated
were it not for politics, a politics we rightfully associate with the name of Pericles.
An individual, however insignificant, is himself just such a field of singularities,

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which obtains a proper name only in and through the operations he performs on
himself and his surroundings, in order to produce a durable configuration. Chtelet
says so of himself: I had a petit bourgeois education, I was influenced by Hegel, I
lived through one of these historical periods that sicken any sensitive soulhence,
these are three facts, with no relation to each other, it seems; in other words, a
plurality, the unfolding of something, which might in fact be someone, we are not
sure.
Independent of the importance of the matter under consideration, this is what
one would call empirie, or history in the present. It is neither lived experience
[vcu ], which delights in singularities for their own sake and leaves them in isolation, nor is it the concept, which drowns singularities in the universal and treats
them as mere moments. Rather it is an operation that truly casts the dice,10 in
order to produce the most consistent configuration, the curve that yields the most
singularities within a given potential, an act of unfurling that brings together
various human relations in a weave. This is what it means to actualize a potential,
or to become active : it is a matter of life and its prolongation, like reason and its
process, a victory over death, since there is no other immortality than this history
of the present, no other life than that which brings borders into closer proximity.
Chtelet calls this a decision, and his entire philosophy is a philosophy of the
decision, of the singularity of the decision, as opposed to the universals of reflection or communication. . . . Whether in Athens or in my room, every action is
Periclean, and ultimately, what results in Periclean action is rooted in a
decision.
The weight of the empirical imposes itself unavoidably, as a manifold or better, as a
plural whole. The empirical. One could also say historical, not in the sense of the
work of the historian who, due to the demands of objectivity, has to impose a distance and to constitute his object as though belonging to the past, but in the sense
of the history of the present. Hence for me, the field in which this discussion
belongs is the empirical, understood as the opposite both of lived experience
which by its nature is inessential [inessentiel, i.e., not basic]and of the conceptualwhich belongs to another realm.11

A process of rationalization presents itself: it is the actualization of a potentiality


becoming active, producing a human relation, extending singularities, and deciding. In short, it is creating motion. Are all of these expressions equivalent? Every
philosopher to invoke the concrete always claimed to be creating motion, rather
than thinking about it in terms of an abstraction of the universal. The universal
has never run, nor swum, but has made swimming motions on dry sand, and the
motions of running while remaining stationary, because it is concerned only with
ultimate ends or goals. This is far removed from the act of singular reason leaping
of its own accord into the immanence of life. If it were possible to create the

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image of such a man, namely a citizen of the universal State, political action
would no longer be necessary; it would be enough, at least theoretically, to construct
an imaginary representation of this man: the problem is not the goal but movement
itself.12 Movement inheres in potentiality itself. To set something into motion is to
commit an act, to establish a human relation. The act of decision is not the will to set
something in motion, but the doing itself. True, not all movements are processes of
rationalization. But if Chtelet is so profoundly Aristotelian, it is because he grants
the distinction between natural movement and forced movement an exemplary historical and practical dimension. Forced movement always comes from above, from a
transcendence that sets it a goal before it has even begun, from a mediation of
abstract thinking that imposes a trajectory and incessantly reshapes the movement
along straight lines. Hence this movements identification with a purportedly universal reason is at the same time tied to a disaster affecting the universe, ceaselessly,
until the process begins anew, just as abstractly, just as fatally. It is the very opposite
of natural movement, which is solely composed of singularities, and which amasses
neighboring, surrounding zones, unfolding itself in a space that it creates by deviations or inflexions, advancing by connections that are never preestablishedfrom
the collective to the individual and the reverse, from the inner to the outer and the
reverse, from the voluntary to the involuntary and the reverse. The exploration of
surrounding areas, the manufacture of singularities, and deciding: these are the
actions of reason. If reason can be understood as a natural faculty, it is so precisely
inasmuch as it is a process, inasmuch as it can only be found in singular movements, produced by intertwined trajectories, constructing a voluminous space that
presents itself, advances, folds back in on itself, dilutes itself, explodes, annihilates
itself, and unfolds.13
I am increasingly convinced that disasters and great misfortunes occur the very
moment that forced movements predominate, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, over natural movements. A mass migration of a population due to demographic or climactic factors is in most cases less deadly, less disturbing, than
expeditions begun by presumptuous types [des outrecuidants] such as Peter the
Hermit, Urban the Second, or Pizarro; insurrections engendered by physical and
moral poverty, such as those that inspired the first revolutionary movements in
France in 1789, the worker movements or national uprisings of the nineteenth
century, the Russian insurrections in 1905, as well as in February and October
1917, are, in my view, perfect examples of natural movements, like migrations,
which are internal to societies and which lead individuals along their natural
paths. Then there are brutes who with presumptuous force [force outrecuidante] are
forever attempting to hijack these superb and joyous dynamisms and to seize hold
of them: to force them, turning them into business, if possible, into affairs of the
State. Then the killings begin again, and institutions reemerge, that is, the various
means of domestication and slowly committed massacres.14

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Franois Chtelet always lived in close proximity to music. He was opposed to


the idea that it might serve as mere background for those who listened to it constantly; music is activity itself. The two key characteristics of music, in Chtelets
view, are, first, that it dictates neither time nor the eternal to us, but rather produces movement; second, it affirms neither lived experience nor the concept, but
rather constitutes an act of sensing reason. Chtelet undoubtedly was not thinking
of Wagnerwho is too enamored of transcendence, too in thrall to forced movements, too committed to the universal and the universalization of destruction
but of Mozart and Italian opera, namely Verdi. Chtelet would have loved above all
an opera by Verdi on Pericles. Music always seemed to him the most extraordinary decision, a decision always resumed, always to be made. And the passages of
Chtelet on music are themselves extraordinary, because in them we witness, up
to the last moment, the very tonality of his thought. The art of music appears to
have two aspects: one, as the dance of sonorous molecules that reveals the materiality of movements that we normally attribute to the soul, and acts on the entire
body and which the body utilized as musics own stage; but also the other, as the
establishing of human relations in sonorous material, directly producing affects
that are usually explained by psychology. In Verdi, a powerful vocal harmony consists of chords that determine the affect, whereas the melody builds in movements that embody matter itself: music is a politics. Lacking a soul and
transcendence, material and relational, music is the most reasoned of human
activities. Music creates, and makes us create, movement. It ensures that we have
a surrounding environment and populates it with singularities. It reminds us that
the function of reason is not to represent, but to actualize potentiality, that is, to
establish human relations. This is the very definition of opera. It is truly through
music that we can finally understand the unity of the two words, historical materialism:
Musical composition acts in the manner of an unfolding surface, with its shifts in
levels and degrees. There is no suggestion of depth, other than in the material
sense, when it makes our stomachs flutter and our muscles clench. It is no more a
craft or a mastery of time, than painting is a technique of planar space or sculpture
one of three-dimensional space. Of course, music can produce the impression of
fleeting duration, of a sudden event or of stagnation. However, this is but appearance. All the metaphors I have used share one basic flaw: they locate the musical
effect in the realm of representation. Now, music does not present or represent
anything, even in appearance. It is privileged in being able, through its artifices, to
make the entire surface of the body, including its so-called deep parts, sense the
impact of sound qualities and their combinations. . . .
I have often alluded to the project of a physics of quality, which would bring knowledge together in a coordinated, yet nonsystematic whole that aims to shed light on
practical relationsbeyond the ontological distinctions between mind and matter,

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anthropological distinctions between man and world, and epistemological distinctions


between the idea and the thing. Now, it seems to me that the practice of art,
inasmuch as it is rooted in techn, as it is a praxisin Aristotles sense, that is, an
imitation and a transformation of the material it works oninasmuch as art is a
work, it produces artificial realities that are elements of this physics. Within this
type of inquiry, musical art stands out since, naturally excluding visual representation and, consequently, the specular-speculative [spculaire-spculatif ] trap, it goes
far in the enterprise of constructing these automata that have the potential of pleasure and the force of exploration. . .
The art of music possesses the following virtue: it can act on subtle matter, and
thereby allow us to sense the materiality of movements that we normally attribute
to the soul. This is what gives reality and force to the elementary psychology of
Giuseppe Verdis heroes. For the same reason, what Molires genius could only
suggest, Mozarts musical phrases assert: the vehemence of Elviras desire for Don
Giovanni. Fear, carnal passion, or hatred, which are laboriously addressed through
deduction or induction in reflexive or scientific psychology: music simply allows
them to exist, in the singularity of their situation.15

Translated by Charles T. Wolfe

notes
Charles T. Wolfe wishes to thank Majel
Connery for her assistance with the translation.
1. Franois Chtelet, Les annes de dmolition
(Paris: ditions Hallier, 1975), p. 263.
2. This phrase could also be rendered as
Power and the Act. In French, puissance and
acte translate Aristotles terms dunamis and
energeia. Puissance is power in the sense of
potentiality, whereas pouvoir is power in the
sense of rule or domination. Thus I primarily use
potentiality to render Chtelets puissance.
Trans.
3. Chtelet, Chronique des ides perdues (Paris:
Stock, 1977), p. 218.
4. See translation in J. Khalfa ed. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London,
NY: Continuum, 1999), p. 65.
5. Chtelet, Questions, objections (Paris:
Denol-Gonthier, 1979), p. 115.
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, with
Other Uncollected Pieces, Notebooks, and
Unpublished Letters, ed. Edmund Wilson (New
York: J. Laughlin, 1945), p. 69. Note that the

doi:10.1093/oq/kbi094

French translation speaks of a process of


demolition.Trans.
7. Chtelet, Pricls en son sicle (Paris: Club
franais du livre, 1960); reprint (Brussels:
Complexe, 1982).
8. See, for example, Eric Weil, Philosophie
Morale (Paris: Vrin, 2nd revised ed. 1968).
9. Chtelet, La naissance de lhistoire (1961);
reprint Paris: 10/18, 1974.
10. Or performs a dice throw, a coup de ds;
the reference is to Mallarms Un coup de ds
jamais nabolira le hasard (A throw of the dice
never does away with chance). See Stphane
Mallarm, Toute pense met un Coup de Ds,
in Oeuvres compltes, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985), pp. 45377. Trans.
11. Chtelet, Chronique des ides perdues, p. 15.
12. Chtelet, Questions, objections, p. 271.
13. Chtelet, Chronique des ides perdues, p. 237.
14. Chtelet, Les annes de dmolition,
pp. 25556.
15. Chtelet, Chronique des ides perdues,
pp. 23741.

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