Françoise Dolto, Solitude, Vertige du nord/ Carrere, 1985

<L’air est lourd, l’air est léger>, alors que l’air, il n’est jamais ni lourd ni léger. Il s’agit de
pression atmosphérique, mais peut-être aussi d’une façon d’imaginer un climat affectif. 16

Une fois séparé physiquement de sa mère, il faut que l’espace soit <mentais>: toute ambiance
peut avoir couleur de maman, toute odeur être référée un peu à celle de maman, même absente,
tout peut être nimbé de maman. 21

Ces perturbations, la mère peut les apaiser immédiatement, si elle-même ne s’en angoisse pas. 24

Chaque mère, à son insu, à leur propos donne à l’enfant son style. 25

(…) il ressent la solitude si la mère ne les reçoit pas, ne les accepte pas ou même se fâche en
le changeant, avec humeur, ou en refusant de le faire…
(…) parce que l’odeur des excréments est une odeur de sécurité pour l’enfant, puisque c’est
elle qui fait venir la mère. 27

Ce très important dans la vie de l’être humain ce narcissisme de base. Ou il l’a ou il ne l’a pas,
ou il est fragile ou il est très solide. C’est très important dans la vie d’un être humain ce
narcissisme de base qui ne peut pas être atteint sans dérangement physiologique profond. 31

…quand un enfant va vers quelqu’un, si ce quelqu’un supposé c’est son image dans le miroir, eh
bien, ça ne l’intéresse pas. Ce qu’il veut c’est que ce soit un vivant complémentaire, un
répondant. 40
Même s’il parait, c’est parce qu’il cherche à communiquer avec eux à la façon dont eux
communiquent avec lui et avec les autres. Mais c’est pour communiquer, ce n’est pas pour
imiter, alors que les adultes pensent que c’est pour imiter. En fait, c’est une expression inventée,
un appel hors de ses limites, un appel à un autre. 41

Oui, si la mère ne lui apporte pas des éléments nouveaux, il va se contenter de ceux qu’il connait.
(…) L’habitude devient sa seule sécurité, et meme, inconsciemment, comme une morale: est bon
seulement ce qui est déjà connu. 41

La mère doit alors nommer les objets. Nommer parce que, quand elle ne sera plus là, cet objet si
elle l’a nommé, fonctionnera comme représentant d’elle et donc de la non-solitude de l’enfant.
43

Je crois que c’est le premier sentiment de tout être humain: le sentiment du beau, associé
aux premières perceptions à la naissance. 48
On peut décharger l’agresseur de ses tensions visant une érotisation de l’agression de plus en
plus qu’en ne faisant pas cas de son agression, mais en cherchant à décoder le sens pour le
narcissisme: <Qu’est-ce que tu veux me dire? ou dire à cet autre?>, en donnant le sens. 107

L’agression, c’est une manière de questionner, de signaler l’intérêt pour une différence
incompréhensible, un fait insolite, de susciter l’autre à expliquer la raison de sa présence.
108

Comme il y a toujours des microbes sur ou dans un organisme, quand la vie ne fait pas ces
pulsations d’entretien vraiment sthénique de courant sanguin, les microbes présents se mettent à
proliférer. 117

Il ne cherchent plus à prendre contact et c’est là l’autisme qui arrive, toujours après un temps de
séparation d’avec la mère et surtout de séparation non parlée.
Evidemment, on dit : <Il y a certains enfants qui sont plus conditionnées par leur génétique peut-
etre que d’autre>. C’est possible. Mais il y a toujours eu une absence. C’est-à-dire qu’il ne s’est
pas reconnu complet physiologiquement avec la mère soignante de substitution et, à son retour,
n’a pas reconnu sa mère génitrice. (…) Il ne va pas avoir son narcissisme de base. Il y a des
cicatrices profondes. Plus que des cicatrices: il y a des failles, il y a des blessures. 118

Déréliction, c’est la détresse de ne plus savoir qui on est, sa vie semble en morceaux qui n’ont
pas de sens. L’enfant touche quelque chose, s’accroche à un geste, toujours le même, qui n’a plus
de sens pour lui. 118

Les microbes (toujours présents) atteignent sa relation au reste du schéma corporel, mais
justement cela n’arrive pas aux psychotiques. Ils se portent à merveille! 120
Un enfant psychotique, justement, autiste, n’est jamais malade. (…) si on le soigne par une
tentative de relation, une psychothérapie psychanalytique, dés que le traitement commence à
agir, l’enfant s’enrhume, par exemple, ou montre des troubles digestifs, des troubles auditifs,
etc., c’est-à-dire que son corps redevient sensible à la contamination microbienne, est soummis à
la maladie comme les humains. 121

Généralement, quand un autiste guérit, il devient plus obsessionnel et attaché à la personne

grâce à laquelle il a guéri. 130

On dit qu’il y a des autistes qui naissent autistes. J’en doute. Ce ne sont pas des autistes.
C’est sans doute une sorte de psychose. Ils ont l’air de ne pas entendre, ils ne parlent pas, mais
ils sont plutôt caractériels. Ils communiquent avec leur entourage familial. Ce sont des choses qui
viennent de ce qui est arrivé à la fin de la grossesse ou des chocs de la mère. 131
…il y a quelque chose qui s’est passé de dramatique pour la mère, que l’enfant a partagé. 131
Je crois que la manière ou ils seraient les plus heureux, c’est dans un endroit ou il y aurait du
terrain - parce qu’ils aiment les végétaux -, du terraint, et puis des petites bicoques séparées ou
logér, avec l’indispensable, lieux ou ils pouvaient vivre, se réfugier, vivre comme celui-là avant
de me voir, assis toute la journée à ne rien faire, rien, vraiment rien, les yeux dans le vague. Il y
aurait une bâtisse centrale ou ils viendraient chercher à manger ou bien manger à un réfectoire.
136

On ferait mieux de les laisser se promener seuls dans la nature, en prenant soins simplement
qu’ils aient le confort minimum nécessaire à l’hygiène. Parce qu’ils ne sont pas malheureux, ils
ne souffrent pas. Moi, quand je vois un psychotique qui n’est pas angoissé, je trouve qu’on
n’a pas le droit de le déranger <pour le soigner>. 137

<Moment de se fortifier dans le prendre et le déprendre.> Se fortifier pour la subjectivité? (…)

Le déprendre, c’est laisser vivre les autres.146

Apprendre à être en sécurité en sécurité en laissant en repos l’imagination anale et orale,

l’imagination de prendre, enfin du loup qui va dévorer, l’imagination de dévoration, d'être un
objet de dévoration et d’etre un objet de rejet ou de danger, de risque. 146

Combien d’enseignants torturent les enfants, leur faisant perdre confiance en eux parce qu’ils ne
trouvent pas de plaisir à étudier, ou parce que les conditions de temps ou d’espace rendent
<mauvaises> pour son développement les exigences des enseignants à leur égard, ou que leurs
exigences ne sont pas compatibles avec la vie à leur foyer et son organisation carencée ou
perturbée! 152

Savoir résister à la pression du grégarisme, garder la liberté de penser et de désirer, la liberté

d’agir, qui est momentanément, par la force des choses et la force des puissants, interdite
d’expression. 152

…ce n’est pas digne d’un être humain de laisser son désir subjugué par celui d’autrui. 153

!!! Les enfants devraient être enseignés à ne jamais confondre l’amour avec un lien de
dépendance. Ne jamais voir dans un échec à tort, mais une expérience. Ne jamais considérer une
réussite apparente comme un signe de valeur morale, ni comme valeur d’exemple. 153

L’enfant doit être enseigné à supporter que tout est relatif dans un monde relatif et que
chaque individu humain enrichit la communauté, dans la mesure ou il fait servir so désir au bien
de tous (…) 154

Combien de mal-être d’enfants sont dus à des sentiments de culpabilité pour des actes et des
comportements sains, qui gênent la tranquillité des adultes, sans plus!155
Deux etres qui s’aiment, ce parce qu’il y a toujours une partie inconnue, qu’ils ne connaissent
pas dans l’autre. 160

Il y de gens - et ça fait partie de leur personnalité - qui ont besoin d’etre seuls. 162

J’aime les besognes matérielles, la couture et tout ça, parce que je peu penser. 165

Les adultes en analyse reviennent souvent les épreuves de leurs parents de l'époque ou il
étaient en train de s’identifier aux parents. et elle était arrivée là, elle était arrivée au blocage
parce qu’elle tombait dans un état physiologique de dépression et personne pour lui dire: <Mais
ce n’est pas grave. ça veut dire que tu as ressenti, voulu expérimenter ce qui, indépendamment de
sa volonté, s’est passé pour ta mère. L’abandon de poste, la mise en prison. C’est à ce moment là
que ton modèle a disparu, ton soutien a disparu et tu vis ça sur ton analyste.> Elle a provoqué
aussi l’analyste, en décompensant de la sorte. Elle a provoqué la compréhension de l’analyste.
173

Ces enfants sans parents ne sont pas dangereux s’ils s’autonomisent. 177

Sous prétexte de ne pas laisser l’individu seul, de l’intégrer, on en arrive à des apparences, de
<tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil; on est tous ensemble et qu’est-ce qu’on est
bien>, provoquent des effondrements beaucoup plus profonds dans chacun, et qui ne sont pas
évidents tout de suite. 190

…on ne résoud pas de problèmes, mais on les dépasse et on se reconstruit. 198

(préserver la santé de l’enfant en cas de divorce)…reconnaître sa valeur d’avoir voulu s’incarner

de ce couple, quoi qu’il advienne par la suite dans le couple. 218

“Tu n’as pas choisi quelque chose de facile, mais tu es bien vivant et tu es beau physiquement.”
219

Dolto - Sexualité féminine

<Sortir>, c’est le maître-mot des adolescents. 251

Acquérir et conquérir son identité, ce n’est pas s’identifier à une cause, à un mouvement qui
exploite la jeunesse, (…). Ni exploiteur, ni exploité.286

Etre capable de servir d’exemple authentiquement humains à des enfants qui ne se sentiront ni de
trop, ni insuffisants à combler le narcissisme blessé de leurs parents (…) 287
<Parce que les femmes sont trop fortes. Les hommes ne veulent pas que les femmes passent
par les arts martiaux!> 326

(…) être rejetable par tout le monde pour que tout le monde soit comme maman. 347

Ils ne sont plus des adultes qui s’aiment; ils sont des enfants qui jouent à la poupée et qui parlent
comme l’enfant quand il commence à parler en déformant les mots. En simplifiant la syntaxe.
(…) C’est un autre piège, le piège de la maternité qui est l’identification à l’objet aimé au lieu de
rester des sujets qui sont à la recherche du sujet complémentaire et qui aident à s'élever ce
nouveau sujet qui, lui aussi, doit être à la recherche d’un objet qui ne peut pas rester dans ses
parents. 351

La pansée vivante, la pansée d’amour. 362

(…) l’alternance de solitude et de communication. On retrouve le rythme.

On retrouve le rythme respiratoire, le rythme pulsionnel, le rythme cardiaque, diastolesystole.
390

(…) soutenir le désir de s’informer, désir du monde, désir qui existe chez tout être humain;
391

Il me samble que, dans l’ordinateur, il manque le peut-etre. 392

Chaque fois qu’il y a un désir de transgression, transgresser avec la prudence. La prudence

fait partie du respect qu’on a pour les autres ou pour soi-même en tant qu’objet de la
société -pas seulement sujet mais objet de la société. L’objet de la société a des devoirs et
des droits. Et peu à peu, les devoirs de l’enfant, mais, avant, savoir qu’il a des droits
d'être…<J’ai des torts envers toi>, devraient savoir dire maîtres et parents. 399

Ce que l’adulte doit signifier, c’est que d’etre un adulte, ce n’est pas avoir toujours raison
ni etre le plus fort, c’est d’etre maitre de ses pulsions. 407

SI leur enfant leur quitte, ils se sentent vieux; abandonnés, ont peur pour lui de l’audace de ses
initiatives. Le colonisateur n’a plus autorité sur le colonisé. 417

Isidore Isou, Le soulevement de la jeunesse, les années 50 : il faut détruire le système scolaire
pour pouvoir permettre à l’humanité de changer.
aussi l idee de don helder camarra
Les examens d’enseignements pourraient se passer non pas à dates précises, mais à la
demande des candidats qui s’y sentiraient pour s’y présenter. 420

le renouvellement à soi-meme 464

La continuation de la vie à travers l’épreuve redoutée des dangers de la mort partielle supposé,
mort éventuellement totale. Perdre la face ou perdre la vie. Et il faut ça, il faut passer par là pour
sentir la liberté de l’amour. 474
Le Réel c’est le réceptacle d’inattendu, alors que nous cogitons et nous raisonnons sur ce que
nous appelons la Réalité, le répétitif attendu. 465
Plus la connaissance progresse, plus la frontière avec l’inconnu s’agrandit. Frontière avec
l’inconnu qui est source de surprises. 476
L’amour crée justement l’attraction pour ce qu’il reste d’inconnu et d’inconnaissable
encore et qu’on voudrait connaintre chez l’etre aime. 477

C’est ça qui est étrange chez l’humain alors qu’il espère pouvoir maitriser tout de la réalité. Il ya
des gens qui disent: <Avec la science, les humains ne mourront plus.> Mais qu’est-ce qu’on
deviendrait! Ou se loger sur la terre! Il faudra aller dans la stratosphère, envoyer des satellites
pour y mettre les gens dont on ne saura pas quoi faire sur terre. 493

Cacher la mort à l’enfant parce qu’ils ont souffert, eux de la mort de personnes aimées et ils
voudraient retarder chez leur enfant la connaissance de la mort (…) 497

Jean Oury, Marie Depussé, A quelle heure passe le train…Conversations sur la folie,
Calmann-Lévy

MD Tu dis que les psychotiques sont comme des colis en souffrance, oubliés dans une gare de
campagne. 13
(de JO) C’est un seigneur qui a garde l’insolance des banlieuses. (…) L’étonnement, disait-il,
c’est ce qui est requis pour travailler en psychiatrie. Ca ne s’apprend pas à l’école. La répétition,
comme disait Lacan, c’est toujours nouveau. 15

JO En obstétrique, ça existe, le terme, on dit qu’il y a des enfants qui naissent étonnés (j’ai oublié
ce que veut dire, peut-etre qu’ils refusent de respirer… 25
Comprendre, ce n’est jamais qu’un sentiment, un sentiment de satisfaction. Il ne faut sourtout
pas comprendre un délire. Un délire, c’est un travail pour essayer de se construire, de
s’inventer un semblant d’unité, c’est un travail jamais fini. 28

MD (…) leur droit à la fiction… 29

JO Parce que si un infirmier, ou un psychiatre, n’est pas capable d’étre soigné par les malades, il
vaut mieux qu’il foute le camp. 31
Un chemin qui vous dit qu’on est sur le chemin pour recevoir un fou, c’est l’angoisse. Elle
signale qu’on est ouvert au possible, le pur possible, qu’on appelle <le possible kénotique>, du
mot grec, kenos, qui veut dire <vide>. C’est effrayant, le possible. 32

MD On dit: “Oury parle aux fous comme s’ils ne l’étaient pas.> Du possible, tu glisses, c’est ta
façon de faire, vers l’étonnement de continuer à parler, à exister, l’étonement devant le continu.
Tu reves d’avoir le temps de travailler autour de ce terme de Spinoza, le -conatus-, cette
question de perséverer dans son etre. 33
Le rapport d’un fou à la beauté du jour est rarement heureux. Mais si le psychiatre s’asseyait
dans l’herbe, à coté de lui, comme avant, comme ça se fait les jours de fete… 35

JO Quand à l’étonemment, c’est une qualité exigible de tout travalleur en psychiatrie. Qu’il soit
étonné. 36

Toute une vie construite sur quelque chose d’inaccessible. On ne peut l’attraper, ce désir, et c’est
pourtant ce qui fait que vous êtes pas comme les autres. C’est ce qu’il y a de plus singulier chez
chacun.
Ca, ce n’est pas du tout permis par la technocratie actuelle; il faut homogéneiser les gens:
homogénéiser les alcooliques, les schizophrènes, les SDF…L’homogénéisation, c’est une mise à
mort.39

Quand je dis: <Il était une heure du matin>, ça ne vaut que pour moi, ça ne vaut pas grand-chose.
Lui s’en fout parce qu’il n’est pas dans le temps.44
manigancer-comploter

Quand on rencontre quelqu’un, on le rencontre dans son paysage. La difficulté, quand un

schizophrène pousse la porte de votre bureau, c’est qu’on ne peut pas le situer dans un paysage.
Et qu’il soit, lui, dans son corps, une espèce de paysage n’est pas rassurant. 47
Pour s’en approcher un peu, on peu prendre un de ses aspects, qu’un ami mathématicien,
sémioticien, Michel Balat, travaillant à partir de Peirce, appelle le -musement-. C’est un terme
médiéval. 47

Le musement , c’est l’infini de panser. J’aime bien ce masculin médiéval, pour <penser>… 50
Le musement ne va pas seul. Peirce pense selon une logique triadique: il y a le museur, le
scribe et l’interpretant. Il n’y a pas de museur sans scribe. Le scribe, qui ne sait pas ce qu’il
écrit, interrompt la continuité du musement, le fait passer dans le discontinu. C’est au moment ou
on l’interrompt qu’on peut parler du musement. Il n’y a pas de continu sans discontinu. C’est
pour ça que le scribe est premier. Il n’y aurait pas d’inconscient si on ne parlait pas.
L’inconscient n’est qu’une hypothèse au moment ou je la fais. ?
Le scribe est le premier, mais il ne sait pas ce qu’il écrit.
Il n’y a écriture, à distinguer de la seule inscription, que s’il y a intervention d’un troisième
élément, l’interprétant. Attention, il ne faut pas chosifier. Il n’y a pas un monsiuer museur, un
autre scribe, et un troisième interprétant. C’est une logique et il faut que ça circule entre les trois
termes. 51

JO (ce qui les schizophrenes ont toujours manque) se tenir entre réel et fiction 55

Si les infirmières psychiatriques étaient seuls à assurer le travail, ils seraient très seuls. 59

La Gelessenheit serait ouvrir à <la désinvoluture de l’etre>. 63

Les espaces de tranquilité, Gisela Pankow parlait de les restaurer en rétabilissant un point
de symbiose-séparation d’avec la mère…Un espace qui ne soit ni celui de la mère ni celui de
l’enfant. Parce qu’un schizophrène ne dispose pas de ce que Winnicott appelle <l’espace
transitionnel>. En principe, les normopahtes que nous sommes disposons de cet espace-là,
celui que le petit gosse, qui est dans un état d’hyperdépendance, se crée. (…) ça te permet
(le obj trans) d’echapper de l’emprise parentale, et tu crois assumer la séparation. 66

JO Le transpassible, c’est une transcendance, il n’y a rien de plus concret. Je veux dire que,
pour qu’il se passe quelque chose,il faut travailler la disposition des choses, l'architectonique. 68
Si on circule on peut faire les rencontres, de petites rencontres qui n’ont l’air de rien mais qui
vont produire des événements. 69
Il faut se faire une niche dans ce que ton ami Jean-Claude Milner appelle <l’indistinct et le
dispersé comme tel>. 76-77
Je dirais: les voix sont au plus près de réel, elles ne sont pas dans le réel. (…) Toute l’invention
de la psychothérapie institutionnelle, le Club des pensionnaires, les groupes, est un effort
pour pallier cette déficience, reconstruire des bouts du système. Mais l’hallucination, ce
n’est pas mal non plus. ça bouche un trou. Et ça a, comme tu le dis, un effet de compagnie.
Même si c’est, par moments, une compagnie atroce. 81
Il faut savoir que tous les ratés, toutes les déficiences d’un collectif s’inscrivent sur le corps,
comme toutes les déficiences de ce qui, ailleurs, n’est pas un collectif. C’est pour ça qu’il faut
faire très attention au moindre détail de la vie. Dieu git dans les détails, comme tu l’as écrit.
Au moindre défaut de vigilance, on fabrique des malades-symptomes. Il est stupide et injuste de
s’acherner à les soigner. C’est ce qui les entoure qui est malade. 83 84
Des somatoses, oui, des cancers, par example, chez des etres qui ont cédé sur leur désir
pour se dévouer à la famille, à l’Etat, à ce que Lacan appelle le sevice des biens. 84

Il y a une pression aliénatoire pour que rien ne se passe. Ce que j’appelle la thanato-
technocratie qui fabrique obstinément de l’homogène, des classes homogènes, par exemple. Si
l’on regroupe les memes, il ne se passera rien. 85

MD Parce que la fréquentation des psychotiques donne une familiarité avec la littérature.
Parce que la littérature leur permettrait peut-etre d’oser s’approcher de ce qui est le style
de leur travail. 93

Tosquelles: la capacité des malades de se guérir eux mêmes 95

MD citant JO Mais j’applique la règle de Tosquelles, la règle de l’autobus: il y a une

réunion de quatre à cinq, j’y vais, même s’il n’y a personne, j’emmène mes livres, je lis, je
ferai la réunion tout seul; comme un conducteur d’autobus, même si le bus est vide; on ne
va pas supprimer la ligne pour autant. C’est ce que disait Tosquelles, à juste titre. (…) le
bar en tant qu’instrument de psychothérapie. 98

Cooper
Basaglia!!

JO Ou encore le <ni avec ni sans>, qui est une variété du <ni-ni>, et pourrait caractériser
l’existence schizophrénique. Ni avec les autres ni seul, nulle part.
MD Trouffaut, La femme d’à coté
Ce que tu appelles, en prenant ce mot chez Minkowski, <l’esseulement>, cette dégradation de la
solitude. Un schizophrène est dans l’esseulement. 114
JO L’aliénation: dépendre de quelque chose qui est hors de soi. 117

La betise, c’est de conclure, dit Flaubert. 120

Quand il fut grand, Flaubert inventa des personnages que j’appelle <les innocents>.
Charles, Félicité, la servante d’Un coeur simple, ou Dussairdier, le garçon de courses de
l’Education sentimentale, qui construisent leur vie modeste, répétitive, héroique, sur la
croyance en l’intégrité de l’Autre. Quand ils s’aperçoivent qu’ils ont été floués, ils
deviennent fous ou meurent, ou les deux. 121

j’ai toujours dit que notre travail quotidien devait obéir à la logique poétique. 129

Il y a une douleur (pour le schiz.) de ne pouvoir dire. L’éthique de la psychiatrie tient à

l’hypothèse qu’un schizophrène peut s’approcher du dire si l’on fabrique des passerelles, ce que
j’appelle des ponts creux. 130
MD Il est difficile d’admettre, quand on a un paranoïaque parmi ses proches, qu’il est inutile,
complètement inutile de lui parler. Il transforme tout en images d’une bande dessinée avec des
bulles fermées qui ne contiennent que ses vociférations à lui. Impossible d’entrer.138 139

JO Les névroses, c’est l’expression d’une problématique théologique. C’est magnifique:

quand on est embarrassé par quelque chose, il n’y a qu’à avoir recours à Dieu; il est là pour ça,
sinon à quoi servirait-il? Donc, Dieu a inventé les névroses, toutes formes possibles de névroses.
157
L’objet phobique, c’est un objet de peur qui est là pour éviter l’angoisse de la béance de
l’Autre. (…) c’est quelque chose destiné à éviter l’objet du désir. J’aime bien le livre de Julia
Kristeva sur le pouvoir de l’horreur. Elle y explique que l’objet phobique serait plutôt un
<abjet>, un <abject>.
L’état, les institutions quelconques fabriques des objets comme ça, des abjects. 160
—> Il faut développer toutes sortes de contre-phobies. 161
—> l’hystérique

Racamier, Clinique de Chesnut Lodge

Scwartz et Stenton

L’analyse des constellations, c’est toujours aller plus loin que les préjugés, aller au-déla. 172

Quand on n’est jamais caressée, on devient un peu psychotique. 183

JO Sans doute. Pendant une guerre, dans des tranchées, au Vietnam, un médecin, Eric
Wulf, n’ayant rien, aucun médicament, pour sauver les types qui se laissaient mourir, leur
caressait tout le corps. On a appelé ça <la caressothérapie>. 183

Antoioni, L’aventura
Leopardi: La terre n’est pas digne de tes désirs. 184

La Borde: est fait d’un millier de strates, des strates d’aliénation sociale qui infiltrent tout, et des
strates, aussi, faites des fantasmes de chacun (aucun n’étant réductible à l’autre). Sur quelle strate
arrivez-vous? Vous pourriez au moins vous le demander. 190

Tosquelles dit qu’un psychotique souffre d’une insuffisance qualitative des stéréotypes qui
alimentent la vie collective et nous permettent d’y survivre. 269

Travailler, c’est faire des hypothèses et reconnaître qu’on se trompé, c’est l’exercice de ce que
Peirce appelait <le faillibilisme>. 298
Mettre en action le potentiel soignant suppose que chacun prenne les autres dans leur
singularité. 299

Singulariser quelqu’un, c’est aller voir dans quel état est sa chambre et éventuellement la
balayer s’il n’en a pas le courage. Ramasser Dieu qui git dans le détails, comme tu dis. 300

<Dis-moi ce que tu penses des idiots, je te dirai qui tu es.> Lucien Bonnafé

Plus on travaille dans un atelier, plus ça se ferme. 303

Tout le système de construction hiérarchique et de décision étatique est très animal. Il

s’agit d’une résolution des instincts, mais pas forcément celui de la perpétuation de
l’espèce; il y a aussi de l’instinct de mort en jeu, la-dessous. 303

…il faut etre intelligent, sinon on est complice. 306

Création et schizophrénie, Jean Oury, Galilée, 1989

(…) la délimitation de notre champ d’action transcende l’artificielle distinction du <normal> et

du pathologique. 10

envisage

Jean Dubuffet
Auguste For
Expressions de la folie, Marléne Weber et Alain Brousse

Au moment du nazisme, en 1937, des <oeuvres> du musée de Heidelberg ont été exposées à
Munich, sous le titre <Art dégénéré>, avec les oeuvres de Cézanne, Van Gogh, Paul Klee, etc.
Mais Freud lui-meme n’avait pas compris le surréalisme. Bien sur, quand Dali est allé voir
Freud, celui-ci a du le regarder bizarrement!

Giacometti
travaux de Henri Maldiney

Auguste For: Comme tout schizophrène, il ne pouvait supporter le vide! Il en résulte un

certain rythme dialectique entre la figure, le motif, le fond. <Pulsion> qui le pousse à faire
des trous, à mettre des frises, etc. 17
Il y a une sore d’homéomorphie entre ce qui est crée et la personnalité de celui qui crée. Le
style, c’est en même temps le style de la personnalité de celui qui crée. 18

La dissociation schizophrénique, la Spaltung, c’est un défaut de rassemblement. Tout l’effort du

psychotique, s’il lui reste encore assez d’énergie, s’il n’est pas abruti par trop de médicaments ou
un isolement abusif, s’il lui reste une certaine énergie qu’on peut appeler <vitale>, son effort sera
de se rassembler, même s’il n’y arrive pas! (…..) ——>> fabriquer quelque chose… Ce qu’il
fabrique, ce qu’il va produire, du fait de la dissociation, du fait qu’il n’y a pas de
dissociation entre le même et l’autre, c’est lui-meme. Un schizophrène, quand il fait
quelque chose, quand il construit quelque chose, c’est lui-meme qu’il construit. 19

Le système délirant, c’est un système de survie. On trouve cette meme idée chez Viktor von
Weizsacker. (<Pathosophie>: “la maladie elle-meme, c’est un effort pour guérir”). 19

Reconstruction permanente. Mais pour qu’il y ait reconstruction, il faut qu’il y ait eu
catastrophe. Processus qui est valable meme au niveau biologique le plus élémentaire. C’est dans
cette dimension que l’on peut mettre en perspective la Gestaultung. Effort pour refaire quelque
chose de l’ordre d’un monde qui n’est pas forcément le monde commun. 20

Malek Haddad, Le Malheur en danger, 1956

On cherche toujours l’objet qui subsiste dans son etre…21

“Et quand je lui demande à qui elle pense: <A mon cul et à la lune.>” 23

!!! Destructuration existentielle n’est pas forcément régressif. 25

Dalbiez, La Méthode psychanalytique et la méthode freudienne

Monakow et Mourgue, Introduction biologique à l’étude de la neurologie et à la
psycopathologie
Lagache, Les hallucinations verbales et la parole
Jouhandeau, Rafles de visages
R. Daumal, L’Envers de la tete
W. Steckel, Les Etats d’angoisse nerveux
T. Tzara, Un certain automatisme du gout

Nietzsche: <J’écris avec mon sang.> 28

Gottfried Semper, Der Stil, 1878

pas l’oeuvre fini, mais “le processus d’élaboration” 32

<L’abscence d’oeuvre>, c’est l’ouvert. (…) Le risque, c’est justement, peut-etre, une
caracteristique de l’ouvert. 33
…mais cet ouvert ne doit pas etre détérminé d’avance, sinon il serait déjà du fermé. 33

Kierkegaard - l’ame comme une -exercise de la patience- 38

<Le rythme c’est l’auto-mouvement de l’espace> (Maldiney) 40

Il y a un pouvoir du fond qui travaille sur le motif. 41
Braque
le giclage - à Soutine 42

processus opposé au développement 42

Karl Jaspers, Psychopathologie générale, 1913

Une schizophrénie, c’est une <nouvelle personnalité> qui est là; “tout autre”, comme disait
Bleurer…49

…cette chance extraordinaire de faire une <vraie dépression>. 53

Ajuriaguerra et Hecan, Le Cortex cérébral 54

Tellenbach, La Mélancolie 55

l’élan creatif comme “nécéssité impérieuse” - Prinzhorn 59

<aion> : le jaillisement éternel 60

La thèse que j’essaie de soutenir, c’est que, du fait qu’il y a un processus schizophrénique, on
entre dans un monde particulier. 60

Artaud
Simone
Whinehouse

la distinction de Gisela Pankow: (…) dans les phases de dépersonnalisation hystérique ou

autre, l’unicité de la personne est conservé: il y a toujours conscience de l’unité. On est toujours
soi-même. Dans ce premier cas, il peut toujours avoir des expériences de <corps morcelé>, mais
ce corps morcelé reste délimité dans son unité. Dans la dissociation, il n’y a plus d’unité du
corps. 67
C’est l’espace transitionnel, potentiel, qui rend possible le processus sublimatoire, le processus
culturel. 69

Michel Serres, La fondation de Rome 71

? Ce refoulement originaire, c’est ce qui permet de maintenir, dans la structure, un vide, un vide
enclos. C’est d’une telle importance qu’on pourrait définir la psychose comme une fuite du vide.
C’est ce que me confirmait une malade psychotique : <Ce qui compte, mais je ne peux y arriver,
c’est qu’il faudrait que j’aie du vide hermétiquement clos>. C’est elle qui parlait d’une <fuite du
vide>… 72

Ecrire peut déclencher une angoisse insurmontable; traverser cette angoisse pour écrire:
un saut d’un registre à l’autre. Blanchot, bien plus tard, écrira Le pas au-delà, etc. 74

la <pathoplastie>; on n’a affaire, cliniquement, souvent qu’à ça.(….)——> “Celui qui bouge, au
fond de la classe!…” Système de triage sans rapport avec les capacités innées des élèves. 81

Mais qu’est-ce qui permet d'être dans le paysage? C’est participer à son -atmosphere-.83
Max Scheler
Minkowski

Le diagnostic, ce n’est pas une étiquette,mais une façon d’etre avec. 83

Le pré de Francis Ponge

Giacometti 84

Sur le plan de la pratique psychiatrique, certaines formes naives de ce qu’on appelé

<l’antipsychiatrie> font des amalgames qui empêchent d’avoir accès à ce qui se manifeste.
Certains <anti-psychiatres> disaient meme qu’il ne se <manifestait> rien du tout, et que la
schizophrénie était une invention de flics! 91

François Cheng, Le vide et le Pléin

l’occasion qu’il ait du <pictionnel>; ne pas etre intoxiaqué par le verbiage ou le discours courant,
etre là en position d’accueil de quelque chose, mais qui est souvent méconnu. Il n’est s’agit pas
simplement d’etre gentil, parce que être gentil, c’est le pire des choses. Etre gentil, c’est rester de
l’autre coté de la barrière, souvent. 99

(…) ce qui compte, ce qui fait oeuvre mais qui est inséparable du statut d’existence, c’est un
baton, une ficelle, un bout de journal. Avec ça, on fait un espace. Ca ne coute pas cher. Et on
se délimite. Il n’y a qu’à voir les jeux des gosses qui sont d’une inventivité extraordinaire pour
ça; et ça ne s’achète pas dans les magasins! Un baton, une ficelle et un bout de papier
quelconque, et ça fait un espace de vie et d’émergence. Par contre, si le normopathe passe par là
en disant: <Qu’est-ce que c’est que ces saloperies-là!>, le type va crever véritablement.
Voyez dans certains hopitaux ce qui se passe: <Il faut de l’hygéne! Il faut que ce soit propre!
Qu’est-ce que c’est que ces ordures qui trainent! > On ne peut pas accuser l’hygiéniste d’etre un
assasin! Mais c’est quand meme, objectivement, ce dont il est en question. Il s’agit bien de
l’usage qu’on va faire de la création, avec ses dangers, sa technicisation, son utilisation. 99

Mais il me semble que le logos ne peut se comprendre que par ses effets d’interruption. 102

Maldiney, Art et existence

La plupart des gens sont efermées dehors, c’est-à-dire qu’ils ne sont pas dans le <pré>. 113

Jean Paulhan, Braque le patron

“une greffe d’ouvert”

“Etre vigilant à l’imprévu” (…) Cette vigilance à l’imprévu implique un dépassement des
préjugés. Les préjugés, c’est le remplissage dont je parlais tout à l’héure. 128

Miguel Hernandez
Wolfi

Ce bleu à partir duquel il y a une sorte de reconstruction du monde: moment pathique,

<cosmogénétique>, pour reprendre l’expression de Paul Klee. Cet <espace>, où se produit ce
moment pathique, doit être situé typiquement; il est de l’ordre <pré-spéculaire-, c’est-à-dire
avant qu’il ne soit explicitement question de moi. 134

Autrement dit, dans une sculpture ou une peinture, il y a quelque chose d’absolument nouveau
qui est là. 142

Aimable Jayet: Il invente des mots extraordinaires, magnifiques. 154

Merleau Ponty - Phénomenologie de la perception: La structure du comportement 163

Mais c’est ce qui fait la qualité d’une oeuvre: ne pas etre finie, mais dans une juste mesure. 177

!!Henry Maldiney
Hans Prinzhorn, Expressions de la folie, 1984
La main est articulé-articulante, elle est à la fois passive et active, comme le disait Lou Andréas
Salomé de Wolfi ou du poète. 195
Fragonard

Françoise Dolto, Le sentiment de soi, Gallimard, 1997

Ce qui caractérise l’etre humain par rapport à tous les etres vivants que l’homme peut observer,
c’est la relativité des critères de santé. 14

Il est impossible de croire qu’un psychanalyste ait une attitude d’observateur froid qui ne se
sentirait pas impliqué, qui ne serait qu’un instrument, une organisation mentale destinée à
percevoir. Plus un psychanalyste tenterait d’avoir cette attitude ou y prétendrait, plus il serait
artificiel, c’est-à-dire aliéné par rapport à son authenticité humaine. 15

Si les parents tutélaires blament ou interdisent les manipulations et le jeu avec cette région
du corps comme si c’était laid, pas beau, dangereux, l’enfant tout naturellement, par
glissement de sens connu, appréhende son sexe comme excrément (auquel dans le lieu de
son corps il est asocié) ou comme animal magique éventuellement nuisible et il refoule son
intéret pour le sexe et ses sensations. 35

Tout comme l’adulte qui régresse (mais qui au lieu de représenter son ressenti par le langage, le
dessin et le modelage, somatise ses pulsions refoulées en troubles fonctionnels qui fragilisent sa
santé), un enfant en régressant retourne à l’image du corps de sécurité de base au stade oral et
anal représentée par des boules ou des récipients incluant des boules, des boudins plus ou moins
longs, le serpent du contenu péristaltant digestif extériorisable en fèces par morcellement-rejet.
42

Il n’y a qu’une manière de soutenir l’éducation de l’enfant à réaliser son propre désir de grandir à
l’instar des adultes, c’est de n’ avoir pas d’attention élective pour sa façon d’etre adroit
manuellement et adroit en paroles compréhensibles et dans ses expressions corporelles. 54

Ces lieux de son schéma corporel sont alors sous tension quand il brigue un plaisir nouveau ou
qu’il donne un effort d’attention. C’est là qu’il ressent les conflits affectifs ainsi ainsi qua dans la
colonne vertébrale, lieux des centres nerveux de toutes les régions périphérique responsables de
l’expression kinétique de ses désirs. 56
Le travail, c’est la transformation, la modification de manière première valorisée en société, que
l’homme fait subir aux choses pour donner puissance et satisfaction à lui-même et à autrui (qui
lui donne de l’argent en échange du prendre l’objet partiel). 62

Qui ou que s’imagine etre le malade lorsqu’il est seul ou lorsqu’il est au contact de son
psychanalyste? Se sent-il, s’imagine-t-il etre avec lui, dans quel lieu? Dans quel temps? Quel
type d’échanges dans son passé a-t-il été vécu ou souhaité satisfaisant et avec qui?78

C’est la résonance emotionelle qui est le fait opérationnel du transfert (…) 79

La personne humaine n’aboutit que tardivement à une connaissance claire de son corps, confome
à la materialité objective du corps masculin ou féminin qui est le sien. L’image du corps
n’atteint sa forme achevée qu’après la résolution de la crise oedipienne, après que le sujet
ait reçu la castration symbolique qui va faire de lui un être humain dans la loi - en tant que
sujet, définitivement marqué par elle, exprime et manifeste son désir dans la liberté qui
s’instaure de l’intégration de cette loi. Seule la crise oedipienne résolue et dépassée peut
permettre la vigueur et le rayonnement des pulsions d’un sujet dans l’activité sociale en
tant que responsable, industrieuse, créatrice, l'efficacité et le plaisir dans le commerce avec
les autres, au sens large du terme, langage, travail, jouissance réciproques, épreuves
partagées, justes concertation. 129

Or, ce corps dans sa réalité organique n’est pas du tout le meme que dans l’image que nous
en avons inconsciemment et consciemment en tant qu’il est également support exposé au
langage d’autrui, porteur lui-même et source lui-meme de langage. 131

L’intéret qu’il y a à étudier cette imagerie précoce du corps pour le psychanalyste est que
beaucoup de troubles fonctionnels que l’on appelle aujourd’hui psychosomatiques ne sont pas
autre chose que l’expression inconsciente, langagière, que le sujet utilise pour exprimer ce qui est
refoulé et qui ne peut être verbalise.137

Comment rendre le réflexe de la déglutition à un bébé qui l’a perdu, quand on sait que ce
réflexe existait in utero? Comment faire retrouver ces mouvement? Je pansais qu’il fallait
essayer de lui rendre la sécurité de l’image de base in utero. 149

Si la mère a été, par exemple, abandonnée ou traumatisée par son père, c’est son premier
fils qui deviendra phobique. (…)Et ses mères d’enfants phobiques, quand on parle avec
elles ont toujours vécu dans une sorte d’inquiétude latente, mais chose curieuse, sans savoir
exactement de quoi elle était faite. 166
Ce n’est pas -la faute des parents-, comme le disent bien des gens qui s’informent de
psychanalyse, mais c’est du fait de la souffrance des parents que les enfants aussi héritent
d’une mutilation dans leur image du corps archaïque. 167

La manque dans l’enfance du père ou de la mère d’une existence réelle, qui a fait échouer leur
relation triangulation oedipienne, était un manque parce que cela n’a pas été parlé. 168

C’est ainsi le père qui est jaloux du fils au lieu d’avoir été jaloux de son père, ou c’est la
mère qui est jalouse de sa petite fille, au lieu d’avoir pu être jalouse de sa mère vis-a-vis de
son père. Les enfants perçoivent très précocement ce renversement des choses, ce
renversement de la situation génitale symbolique, et cela provoque chez eux des névroses
très profondes et des interdits de vivre leur désir. 168

Ce que je viens de dire touchant les carences des images du corps des parents au cours de leur
enfance, qui sont passées inaperçues cliniquement et qui n’apparaissent qu’en se répercutant
inconsciemment chez leurs enfants du fait de leur relation libidinale à eux, c’est cela qu’on
retrouve dans l’anamnèse des parents des enfants fragilisés symboliquement et qui nous sont
amenés pour des troubles plus ou moins profonds de la personnalité. 169

Or, on dit que c’est nécessaire pour qu’un enfant soit heureux qu’il soit désiré par les
parents. 170

Il est indispensable d’analyser ainsi les parents, car s’occuper seulement de l’enfant ne sert,
on peut le dire, absolument à rien. 172

!! L’enfant ne peut sortir, en règle générale, du symptome phobique, qu’au prix, pour la
phobie des parents - surtout le parent le plus traumatisé -, d’un épisode névrotique ou
psychosomatiaque ou dépressif grave, pénible en tout cas qui est provoqué par le
traitement analytique de l’enfant. 175

(…) mettre le sujet en condition d’exprimer son désir, ou qu’il soit, quel qu’il soit, de la façon
dont il a à l’exprimer, et par la seule méditation du langage qui n’est pas d’abord un langage
parlé, pour amener à un langage parlé. 180

C’est ce qu’on appelle, dans le langage courant, un retard affectif, et en réalité c’est une image
du corps archaïque qui empeche l’enfant de se servir de son schema corporel pour vivre
autonome.182

embocage
agripper
C’est avec l’odeur connue et reconnue de la mère par l’enfant que l’érogénéité jaillisante de lait
s’inscrit en lui, en même temps que s’apaise son besoin, sa faim et sa soif. 204
macher

Pour que l'être humain réussisse à accomplir les désirs du sujet, responsable de son langage et de
ses désirs, il lui faut pour cela accéder à son autonomie et donc se séparer totalement de la tutelle
parentale, de la tutelle de la nourrice pour commencer, puis de la tutelle parentale. 232

Le problème de la castration éclaire en le montrant un autre aspect: c’est tout ce qui manque au
sujet, alors qu’au corps il ne manque rien du tout.
Le Moi humain par lequel se médiatise le désir de chaque individu résulte des modalités
frustrantes de ses besoins, des castration de ses désirs dans sa prime enfance. Ce qui
exacerbe son désir, c’est cela qui a provoqué par processus de défense narcissique des
possibilités de transposition de ce désir sur d’autres plans, dans la société, et lui a permis ce
qu’on appelle des sublimations; mais les sublimations ne viennent que des échecs du désir qui
ont été négociés et dépassés. L’individu est face à l’intuition qu’il a d’exister dans une vérité de
parole inconnaissable et c’est là qu’il voudrait recevoir d’un autre la connaissance de ses paroles
alors que cet autre lui en demande autant. 233

Mais -qui parle à qui?- Quelle est l’image du corps inconsciente chez le psychanalyste à qui
s’adresse le psychanalysant dans une image de corps blesée? C’est ce dont il vient chercher chez
le psychanalyste le clé de sa guérison, que le psychanalyste ne sait pas, et que peut-etre l’autre
trouvera en parlant avec ce psychanalyste et en touchant sa propre vérité de ses relations à l’autre
depuis son plus jeune âge, en se leurrant une nouvelle fois sur la personne de l’analyste en le
croyant puissant et capable de lui donner ce qu’il n’a pas, le secret de la vie et du désir. 235

Les affinités électives entre les etres humains proviennent de ces perceptions ténues subtiles
d’accords entre eux qui les font se reconnaitre semblables et un meme temps nouveaux,
constamment et jamais totalement connaisables, se provoquant l’un l’autre à un renouvellement
créatif d’adaptation mutuelle, s’entraidant et s’enrichissant l’un l’autre par de nouveaux moyens
de connaissance et de nouveaux appels à dépasssements du déja connu. 245

Qui désire? Qui jouit? Interrogation ineffable à l’ineffable et mystérieux Désir qui nous fait les
uns les autres aimer et hair, comprendre et rejeter, espérer et désespérer et chercher dans la joie
tissée è la douleur un sens à notre allant-devenant de la conception à la mort qui se derobent tout
deux à notre entendement. Qui désire pour que moi je me connaisse désirant, moi, attribut d’un
inconnaissable sujet que mon désir m’oblige à appeler, questionner, dont j’exige une réponse
pour laquelle le code à le décrypter me manque. 246

Je pense que l’étude de l’image inconsciente du corps contribuera à l’avenir à mieux

comprendre ces zones d’absence de vitalité ou ces zones de dérèglement des fonctionnement
à effet pathogène qu’on nomme faute d’un meilleur mot, troubles psychosomatiques, et qui
seraient mieux dénommés névroses ou psychoses somatiques par échec dans l’expression
interpsychique ou créatrice du désir et de sa souffrance chez le sujet qui en souffre. 253

Quant au critère biologique seul, appréciable par l’observation sensorielle complétée par
l’observation dite scientifique (des appareils de perception), il conduit à une impasse la médicine
et en particulier la pediatrie et la psychiatrie qui voudraient s’y réduire,à une impasse aussi les
médicins qui voudraient s’en voudraient s’en abstraire. 259

Ce qui caractérise encore l’etre humain, c’est que le moindre de ses échanges biologiques,
appréciable sensoriellement par l’observateur, est relié à sa vie émotionelle à travers ses
représentations imaginaires (décelables ou non) et que le jeu de la fonction symbolique
caractéristique de l’espèce humaine entraine des effets dans l’equilibre de sa santé dont les
études de psychologie dynamique recherchent les lois. 260

Plus tard, la somme des contacts que le sujet a ressentis avec sa mère, est introjectée et nait ainsi
son attitude vis-a-vis de soi-meme. Qui remplace la mère vis-a-vis du corps? C’est soi-meme
s’aimant, soi-meme se donnant à manger, se donnant les soins corporels, etc.
C’est déja une relation d’objet avec mère bonne et satisfaite introjectée. C’est l’autorisation à
posséder la nourriture, c’est la réconciliation avec soi-meme appauvri par une situation de
déficience ou de besoin, dans une dialectique d’un emboitement dynamogène, une adaptation
parfaite,vitale. C’est cela pour l’adulte, la regression saine et sans blocage au stade oral prévalant
dans les épreuves se rapportant à des situations transférées des stades ultérieurs lorsqu’elles
apportent une épreuve momentanée. 270

Mme Aubri: Les images du corps vous servent à vous de support imaginaire. Vous vous en
servez sans jamais objectiver le sujet. Votre suggesiton se situe entre deux images entre
lesquelles il oscille et qui sont un mouvement dialectique. 301

Fraçoise Dolto, Jean-Pierre Winter

Les images, les mots, le corps
Gallimard

Mais Winnicott, ça n’est pas de la théorie! Je trouve que cet homme travaille comme je
travaillerais si j’étais un homme.27

La théorie, ça aide celui qui travaille. Par exemple, ma théorie m’a aidée parce que si je n’avais
pas cherché une théorie, j’aurais pu n’importe quoi! Il y a une éthique, quand nous travaillons,
qui est d’essayer de savoir ce que nous faisons, dans la mesure ou nous sommes conscients.
Mais quant à ce qui est inconscient en nous, il faut accepter que nous ne savons pas ce que c’est.
Notre travail c’est tout le temps d’essayer de rendre communicable ce que nous avons trouvé,
puisque la psychanalyse est tout de meme une science de l’homme, bien que ce soit une vraie
science au sens objectif.30

…le travail qui est de décoder tout le temps. 32

Ce sont tous les conflits qu’on voit chez les enfants qui sont entre un père et une mère, et ou ils
veulent jouer leur role, c’est-à-dire finalement vouloir commander tout pour etre le maitre. 33

Mais ce que m’a vraiment intéressée c’est quand je me suis aperçue qu’il n’y avait pas du tout de
situations triangulaire, en ce sens que l’enfant était, vis-à-vis de son père, dans la meme situation
que vis-à-vis de sa mère. Il n’y avait pas du tout une attitude sexuée comme Freud l’avait décrit.
Il avait parlé de l’oedipe inversé, soi-disant, mais je me suis aperçue que ça n’existe pas.
L’oedipe inversé, c’est un dire de psychanalyste à des adultes. 34

C’est un travail entre l’image de corps et le schema corporel. L’image du corps a une influence
sur le schéma corporel, et inversement. 38

C’est de la blessure de l’image du corps à travers une blessure imaginaire ou réelle du

schéma corporel - mais ça peut etre une blessure imaginaire du schéma corporel -, par la
relation que l’enfant a avec la personne de laquelle dépend la structure de son identité. 39

!!! Même quand les gens sont sur le divan et qu’ils disent un état émotionnel, je leur
demande si, dans leur corps et à quel éndroit, ils ressentent l’émotion dont ils sont en train
de parler en mots. 54

Il dit le problème global qui est le sien en le projetant dans des dessins. 57

pinailler
Les sens des mots m’a toujours posé question du fait du malentendu entre moi enfant et mes
parents. 66

Tout le temps, j’étais sensible au malentendu du sens de la beauté. 66

-enfant éponge de l’inconscient de ceux qui l’ont porté dans la vie- 78

téter
tinette
au guet

Donc le racisme avec dérision, déréliction, rejet, à mon avis, c’est noyau pervers que nous
avons tous - puisque nous sommes tous un peu racistes -, c’est un noyau pervers que nous
tenons probablement de notre archaïque moyen de défense qui consiste à nier l’odeur de
quelqu’un qui n’est pas celle de notre mère. 123

Donc, dans l’analyse, ça ne dure pas très longtemps la haine. C’est un artefact de communication
qui n’est ni amour ni haine, c’est désir de communiquer jusque dans l’abstrait à des êtres qui
sont, par la chose-corps, dans le concret. 126

Absolument! C’est pris comme haine par les autres mais pas par celui qui éprouve ce sentiment.
Il est une vie qui éclate et dont les autres ont à souffrir, mais ce n’est pas en vue de faire souffrir
l’autre qu’il y a haine, je ne crois pas, sinon ça se retournerait sur lui-meme et ça serait une
autodestruction. 129

ça peut rendre fou d’avoir un sens en plus, et je pense que certains enfants schizophrènes ont
une intuition, une intelligence que nous n’avons pas, qu’ils souffrent de ce qu’ils prévoient
peut-etre, et qu’ils aiment mieux ne pas vivre comme les autres pour ne pas devenir comme
ces autres. 138

Donc, pour arriver à écouter vraiment quelqu’un, il faut se mettre totalement entre parenthèses
pendant qu’il est présent. Et tant que je ne suis pas entre parenthèses quand j’écoute un enfant,
ou des parents qui me parlent de leur enfant, ou que je m’occupe d’un enfant, c’est que ne je suis
pas assez analysée. Et le jour ou j’ai vu que j’étais totalement libre de me preter à la relation, et
après ça de redevenir complètement à ma vie en oubliant la relation, alors je me suis dit: -Je suis
assez analysée-. 163

Maud Mannoni, Un savoir qui ne se sait pas, L’experience analytique, 1985

Nous l’avons vu, chaque fois que Freud approche d’une vérité, l’angoisse le saisit, il ne peut
écrire, ni travailler et devient ,meme sourd aux patients. Dans ses lettres, où il cherche à
éveiller l’interet de Fliess, plus il idéalise son ami, plus il se sent lui-meme un grand homme.
C’est lorsque le mouvement de l’expérience analytique apparait comme exaltant, que se
dévoile ensuite, la fonction de méconnaissance de l’ego.42

Dés qu’il a eu affaire à l’inconscient, il a compris que les accidents de son passé étaient présents
dans sa recherche, et que conduire une cure n’est possible que si l’analyste a la possibilité de
demeurer attentif à ce qui persiste de conflictuel en lui. 44

Il s’agit d’une jeune fille de 28 ans qui souhaite avoir une liaison avec une femme (de moeurs
légères), hétérosexuelle mais aussi homosexuelle. La femme décline ses avances. La jeune fille
se jette aussitot d’un pont sur la voie ferrée. Plus tard, elle avoue que la dame, inquiète de
l’attitude de son pére, lui avait demandé de cesser toute activité avec elle. Puis, les parents
l’amènent chez Freud. En fait, la jeune fille ne désire pas etre -guerie- de son homosexualité,
mais elle entreprend une analyse -pour ses parents-. Docile, elle y prend un inréret purement
intellectuel, mais émotionellement, l’expérience analytique ne la concerce pas. C’est cette
-isolation- et hostilité latente de la patiente qui poussent Freud à interrompre le traitement.50
La jeune fille entre donc dans la cure dans un contexte où tous les adultes semblent complices.
51

Freud - Il se présente à ses jeunes patientes comme un substitut paternel, sans reconnaintre une
série de mécanismes de défenses propres à l’adolesence. Il demeure sourd à une forme
d’ambivalance marquée par le narcissisme, l’idéalisme et une intransigeance morale à
toute épreuve.51 !!!

Entre 1956 -date où les analystes ont célébré le centainaire de Freud - et 1985, on a connu, en
France, des années fastes au plan de la recherche psychanalytique, mais aussi des années
sombres où l’élaboration d’un savoir psychanalytique unifié a eu pour résultat de couper la
théorie de la pratique. 57

Ce que nous avons beaucoup moins bien retenu, c’est l’exigence éthique de Freud concernant
une certaine cohérence du discours. C’est cette exigence qui amena Freud à se séparer d’un
Jung, séduisant pour la propagande, mais dont le discours tenu devient de nature, radicalement
différent de celui de Freud (l’appareil structural avec lequel il constitue l’expérience). 60

La subjectivité s’y mêle alors à l’information. Or, la technique de la communication voudrait

éliminer -ce qu’il y a de plus dans le langage.- 68
Les poètes ont toujours su cela, eux qui, lorsqu’ils ne peuvent pas résister au désir de lire
leurs poèmes, le lisant à l’autre, mais celui-là n’est que l’ombre d’eux-memes. Car pour le
lire à l’Autre,ils peuvent être seuls. 69

Ce qui importe, en effet, alors à l’analyste, c’est de savoir si l’enfant est créatif,
indepéndant et a de bons rapports avec ses camarades de jeux. C’est là qu’il rencontre
l’angoisse des parents, souvent si inquiets pour l’avenir, que c’est la vie dans le présent qui
se trouve supprimé. Mais l’enfant se défend et fabrique des symptomes…82

Françoise Dolto, quant à elle, demande à l’enfant s’il désire etre soigné. Elle donne aux
parents une sorte de -bilan- de la situation, telle qu’elle la comprend et propose ou non une
analyse,en fonction de ce bilan et de l’attitude de l’enfant face à ce aui lui est proposé. 87

On sait que, dans les années 1920, les analystes espérènt beaucoup des applications
pédagogiques de l’analyse (Vera Schmidt, Marie Bonaparte, Wilhelm Reich, Pfister, pour
ne citer que les principaux). Ils attendaient de l’éducation une sorte de prophylaxie des
névroses. Freund, quant à lui, se montra toujours beaucoup plus réticent. Pour lui, le
problème était ailleurs, dans la mesure où il estimait nécessaire un minimum de répression
et de contrainte dans l’éducation d’un enfant. La sublimation n’est-elle pas, en effet, un
produit de la répression pulsionnelle? (…)
Ainsi, dans l’éducation traditionnelle, non seulement le sujet ne doit pas satisfaire une
pulsion incompatible avec la loi sociale, mais encore il doit oublier jusqu’à sa propre
existence et réussir ainsi le refoulement. L’éclairage analytique,ici, met moins en question
l’autoritarisme de telle forme d’éducation que la façon dont l’adulte traite le refoulement.
Pour l’analyste, en effet, l’éducation se doit de ne pas fonctionner aveuglément (en se
contenant, par exemple, de l’acquisition d’automatismes), mais a plutôt à laisser une place
au désir et à ouvrir sur des possibilités d’invention permanente.
Une nouvelle voie a été ouverte par Winnicott en développant ce qui avait été - on l’a vu -
indiqué par Freud, dès 1907: ménager au sujet un espace pour la fantaisie. Cet espace,
ainsi que l’attention apportée au jeu et contre-jeu maternel, constituent les axes avec
lesquels travaillent les -lieux d’accueil- winnicottiens en Angleterre.
Un enfant psychotique (mais cela est vrai pour tout enfant) a, en effet, besoin d’abord et
avant tout, de vivre dans un lieu où l’accès à la fantaisie et à la création devienne possible.
Aussi l’enfant doit-il etre entrainé à vivre dans un lieu qui fasse une place à la fête, au
folklore, un lieu qui marque le sens et le rythme des saisons et du temps, un lieu qui fasse
une place à une tradition orale (celle véhiculée par l’histoir, les mythes, les contes) et qui
laisse l’enfant découvrir le plaisir d’avoir des mains qui créent (ce qui suppose une
ouverture non seulement à la peinture, à la sculpture, mais aussi à la cuisine, à la
menuiserie et à tout un corps de métiers artisanaux). Le scolaire ne peut, en effet, prendre
sens qu’à être pris d’abord dans ce premier réseau symbolique. Aussi un analyste qui
n’aurait pas pour souci qu’un enfant très perturbé puisse bénéficier dans la réalité d’un
type d’accueil ouvert sur la vie (et la création) se priverait-il d’un outil essentiel à la
-guérison- de l’enfant. Une analyse qui se voudrait avant tout -soignante- laisserait, de
même, échapper l’invention. Car le désir surgit là où on ne s’y attend pas…94

Il peut aussi se trouver en situation d’scolarité totale et choisir, meme à l’age de douze ans, de
travailler à mi-temps, au restaurant par exemple. 96

Jean Sandretto, Un enfant dans l’asile, Seuil, 1977

C’est parce qu’il se fait ainsi support d’une question, qu’un certain discours peut se tenir, à
travers la haine et l’amour eu-delà de tout chantage de l’abandon. 101

L’asile, dénommé autrefois -prison de fous- puis hopital psychiatrique, est maintenant devenu
-centre communautaire de santé mentale-. Electrochocs, expérimentation de drogues
(dangerouses) non encore commercialisées, présentation de malades: autant de pratiques qui
continuent à avoir cours dans des structures faites, en réalité, pour -fabriquer un malade mental-,
ce à quoi contribue l’equipe soignante dans son besoin de -soigner-. Dans cette caricature de
démocratie, se joue collectivement (dans l’anonymat) le sort d’individus isolés et piégés dans les
filets qui leur sont tendus. 103

Ce qu’Octave Mannoni tentait de faire entendre en mettant l’accent sur l’analyse personelle du
candidat, c’est que l’expérience la plus pénible pour celui qui souhaite devenir analyste est
d’avoir d’abord à apprendre à devenir un patient. 135

Maud Manoni,
Le premier rendez-vous avec le psychanalyste, préface de Françoise Dolto,Gallimard, 1965

Préface
Le psychalanyse est et reste le point d’impact d’un humanisme qui s’éclaire depuis Freud de la
découverte de processus inconscients, agissant à l’insu du sujet et limitant sa liberté.7
Jusqu’a la première rencontre avec la psychanalyste, le problème n’est donc abordé qu’au niveau
de l’objet de la requête; et il n’y a requête qu’à propos d’objets de caractère négatif pour
l’entourage: la réussite scolaire, par exemple, parait toujours en soi un objet positif, l’abscence
de troubles du caractère genants pour la tranquilité de l’entourage aussi. Or ces deux résultats
psychodynamiques n’ont de valeur culturelle authentique que si le sujet est effectivement créatif
et non pas seulement soumis aux exigences des adultes, que s’il est en communication
langagière,verbale, affective et psychomotrice de son age avec son entourage, que s’il est à l’abri
de tensions internes, dégagé, au moins dans ses pensées et jugements, de la dépendance au désir
d’autrui, à l’aise dans la fréquentation des compagnons des deux sexes de sa génération,apte à
aimer et etre aimé, apte à communiquer ses sentiments, apte à faire face aux frustrations et aux
difficultés quotidiennes de toutes sortes sans décompenser, s’il montre une élasticité
caracteriélle et mimique qui caractérise la santé mentale. 11

Le lecteur saisira sans peine comment un être humain, dés sa vie prénatale, est déjà marqué par
la manière dont il est attendu, par ce qu’il représente ensuite, par son existence réelle devant les
projections inconscientes des parents, lequels, servant d’interlocuteurs et de modèles naturels,
altérent trop souvent chez l’enfant le sens des références vécues à des paroles justes, cela parfois
dés sa naissance. Quel est donc le role du psychanalyste? Je viens de dire que c’est celui
d’une présence humaine qui ecoute. Comment cet etre humain fait comme les autres, issu
de la meme population, a-t-il éte formé de sorte que son écoute produise de tels effets de
vérite? 12-13

Là où le langage s’arrete, c’est le comportement qui continue à parler, et lorsqu’il s’agit

d’enfants perturbés, c’est l’enfant qui, par ses symptomes, incarne et présentifie les
conséquences d’un conflit vivant, familial ou conjugal, camouflé et accepté par ses parents. 13

Plus les humains sont jeunes, plus le poids des inhibitions dynamiques subies directement ou
indirectement par les tensions et l’exemple des adultes mutilent leur libre jeu de vitalité
émotionelle, moins ils peuvent s’en défendre créativement ; et les troubles très graves du
développement psycho-moteur mental ou de la fragilité de santé , par effet dit psychosomatique,
des très jeunes enfants, sont la conséquence de ces relations perturbées au monde - alors que le
monde de l’enfant est encore réduit à l’adulte nourricier. 14

Il en est ainsi des accidents, des morts, des maladies, des crises de colère, d’ivrognerie, des
dérèglements de la conduite entrainant l’intervention de la justice […] toutes situations
auxquelles l’enfant est melé et dont on ne lui permet pas la divulgation ou dont, pire encore, on
lui cache la realité, qu’il subit pourtant,sans lui permettre de s’y connaitre la vérité qu’il perçoit
trés finement et dont les mots justes, pour traduire son épreuve avec eux partagée, lui manquant,
l’induisent à se sentir étrange, objet d’un malaise magique, déshumanisant. éé

! pas un enfant-prothèse
Au contraire, l’enfant qui n’a pas résolu l’Oedipe reste trés dominé par l’ambiance
émotionelle de sa relation à la mère ou au père. 31

Tous les mots névrosants viennent des mensonges qui empechent les faits réels de porter les
fruits de l’acceptation, à partir de la situation réelle. 33

La drame pour les enfants, en notre pays et dans son système, provient du style
d’instruction passive, aux horaires et programmes obsédants et qui ne laisse point à chacun
une marge d’accès à la culture. Les leçons et les devoirs, on l’oublie trop souvent, sont des
moyens mais non des fins en soi….- photos

Si le role du psychanalyste est de permettre à un sujet névrosé ou malade mental de trouver son
sens, son role est aussi de pousser un cri d’alarme devant la carence publique éducationnelle, les
méthodes et institutions scolaires souvent pathogènes, face aux carences et au role pathogène
individuels de bien des parents du monde dit civilisé. 46

l’analyse : Par sa présence, il va aider un sujet à articuler sa demande, à se constituer dans sa

parole par rapport à son histoire, pour dégager enfin à travers un certain cheminement, un
message auquel un sens pourra être donné. 52

Que nous le voulions ou non, nous sommes inscrits dans un certain système de parenté.
L’histoire de chacun est fonction de la manière dont il y réagit. 53

La présence réelle du père n’est pas indispensable, mais ce qui semble indispensable, c’est
la présence du père dans le discours de la mère. 82

Mais il arrive que les sentiments de jalousie correspondent à des difficultés non résolues
chez l’un des deux parents. A partir de ce moment, l’enfant quitte l’expérience normale
d’un conflit de jalousie pour entrer dans le domaine pathologique. Il exprime alors d’un
facon violente ce qui, chez la mère, est resté inavouable. C’est cet inavouable, ce non
sublimable qui l’enfant va faire exploser, créant la panique dans le monde adulte. 87

C’est la mère que ces enfants en veulent. N’ayant pu trouver les mots pour exprimer leur soif
d’amour, c’est par des actes destructeurs qu’ils s’efforcent d’amorcer le dialogue…88

Tous ces enfants ayant précocement des agissements a-sociaux ne sont pas des pervers, mais des
sujets dont l’évolution est compromise par une situation familiale nocive qui les empêche de
poser correctement leur Oedipe. Identifiés tour à tour au père ou à la mère -victimes- ou -ratés-.
90
Quand le symptome est devenu le seule possibilité de communication du sujet, celui-ci y tient.
94

On ne peut pas dans ce cas, en raison meme de l’absence du père, qu’espérer qua la mère
puisse un jour accepter l’idée d’une existence propre, indépendente de celle de ses enfants.
101

Ses maladies organiques sont l’expression de l’anxiété de la mère.

Bref, on cherche de plus en plus à saisir sa personnalité, qu’on n’hésite pas d’ailleurs à évaluer à
l’aide de critères statistiques. 148

Le niveau de Q.I., la précision des troubles de l’attention, les difficultés dans le domaine de
l’abstraction, un trouble scolaire défini,non, tout cela n’a de sens que situé dans une histoire.
150

(….) un test devrait etre compris comme un essai (avec ses possibilités d’erreurs) et non
comme un texte législatif ordonnant telle ou telle orientation. 155

Or, il est fréquent, meme en maison de santé (maison de cure pour étudiants) de faire passer,
avant toute idée de cure, la necessité de la réorientation. 159

Ce qui pour un enfant est dangereux, c’est le mensonge de la mère à elle-meme. -Je le
savais que cet enfant n’était pas de mon mari, mais je ne voulais pas le savoir.-163

Le rendez-vous avec le psychanalyste, c’est une rencontre, à travers l’Autre, avec son
propre mensonge. 169

Gerard de Nerval, Aurelie

Ici a commencé pour moi ce que j'appellerai l'épan chement du songe dans la vie réelle. À dater
de ce moment tout prenait parfois un aspect double, et cela, sans que le raisonnement manquât
jamais de logique, sans que la mémoire perdît les plus légers détails de ce qui m'arrivait.
Seulement, mes actions, insensées en apparence, étaient soumises à ce que l'on appelle illu sion,
selon la raison humaine...
Cette idée m'est revenue bien des fois, que, dans cer tains moments graves de la vie, tel Esprit du
monde extérieur s'inca ait tout à coup en1a fO e d'une per sonne ordinaire, et agissait ou tentait
d'agir sur nous, sans que cette personne en eût la connaissance ou en gardât le souvenir. 16
 Le néant, dit-il, n'existe pas dans le sens qu'on l'entend ; mais la te e est elle-même un co s
matériel dont la somme des esprits est l'âme."' La matière ne peut pas plus périr que l'esprit, mais
e e peut se modi er selon le bien et selon le mal. Notre passé et notre avenir sont solidaires. Nous
vivons dans notre race, et notre race vit en nous. 22

L'un d'ux me dit en pleurant: «N'est-ce pas que c'est vrai qu'il y a un Dieu? - Oui! » lui dis-je
avec enthousiasme. Et nous nous embrassâmes comme deux ères de cette pat e mystique que
j'avais entre vue. Quel bonheur je trouvai d'abord dans'cette conviction!.Ainsi ce doute éte el de
l'immortalité de l'âme qui a ecte les meilleurs esp ts se trouvait résolu pour moi. Plus de mort,
plus de t stesse, plus d'inquiétude. Ceux que j'aimais, parents, amis, me donnaient des signes
certains de leur existence éter nelle, et je n'étais ·plus séparé d'eux que par les heures du jou
l'attendais celles de la nuit dans une douce mélancolie. 27

Quoi qu'il en soit, je crois que l'imagina tion humaine n'a rien inventé qui ne soit vrai, dans ce
monde ou dans les autres, et je ne pouvais douter de ce que j'avais vu si distinctement.
38

« Eh bien, me dis-je, luttons 'contre l'esprit fatal, luttons contre le dieu lui-même avec les armes
de la tradition et de là science. Quoi qu'il fasse dans l'ombre et la nuit, j'existe; et j'ai pour le
vaincre tout le temps qu'il m'est donné encore de vivre'sur la terre. » 39

Mais, selon ma . ,pensée, les 'événements terrestres étaient liés à cèux du monde invisible. C'est
de ces rapports étrange,s dont je ne me rends pas compte moi-même et qu'il est plus aisé
d'indiquer que de dé ni ..
43

Pourquoi donc est-ce la première fois, depuis si longtemps, que je songe à lui ? Le système fatal
qui s'était créé dans mon esprit n'admettait pas cette royauté solitaire... ou plutôt e e s'absorbait
dans la somme des êtres : c'était le dieu de Lucretius, impuis.- sant et perdu dans son immensité.
45

Du moment que je me s assuré de ce point que j'étais soumis aux épreuves de l'initiation sacrée, u
e force invincible entra dans mon esprit. Je me jugeais un héros vivant sous le regard des dieux ;
tout dans la nature prenait des aspects nouveaux, et des voix secrètes so aient de la plante, de
l'arbre, des anima , des plus humbles insectes, pour m'avertir et m'encou rage Le langage de mes
compagnons avait des tours mystérieu* dont je comprenais le sens, les objets sans forme et sans
vie se prêtaient eux-mêmes aux c culs de mon e$prit ; - des combinaisons de cailloux, des gures
d'angles, de fentes ou d'ouvertures, des décou pures de feuilles, des couleurs, des odeurs et des
sons, je voyais' resso ir des harmonies jusqu'alors incon nues. « Comment, me disais-je, ai-je pu
exister si long temps hors de la nature et sans m'identi er à elle ? Tout vit, tout agit, tout se co
espond; les rayons magnétiques émanés de moi-même ou des autres tra versent sans obstacle la
chaîne in nie des choses créées; c'est un réseau transparent qui couvre le monde, et dont les ls
déliés se communiquent de proche en proche aux planètes et aux étoiles. Captif en ce moment
sur la terre, je m'entretiens avec le chœur des astres, qui prend part à mes joies et à mes dou leurs
!»
67

“YES, IT'S ONLY that fear, those searchings, tracings, tellings whose purpose is to hide the
unreachable horizon. It's night again, and everything departs, disappears, shrouded in black sky. I
am alone and must remember events, because the terror of the unending is upon me. The soul
dissolves in space like a drop in the sea, and I am too much a coward to have faith in it, too old
to accept its loss; I believe it is only through the visible that we can know relief, only in the body
of the world that my body can find shelter. I would like to be buried in all those places where I've
been before and will be again. My head among the green hills of Zemplén, my heart somewhere
in Transylvania, my right hand in Chornohora, my left in Spišská Belá, my sight in Bukovina,
my sense of smell in Răşinari, my thoughts perhaps in this neighborhood ... This is how I
imagine the night when the current roars in the dark and the thaw wipes away the white stains of
snow. I recall those days when I took to the road so often, pronouncing the names of far cities
like[…]” 15-16
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Any place was good, because I could leave it without regret.” 19 Excerpt From: Andrzej
Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
“My country! At all cost I desired to connect with it—but there was nothing to connect with.
Neither in its present nor in its past did I find anything genuine ... My mad lover's rage had no
object, you could say, because my country crumbled under the force of my gaze. I wished it were
as powerful, immoderate, and wild as an evil power, a doom to shake the world, but it was small,
modest, and without the qualities that make destiny." So wrote Emil Cioran in 1949, returning in
his mind to his adventure in the Iron Guard.” 50
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
“The loneliness of a liberated mind is as great as the sky over Transylvania. Such a mind
wanders like cattle in search of shade or a watering place.” 52
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“You can't devote attention to events that come out of nowhere and whose purpose and sense
remain unclear to the end. No one will wrap things into a whole, cobble a finished tale. Neglect
is the essence of this region. History, deeds, consequences, ideas, and plans dissolve into the
landscape, into something considerably older and vaster than all the striving. Time gets the better
of memory. Nothing can be remembered with certainty, because actions do not line up according
to the principle of cause and effect. A long narrative about the spirit of the times in this place
seems a project as pathetic as it is pretentious, like a novel written from the point of view of God.
Paroxysm and tedium rule here in turn, and that is why this region is so human. "One of your
father leaders?" Why not? I thought. In a sense, both ours and yours. Ultimately, in Szela was
embodied the desire for violent change, a rejection of one's fate that at the same time suddenly
turns into acceptance of what that fate brings.”
69
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
stew - casserole
swarthy ,dark - basane
“It drew us, because life is made of bits of the present that stay in the mind. The world itself,
really, is made of that.” 79
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about. Your thoughts grow still,
useless. Everything must be rebuilt. In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference
point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories. You live a little like a child, or an
animal. Objects and events may bring things to mind, but in the end they remain no more than
what they are in fact. They begin only when we experience them, vanish when others follow. So
they truly have no significance. They are made of that primal substance that touches our senses
but is too light, too evanescent, to teach us anything.” 111-112

Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“I saw birds I couldn't name.” 120
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Communism, after all, had been the fruit of long, hopeless winters, when people began to go
mad from boredom and from the fear of the self. It made sense, if it made sense at all, only on a
flat, featureless plain where nothing happened and therefore anything could happen.” 121
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
“he existence of small countries of moderate temperament is simply a challenge to common
ideas on such subjects as expansion, might, size, mission, and all those other collective axioms.
As for me, I've always wanted to live in a smaller country—never, God forbid, in a larger one. It
is much more difficult for negligibility to turn into a caricature of itself than for greatness to do
so. And in any case it does less harm to its surroundings.
The Slovenian writer Edvard Kocbek, in his Parisian Notebook, wrote:
"Our history is not marked by great passions; its poverty does not permit the assumption of any
weighty mission. We can rely on no original declaration of faith, no communal character. The
nature of our country is convex rather than concave; it has no true center of gravity, which would
indicate a geographic as well as moral center. For this reason we lack thinkers of centripetal
energy, souls who bear witness to our identity, souls of a crystallized fate ... We never regarded
our national borders as a test of quality, as trustworthy passage, as solution or inspiration—or as
temptation, shame, and an opportunity for smuggling." 122
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Albania, see, is ancient. Its beauty brings to mind species and epochs that are long extinct and
have left behind no likenesses. The landscape endures yet is constantly disintegrating, as if the
sky and air were tearing at it with their fingers. Hence the cracks, ravines, fissures, and the
persistent weight of matter that wishes to be left alone, to be rid of its shapes, to rest, and to
return to the time when there were no forms.”133
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Names organized nothing, having no fixed, established, verifiable meaning.” 116

Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

riff-raff - undesirable people

swineherd - porcher/e, porcar
cassock - soutane
dismal, luguber - lugubre
smudge - une trace

gutter - guttiere, caniveau, burlan

reek - puanteur (care miroase urat)
plank - planche, scandura groasa de lemn
plywood - contreplaque, placaj
burlap - toile a sac, panza de sac

to peek , to look or glance quickly- coup d’oeil furtif

crosshatch - hachurage
shingle - galets, șindrilă
mothball - napthtaline
clatter - cliquetis

hens - gaini
to trundle - pousser
stocky, heavily built - trapu
resettlement - integration, reinsertion
limestone - calcaire

crag - rocher, stanca

put a spoke in someone's wheel - Brit. prevent someone from carrying out a plan.
tarred - goudron, bitume
to etch - graver
cutout - silhouette/ decupaj

meadow, a piece of grassland, especially used for hay - pré

brambles - mures, mura
to abrade - eroder, abraser
husk, shell - enveloppe
shrine - lieu de la

(clouds) thickening - epaissisant, a se ingrosa

makeshift - improvise
rattling - clinquetis
wheelbarrow - brouette
patter, tapping sound - crepitement

aglow - rayonnante
block out
sway - osciler
vouchsafed - gratifier
pigsty, place for pigs - porcherie

hayrick - a pile of hay

foothills - contrefort
perfunctory - rapide, sans conviction
sullen - renforgner, morne
stepped out

stork - cigogne
racket, noise- vacarme
preternatural- surnaturel
miscellaneous - divers
sludge - usees

hoary - blanchi, incaruntit

pebbles - caillou
to trample - piétiner, fouler aux pieds
swelter, be uncomfortably hot - etouffer de chaleur
notch, indentation, incision - entaille

inlets - bras de mer

whiff - odeur
reeled - bobine, moulinet
Sturdy - robuste
strewn - eparpiller

cursory - rapide
smuggling- contrabande
shackles - chain
outskirts - peripherie
jutting - s’avancer en saillie

gangplanks - pasarelle
ridge - corniche
slopes - pente, inclination (panta)
sifted, to flow or pass as to a sieve
heavyset - a person strongly built

ravine/ a deep, narrow gorge with steep sides - raviner - creuser

strait, channel that links 2 seas - detroit
potholes - fondrieres, pesteri
splinter- echarde, eclat, scanteie
dimness - obscurite

harness - harnais, hățuri

knickknacks - bibleot
paperweights - presse - papier
litter, rubbish - detritus
to parse, to solve a problem of grammar - analyser, meme du point de vue gramatical

taut - tight
hut - cabane
corrugated - ondulé
gaunt - décharné; lugubre
twig - brindille; vreasc- crenguta

cellar; cave; beci

marauding; thieving; en maraude
scruffy; untidy;
fender; garde cendre
swerved ; swerv ; faire un écart ; écart

to waft; pass something through the air; souffle

flimsy; very light and thin; peu solide
riddle; devinette; ghicitoare
twine; string; ficelle
combed; peigner

scorched; légère brulure

buckle; boucle
brittle ; praline
ore; minerai de fer
shrubbery; massif d arbuste

tether; rope
hulls; coaque; carcasse
sentry; sentinelle
lucent; shining
cardboard; carton

fowl; volaille;
unimpeachable; unquestionable; irréprochable
cobbled; pavé
slither ; glisser
dwindling; en baisse
corrugated; ondulé
planks; planche
innards; entrailles
churning; tourbilloner
barefoot - aux pieds nus
muggy; unpleasantly warm; étouffant
toddler - bebe
claptrap - nonsensical talk
halfheartedness - without enthusiasm
fiddler - violoniste
bundle, collection of smth - ballot
homespun, rudimentary - sans artifices
switchbacks - voie en lacets, drum cu urcusuri/ coborasuri
paddocks, enclosure for horses - parc fermé
cloudburst - violente averse
bedraggled, disordered - dépenaillé
honk , the scream of a wold goose - cri de claxon, cri de l’oie
reed - roseau
sorrel - oseille
excise - taxe
dreariness - monotonie
wretchedness - dètresse
garrison - garnison
speckled - tacheté, cu pete
shamble - aller d’un pas traînant
floorboards - planche
ram - bélier, berbec
gurgle - gargouillement
schlock- camelote
unsullied - pure, sans tache
raucous - éraillé, bruillant
baggy - large
weasel - balette
sluggish - léthargique
scrawny - décharné, maigre
poultry - volaille
coops, cage for chicken - poulailler

about Moldova: “The whole country had been stolen from the ordinary people. In the Soviet
days, when everything was communal and didn't belong to anyone, theft was not a problem. Like
everything else, it was communal: everybody stole, and nobody lost. Now only the richest stole,
and they made sure the poor couldn't, by inventing property. Property was an invention against
ordinary people, who owned nothing. That was Misha, in Russian.” 155
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“SO, SPACE IS just a kind of eternal present.” 180

Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Basically these people are doing what we all do: trying to get by. Yet they don't pride
themselves, don't write down their history, preferring their legends, folktales, fables passed from
generation to generation, their "once upon a time" instead of, say, "on the thirteenth of December
of the aforesaid year in Copenhagen." And so wherever I go, I look for them, for that living
image of Mediterranean-Christian civilization, that nation without land, those people who, the
moment something is built, must discard it, burn it for fun or in despair, and move their portable
kingdom to a place where the white European horde heaves a little less with hatred of them. I
look for the Gypsies—as in Slovenian Prekmurje—and am disappointed when I don't see them,
feel that I've strayed too far and it's time to go back. I am related to them, in an illegitimate way:
I learned how to put words together, and my words survive somewhere, and yet I cannot create a
credible account. My nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech all detach from the world, fall off
like old plaster, and I return to legend, fable, ballad, to things that truly[…]” 226
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“It's good to live in a nonobvious land, one whose borders contain more locations than any
geography indicates: the vastness of the unknown, the expanse of guesswork, the retreating
horizon of puzzlement, the sweet mirage of prejudices that no reality will correct.” 229
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“and through all those spots that I visited shines a light stronger than the failing light of simple
geography, stronger than the ominous glow of political geography and the moribund glow of
economic geography.” 235
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“What is memory, anyway, if not the endless exchange of currency, a continual allotting and
distributing, a counting in the hope that the total will be right, that what once was will return with
no shortage, whole, untouched, and perhaps even with interest, through love and longing? What
is travel, anyway, if not spending, then reckoning what's left and turning your pockets inside
out?” 243
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Clearly I am drawn to decline, decay, to everything that is not as it could or should be.
Whatever stops in half stride because it lacks the strength or will or imagination to continue.
Whatever gives in, gives up, does not last, and leaves no trace.” 256
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“The present imperfect. Histories that live no longer than the relating of them, objects that are
only when someone regards them. This is what haunts me—this extra being that everyone can do
without, this superfluity that is not wealth, this hiddenness that no one explores, secrets that,
ignored, are lost forever, memory that consumes itself. March draws to a close, and I hear the
snow slipping off the mountains in the dark. The world like a snake sloughing another skin. The
same feeling each year, and it deepens with each year: the true face of my region, of my corner
of the continent—precisely this changing that changes nothing, this movement that expends
itself. Some spring, not only will the snow melt, everything else will melt, too. The brown-gray
water will wash away towns and villages, it will wash away animals, people, everything, down to
the naked skeleton of the earth. Meteorology and geology will join forces, ruling in a dubious
coalition with history and geography. The permanent will seize the transitory by the throat. The
elements will resume their places on Mendeleev's eternal table, and no more tales, no more
narratives will be needed to interpret existence.” 257
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“because a story should defy time and logic, just as our imagination separates itself from events.
There should be a to-be-continued, which may have nothing to do with the beginning, so long as
the story is nourished by the same substance, so long as it breathes the same (albeit somewhat
stale) air. I tell myself it doesn't matter if I find nothing.” 262
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“I wanted to smell Gypsy camps stocked with marvels that no woman or man could resist,
because they came from a realm no one yet had reached or—more to the point—no one had
returned from. Thus I set out for Ubl'a, east of the volcanic mountains of Vihorlat, mountains no
one in his right mind would venture into, as they are haunted by the ghosts of field officers and
front-line soldiers of the Warsaw Pact, and by pallid ghouls, deserters, who sell arms and
uniforms as souvenirs. I drove through the town of Snina, where among weeping willows stood
two-story garrison buildings with red roofs, all looking as if they had been thrown together that
same day and had aged and fallen apart just as quickly. On benches in doorways sat women with
children. Soldiers' wives, widows of the officer ghosts? Snina was a dream dreamt at the edge of
a country that had lost all its enemies.” 267
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Nothing remains; Ubl'a, Heviz, Lendava, Babadag, Leskovik, et cetera, leave no evidence that
quantity eventually becomes quality, that one meshes with the other and like the gears of a
marvelous machine begins to produce sense.” 271
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
“As usual, I saw Gypsies, their desperate liveliness in the slumbering monotony of Slovak towns
and villages. As if everyone, exhausted by the everyday, was taking a nap, hidden behind
curtains, behind rambling roses in gardens, behind the windows of furtive cars, in the stuffy
interiors of gray homes, and only these dark-skinned and cursed people were surrendering
themselves to life, making use of the world and their few minutes in it like a winning ticket. ”
272
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Once people asked an old Gypsy why Gypsies didn't have their own country. "If a country was
a good thing, the Gypsies too would have one, for sure," was his answer. ” 274
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
“Europe without borders is a Gypsy dream, there is no denying it. White folk, lazy, rooted,
fearful, stay in their homes, as one does on a Slovak Sunday. You see only the Gypsies, walking
in their solitude, in twos and threes, on the roadsides from village to village, and the green
countryside closes after them like water. It's as if they could not live without space. Freed from
the workings of time, they are indifferent to the nothingness that will claim Gönc and all the
other places we have given names to, because only by naming can we grasp the world, even as
we condemn it to destruction.” 275
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
foal, young horse - poulain
“Old women carrying brushwood on their backs, men gathered around the open hoods of old
cars, a boy in Podgrodzie cradling a puppy in his arms. A cart in Transylvania hitched to two
horses, and in the cart a frightened foal, a couple of weeks old, its legs splayed, a child
embracing its neck affectionately, face in the brown fur, as if the child had found a creature
smaller than itself and more defenseless. Red Kalderash petticoats on the road to Mount
Moldoveanu, bare feet covered with yellow dust. A smoldering dump in ErdŐhát; small, slender
figures plucking metal, plastic, and glass from the smoking rubbish. A dump in Tiszacsécse, by
the road that winds above the river, where an old man with a pipe in his mouth pulls long pieces
of wood out of the hills of junk; he ties them in bundles and sets them beside a relic bicycle ... I
should create a catalog, an encyclopedia of these scenes and places, write a history in which time
plays no part, a history of Gypsy eternity, because it is more enduring, and wiser, than our
governments and cities, than our entire world, which trembles at the imminence of[…]” 276
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

“Anyone who was born in Huşi and spent his youth there is entitled not to believe in the future. I
assume Codreanu visited Valea Grecului too; he was a young man on the move. He hated the
Communists, who believed in the future, as much as the Jews. His dull, provincial mind probably
had trouble telling them apart. Basically, he never stopped being a prophet from the sticks. The
world was divided into Romania and the rest, and the rest had no value because it wasn't
Romania, let alone Huşi.” 285
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.
“Yes, there are places in which we are certain that something lies behind, something is
concealed, but we are helpless, too stupid or too timid or perhaps not old enough to know how to
cross to the other side.” 325
Excerpt From: Andrzej Stasiuk. “On the Road to Babadag.” iBooks.

La mort de ma mere, Albert Cohen

Gallimard, 1954

"Mets ton chapeau de côté, mon fils, et sors et va te divertir, car tu es jeune, va, ennemi de toi-
même. “

Souris pour croire que rien n'importe, souris pour te forcer à feindre de vivre, sou- ris sous l'épée
suspendue de la mort de ta mère, souris toute ta vie à en crever et jus- qu'à ce que tu en crèves de
ce permanent sourire.13

Oui, une simple, ma mère. Mais tout ce que j'ai de bon, c'est à elle que je le dois. Et ne pouvant
rien faire d'autre pour toi, Maman, je baise ma main qui vient de toi. 54

Amour de ma mère, à nul autre pareil. Elle perdait tout jugement quand il s'agissait de son fils.
Elle acceptait tout de moi, possé- dée du génie divin qui divinise l'aimé, le pauvre aimé si peu
divin. 90

Avec les plus aimés, amis, filles et femmes aimantes, il me faut un peu paraître, dissimu- ler un
peu. Avec ma mère, je n'avais qu'à être ce que j'étais, avec mes angoisses, mes pauvres
faiblesses, mes misères du corps et de l'âme. Elle ne m'aimait pas moins. Amour de ma mère, à
nul autre pareil.
105

« Et puis, je n'aimerais pas que tu changes, ne sais-tu pas que les mères aiment que le fils soit
supérieur, et même un peu ingrat, c'est signe de bonne santé. » 124

Les yeux des Juifs vivants ont tou-

jours peur. C'est notre spécialité maison, le malheur. 127

(…) pourquoi tant d'émois pour tout, pourquoi m'a-t-elle tant souri si elle devait tant disparaître?
147
Fraçoise Dolto, Jean-Pierre Winter, Les images, les mots, le corps, Gallimard

Mais Winnicott, ça n’est pas de la théorie! Je trouve que cet homme travaille comme je
travaillerais si j’étais un homme.27

La théorie, ça aide celui qui travaille. Par exemple, ma théorie m’a aidée parce que si je n’avais
pas cherché une théorie, j’aurais pu n’importe quoi! Il y a une éthique, quand nous travaillons,
qui est d’essayer de savoir ce que nous faisons, dans la mesure ou nous sommes conscients. Mais
quant à ce qui est inconscient en nous, il faut accepter que nous ne savons pas ce que c’est. Notre
travail c’est tout le temps d’essayer de rendre communicable ce que nous avons trouvé, puisque
la psychanalyse est tout de meme une science de l’homme, bien que ce soit une vraie science au
sens objectif.30

…le travail qui est de décoder tout le temps. 32

Ce sont tous les conflits qu’on voit chez les enfants qui sont entre un père et une mère, et ou
ils veulent jouer leur role, c’est-à-dire finalement vouloir commander tout pour être le
maitre. 33

Mais ce que m’a vraiment intéressée c’est quand je me suis aperçue qu’il n’y avait pas du
tout de situations triangulaire, en ce sens que l’enfant était, vis-à-vis de son père, dans la
meme situation que vis-à-vis de sa mère. Il n’y avait pas du tout une attitude sexuée comme
Freud l’avait décrit. Il avait parlé de l’oedipe inversé, soi-disant, mais je me suis aperçue
que ça n’existe pas. L’oedipe inversé, c’est un dire de psychanalyste à des adultes. 34

C’est un travail entre l’image de corps et le schema corporel. L’image du corps a une
influence sur le schéma corporel, et inversement. 38

C’est de la blessure de l’image du corps à travers une blessure imaginaire ou réelle du

schéma corporel - mais ça peut être une blessure imaginaire du schéma corporel -, par la
relation que l’enfant a avec la personne de laquelle dépend la structure de son identité. 39

Meme quand les gens sont sur le divan et qu’ils disent un état émotionnel, je leur demande si,
dans leur corps et à quel éndroit, ils ressentent l’émotion dont ils sont en train de parler en mots.
54

Il dit le problème global qui est le sien en le projetant dans des dessins. 57
pinailler

Les sens des mots m’a toujours posé question du fait du malentendu entre moi enfant et mes
parents. 66

Tout le temps, j’étais sensible au malentendu du sens de la beauté. 66

-enfant éponge de l’inconscient de ceux qui l’ont porté dans la vie- 78

téter
tinette
au guet

Donc le racisme avec dérision, déréliction, rejet, à mon avis, c’est noyau pervers que nous avons
tous - puisque nous sommes tous un peu racistes -, c’est un noyau pervers que nous tenons
probablement de notre archaïque moyen de défense qui consiste à nier l’odeur de quelqu’un qui
n’est pas celle de notre mère. 123

Donc, dans l’analyse, ça ne dure pas très longtemps la haine. C’est un artefact de communication
qui n’est ni amour ni haine, c’est désir de communiquer jusque dans l’abstrait à des êtres qui
sont, par la chose-corps, dans le concret. 126

Absolument! C’est pris comme haine par les autres mais pas par celui qui éprouve ce sentiment.
Il est une vie qui éclate et dont les autres ont à souffrir, mais ce n’est pas en vue de faire souffrir
l’autre qu’il y a haine, je ne crois pas, sinon ça se retournerait sur lui-meme et ça serait une
autodestruction. 129

ça peut rendre fou d’avoir un sens en plus, et je pense que certains enfants schizophrènes ont une
intuition, une intelligence que nous n’avons pas, qu’ils souffrent de ce qu’ils prévoient peut-être,
et qu’ils aiment mieux ne pas vivre comme les autres pour ne pas devenir comme ces autres. 138

Donc, pour arriver à écouter vraiment quelqu’un, il faut se mettre totalement entre parenthèses
pendant qu’il est présent. Et tant que je ne suis pas entre parenthèses quand j’écoute un enfant,
ou des parents qui me parlent de leur enfant, ou que je m’occupe d’un enfant, c’est que ne je suis
pas assez analysée. Et le jour ou j’ai vu que j’étais totalement libre de me prêter à la relation, et
après ça de redevenir complètement à ma vie en oubliant la relation, alors je me suis dit: -Je suis
assez analysée-. 163
Jean Oury, Marie Depussé, A quelle heure passe le train…Conversations sur la folie,
Calmann-Lévy
MD Tu dis que les psychotiques sont comme des colis en souffrance, oubliés dans une gare de
campagne. 13
(de JO) C’est un seigneur qui a garde l’insolance des banlieuses. (…) L’étonnement, disait-il,
c’est ce qui est requis pour travailler en psychiatrie. Ca ne s’apprend pas à l’école. La répétition,
comme disait Lacan, c’est toujours nouveau. 15

JO En obstétrique, ça existe, le terme, on dit qu’il y a des enfants qui naissent étonnés (j’ai oublié
ce que veut dire, peut-être qu’ils refusent de respirer… 25
Comprendre, ce n’est jamais qu’un sentiment, un sentiment de satisfaction. Il ne faut surtout pas
comprendre un délire. Un délire, c’est un travail pour essayer de se construire, de s’inventer un
semblant d’unité, c’est un travail jamais fini. 28

MD (…) leur droit à la fiction… 29

JO Parce que si un infirmier, ou un psychiatre, n’est pas capable d’étre soigné par les
malades, il vaut mieux qu’il foute le camp. 31
Un chemin qui vous dit qu’on est sur le chemin pour recevoir un fou, c’est l’angoisse. Elle
signale qu’on est ouvert au possible, le pur possible, qu’on appelle <le possible kénotique>, du
mot grec, kenos, qui veut dire <vide>. C’est effrayant, le possible. 32

MD On dit: “Oury parle aux fous comme s’ils ne l’étaient pas.> Du possible, tu glisses, c’est ta
façon de faire, vers l’étonnement de continuer à parler, à exister, l’étonement devant le continu.
Tu rêves d’avoir le temps de travailler autour de ce terme de Spinoza, le -conatus-, cette question
de perséverer dans son être. 33
Le rapport d’un fou à la beauté du jour est rarement heureux. Mais si le psychiatre s’asseyait
dans l’herbe, à coté de lui, comme avant, comme ça se fait les jours de fete… 35

JO Quand à l’étonemment, c’est une qualité exigible de tout travailleur en psychiatrie. Qu’il soit
étonné. 36

Toute une vie construite sur quelque chose d’inaccessible. On ne peut l’attraper, ce désir, et c’est
pourtant ce qui fait que vous êtes pas comme les autres. C’est ce qu’il y a de plus singulier chez
chacun.
Ca, ce n’est pas du tout permis par la technocratie actuelle; il faut homogéneiser les gens:
homogénéiser les alcooliques, les schizophrènes, les SDF…L’homogénéisation, c’est une mise à
mort.39

Quand je dis: <Il était une heure du matin>, ça ne vaut que pour moi, ça ne vaut pas grand-chose.
Lui s’en fout parce qu’il n’est pas dans le temps.44
manigancer-comploter
Quand on rencontre quelqu’un, on le rencontre dans son paysage. La difficulté, quand un
schizophrène pousse la porte de votre bureau, c’est qu’on ne peut pas le situer dans un paysage.
Et qu’il soit, lui, dans son corps, une espèce de paysage n’est pas rassurant. 47
Pour s’en a un peu, on peu prendre un de ses aspects, qu’un ami mathématicien, sémioticien,
Michel Balat, travaillant à partir de Peirce, appelle le -musement-. C’est un terme médiéval. 47

Le musement , c’est l’infini de panser. J’aime bien ce masculin médiéval, pour <penser>… 50
Le musement ne va pas seul. Peirce pense selon une logique triadique: il y a le museur, le scribe
et l’interpretant. Il n’y a pas de museur sans scribe. Le scribe, qui ne sait pas ce qu’il écrit,
interrompt la continuité du musement, le fait passer dans le discontinu. C’est au moment ou on
l’interrompt qu’on peut parler du musement. Il n’y a pas de continu sans discontinu. C’est pour
ça que le scribe est premier. Il n’y aurait pas d’inconscient si on ne parlait pas. L’inconscient
n’est qu’une hypothèse au moment ou je la fais. ?
Le scribe est le premier, mais il ne sait pas ce qu’il écrit.
Il n’y a écriture, à distinguer de la seule inscription, que s’il y a intervention d’un troisième
élément, l’interprétant. Attention, il ne faut pas chosifier. Il n’y a pas un monsiuer museur, un
autre scribe, et un troisième interprétant. C’est une logique et il faut que ça circule entre les trois
termes. 51

JO (ce qui les schizophrenes ont toujours manque) se tenir entre réel et fiction 55

Si les infiermieres psychiatriques étaient seuls à assurer le travail, ils seraient très seuls. 59

La Gelessenheit serait ouvrir à <la désinvoluture de l’etre>. 63

Les espaces de tranquilité, Gisela Pankow parlait de les restaurer en rétabilissant un point
de symbiose-séparation d’avec la mère…Un espace qui ne soit ni celui de la mère ni celui de
l’enfant. Parce qu’un schizophrène ne dispose pas de ce que Winnicott appelle <l’espace
transitionnel>. En principe, les normopathes que nous sommes disposons de cet espace-là,
celui que le petit gosse, qui est dans un état d’hyperdépendance, se crée. (…) ça te permet
(le obj trans) d’échapper de l’emprise parentale, et tu crois assumer la séparation. 66

JO Le transpassible, c’est une transcendence, il n’y a rien de plus concret. Je veux dire que, pour
qu’il se passe quelque chose,il faut travailler la disposition des choses, l’architectonie. 68
Si on circule on peut faire les rencontres, de petites rencontres qui n’ont l’air de rien mais
qui vont produire des événements. 69
Il faut se faire une niche dans ce que ton ami Jean-Claude Milner appelle <l’indistinct et le
dispersé comme tel>. 76-77
Je dirais: les voix sont au plus prés de réel, elles ne sont pas dans le réel. (…) Toute
l’invention de la psychothérapie institutionelle, le Club des pensionnaires, les groupes, est
un effort pour pallier cette déficience, reconstruire des bouts du système. Mais
l’hallucination, ce n’est pas mal non plus. ça bouche un trou. Et ça a, comme tu le dis, un
effet de compagnie. Meme si c’est, par moments, une compagnie atroce. 81
Il faut savoir que tous les ratés, toutes les déficiences d’un collectif s’inscrivent sur le corps,
comme toutes les déficiences de ce qui, ailleurs, n’est pas un collectif. C’est pour ça qu’il faut
faire trés attention au moindre détail de la vie. Dieu git dans les détails, comme tu l’as écrit. Au
moindre défaut de vigilance, on fabrique des malades-symptomes. Il est stupide et injuste de
s’acherner à les soigner. C’est ce qui les entoure qui est malade. 83 84
Des somatoses, oui, des cancers, par example, chez des êtres qui ont cédé sur leur désir pour se
dévouer à la famille, à l’Etat, à ce que Lacan appelle le service des biens. 84

Il y a une pression aliénatoire pour que rien ne se passe. Ce que j’appelle la thanato-
technocratie qui fabrique obstinément de l’homogène, des classes homogènes, par exemple. Si
l’on regroupe les memes, il ne se passera rien. 85

MD Parce que la fréquentation des psychotiques donne une familiarité avec la littérature. Parce
que la littérature leur permettrait peut-être d’oser s’approcher de ce qui est le style de leur travail.
93

Tosqualles: la capacité des malades de se guérir eux memes 95

MD citant JO Mais j’applique la règle de Tosquelles, la règle de l’autobus: il y a une réunion de

quatre à cinq, j’y vais, meme s’il n’y a personne, j’emmène mes livres, je lis, je ferai la réunion
tout seul; comme un conducteur d’autobus, meme si le bus est vide; on ne va pas suprimmer la
ligne pour autant. C’est ce que disait Tosquelles, à juste titre. (…) le bar en tant qu’instrument de
psychothérapie. 98

Cooper
Basaglia!!

JO Ou encore le <ni avec ni sans>, qui est une variété du <ni-ni>, et pourrait caractériser
l’existence schizophrénique. Ni avec les autres ni seul, nulle part.
MD Trouffaut, La femme d’à coté
Ce que tu appelles, en prenant ce mot chez Minkowski, <l’esseulement>, cette dégradation de la
solitude. Un schizophrène est dans l’esseulement. 114
JO L’aliénation: dépendre de quelque chose qui est hors de soi. 117

La bêtise, c’est de conclure, dit Flaubert. 120

Quand il fut grand, Flaubert inventa des personnages que j’appelle <les innocents>. Charles,
Félicité, la servante d’Un coeur simple, ou Dussairdier, le garçon de courses de l’Education
sentimentale, qui construisent leur vie modeste, répétitive, héroique, sur la croyance en l’intégrité
de l’Autre. Quand ils s’aperçoivent qu’ils ont été floués, ils deviennent fous ou meurent, ou les
deux. 121

j’ai toujours dit que notre travail quotidien devait obéir à la logique poétique. 129

Il y a une douleur (pour le schiz.) de ne pouvoir dire. L’éthique de la psychiatrie tient à

l’hypothèse qu’un schizophrène peut s’approcher du dire si l’on fabrique des passerelles,
ce que j’appelle des ponts creux. 130

MD Il est difficile d’admettre, quand on a un paranoique parmi ses proches, qu’il est inutile,
complètement inutile de lui parler. Il transforme tout en images d’une bande dessinée avec des
bulles fermées qui ne contiennent que ses vociférations à lui. Impossible d’entrer.138 139

JO Les névroses, c’est l’expression d’une problématique théologique. C’est magnifique: quand
on est embarassé par quelque chose, il n’y a qu’à avoir recours à Dieu; il est là pour ça, sinon à
quoi servirait-il? Donc, Dieu a inventé les névroses, toutes formes possibles de névroses. 157
L’objet phobique, c’est un objet de peur qui est là pour éviter l’angoisse de la béance de l’Autre.
(…) c’est quelque chose destiné à éviter l’objet du désir. J’aime bien le livre de Julia Kristeva sur
le pouvoir de l’horreur. Elle y explique que l’objet phobique serait plutôt un <abjet>, un
<abject>.
L’état, les institutions quelconques fabriques des objets comme ça, des abjects. 160
—> Il faut développer toutes sortes de contre-phobies. 161
—> l’hystérique

Racamier, Clinique de Chesnut Lodge

Scwartz et Stenton

L’analyse des constellations, c’est toujours aller plus loin que les préjugés, aller au-déla. 172

Quand on n’est jamais caressée, on devient un peu psychotique. 183

JO Sans doute. Pendant une guerre, dans des transchées, au Viet Nam, un médicin, Eric
Wulf, n’ayant rien, aucun médicament, pour sauver les types qui se laissaient mourir, leur
caressait tout le corps. On a appelé ça <la caressothérapie>. 183

Antoioni, L’aventura
Leopardi: La terre n’est pas digne de tes désirs. 184

La Borde: est fait d’un millier de strates, des strates d’aliénation sociale qui infiltrent tout, et des
strates, aussi, faites des fantasmes de chacun (aucun n’étant réductible à l’autre). Sur quelle strate
arrivez-vous? Vous pourriez au moins vous le demander. 190
Tosquelles dit qu’un psychotique souffre d’une insuffisance qualitative des stéréotypes qui
alimentent la vie collective et nous permettent d’y survivre. 269

Travailler, c’est faire des hypothèses et reconnaître qu’on se trompé, c’est l’exercice de ce
que Peirce appelait <le faillibilisme>. 298

Mettre en action le potentiel soignant suppose que chacun prenne les autres dans leur
singularité. 299

Singulariser quelqu’un, c’est aller voir dans quel état est sa chambre et éventuellement la balayer
s’il n’en a pas le courage. Ramasser Dieu qui git dans le détails, comme tu dis. 300

<Dis-moi ce que tu penses des idiots, je te dirai qui tu es.> Lucien Bonnafé

Plus on travaille dans un atelier, plus ça se ferme. 303

Tout le système de construction hiérarchique et de décision étatique est très animal. Il s’agit
d’une résolution des instincts, mais pas forcément celui de la perpétuation de l’espèce; il y a
aussi de l’instinct de mort en jeu, la-dessous. 303

…il faut être intelligent, sinon on est complice. 306

Maud Mannoni,
Le premier rendez-vous avec le psychanalyste, préface de Françoise Dolto,Gallimard, 1965

Préface
Le psychalanyse est et reste le point d’impact d’un humanisme qui s’éclaire depuis Freud de la
découverte de processus inconscients, agissant à l’insu du sujet et limitant sa liberté.7

Jusqu’a la première rencontre avec la psychanalyste, le problème n’est donc abordé qu’au niveau
de l’objet de la requête; et il n’y a requête qu’à propos d’objets de caractère négatif pour
l’entourage: la réussite scolaire, par exemple, parait toujours en soi un objet positif, l’abscence
de troubles du caractère genants pour la tranquilité de l’entourage aussi. Or ces deux résultats
psychodynamiques n’ont de valeur culturelle authentique que si le sujet est effectivement
créatif et non pas seulement soumis aux exigences des adultes, que s’il est en communication
langagière,verbale, affective et psychomotrice de son age avec son entourage, que s’il est à l’abri
de tensions internes, dégagé, au moins dans ses pensées et jugements, de la dépendance au désir
d’autrui, à l’aise dans la fréquentation des compagnons des deux sexes de sa génération,apte à
aimer et être aimé, apte à communiquer ses sentiments, apte à faire face aux frustrations et aux
difficultés quotidiennes de toutes sortes sans décompenser, s’il montre une élasticité caracteriélle
et mimique qui caractérise la santé mentale. 11

Le lecteur saisira sans peine comment un être humain, dés sa vie prénatale, est déjà marqué par
la manière dont il est attendu, par ce qu’il représente ensuite, par son existence réelle devant les
projections inconscientes des parents, lequels, servant d’interlocuteurs et de modèles naturels,
altérent trop souvent chez l’enfant le sens des références vécues à des paroles justes, cela parfois
dés sa naissance. Quel est donc le role du psychanalyste? Je viens de dire que c’est celui d’une
présence humaine qui ecoute. Comment cet etre humain fait comme les autres, issu de la meme
population, a-t-il éte formé de sorte que son écoute produise de tels effets de vérite? 12-13

Là où le langage s’arrete, c’est le comportement qui continue à parler, et lorsqu’il s’agit

d’enfants perturbés, c’est l’enfant qui, par ses symptomes, incarne et présentifie les
conséquences d’un conflit vivant, familial ou conjugal, camouflé et accepté par ses parents. 13

Plus les humains sont jeunes, plus le poids des inhibitions dynamiques subies directement ou
indirectement par les tensions et l’exemple des adultes mutilent leur libre jeu de vitalité
émotionelle, moins ils peuvent s’en défendre créativement ; et les troubles très graves du
développement psycho-moteur mental ou de la fragilité de santé , par effet dit psychosomatique,
des très jeunes enfants, sont la consequence de ces relations perturbées au monde - alors que le
monde de l’enfant est encore réduit à l’adulte nourricier. 14

Il en est ainsi des accidents, des morts, des maladies, des crises de colère, d’ivrognerie, des
dérèglements de la conduite entrainant l’intervention de la justice […] toutes situations
auxquelles l’enfant est melé et dont on ne lui permet pas la divulgation ou dont, pire encore, on
lui cache la realité, qu’il subit pourtant,sans lui permettre de s’y connaitre la vérité qu’il perçoit
trés finement et dont les mots justes, pour traduire son épreuve avec eux partagée, lui manquant,
l’induisent à se sentir étrange, objet d’un malaise magique, déshumanisant. éé

! pas un enfant-prothèse

Au contraire, l’enfant qui n’a pas résolu l’Oedipe reste très dominé par l’ambiance émotionnelle
de sa relation à la mère ou au père. 31

Tous les mots névrosants viennent des mensonges qui empêchent les faits réels de porter les
fruits de l’acceptation, à partir de la situation réelle. 33
La drame pour les enfants, en notre pays et dans son système, provient du style
d’instruction passive, aux horaires et programmes obsédants et qui ne laisse point à chacun
une marge d’accès à la culture. Les leçons et les devoirs, on l’oublie trop souvent, sont des
moyens mais non des fins en soi….- photos

Si le role du psychanalyste est de permettre à un sujet névrosé ou malade mental de trouver son
sens, son role est aussi de pousser un cri d’alarme devant la carence publique éducationnelle, les
méthodes et institutions scolaires souvent pathogènes, face aux carences et au role pathogène
individuels de bien des parents du monde dit civilisé. 46

l’analyse : Par sa présence, il va aider un sujet à articuler sa demande, à se constituer dans sa

parole par rapport à son histoire, pour dégager enfin à travers un certain cheminement, un
message auquel un sens pourra être donné. 52

Que nous le voulions ou non, nous sommes inscrits dans un certain système de parenté.
L’histoire de chacun est fonction de la manière dont il y réagit. 53

La présence réelle du père n’est pas indispensable, mais ce qui semble indispensable, c’est
la présence du père dans le discours de la mère. 82

Mais il arrive que les sentiments de jalousie correspondent à des difficultés non résolues chez
l’un des deux parents. A partir de ce moment, l’enfant quitte l’expérience normale d’un conflit
de jalousie pour entrer dans le domaine pathologique. Il exprime alors d’un façon violente ce qui,
chez la mère, est resté inavouable. C’est cet inavouable, ce non sublimante qui l’enfant va faire
exploser, créant la panique dans le monde adulte. 87

C’est la mère que ces enfants en veulent. N’ayant pu trouver les mots pour exprimer leur soif
d’amour, c’est par des actes destructeurs qu’ils s’efforcent d’amorcer le dialogue…88

Tous ces enfants ayant précocement des agissements a-sociaux ne sont pas des pervers, mais des
sujets dont l’évolution est compromise par une situation familiale nocive qui les empêche de
poser correctement leur Oedipe. Identifiés tour à tour au père ou à la mère -victimes- ou -ratés-.
90

Quand le symptôme est devenu le seule possibilité de communication du sujet, celui-ci y tient.
94

On ne peut pas dans ce cas, en raison meme de l’absence du père, qu’espérer qua la mère puisse
un jour accepter l’idée d’une existence propre, indépendante de celle de ses enfants. 101
Ses maladies organiques sont l’expression de l’anxiété de la mère.

Bref, on cherche de plus en plus à saisir sa personnalité, qu’on n’hésite pas d’ailleurs à évaluer à
l’aide de critères statistiques. 148

Le niveau de Q.I., la précision des troubles de l’attention, les difficultés dans le domaine de
l’abstraction, un trouble scolaire défini,non, tout cela n’a de sens que situé dans une
histoire. 150

(….) un test devrait être compris comme un essai (avec ses possibilités d’erreurs) et non comme
un texte législatif ordonnant telle ou telle orientation. 155

Or, il est fréquent, meme en maison de santé (maison de cure pour étudiants) de faire passer,
avant toute idée de cure, la nécessité de la réorientation. 159

Ce qui pour un enfant est dangereux, c’est le mensonge de la mère à elle-même. -Je le savais que
cet enfant n’était pas de mon mari, mais je ne voulais pas le savoir.-163

Le rendez-vous avec le psychanalyste, c’est une rencontre, à travers l’Autre, avec son
propre mensonge. 169

Foucault, Histoire de la Folie

Bref le mal vénérien s'installe, au cours du XVIe siècle, dans l'ordre des maladies qui demandent
traitement. Sans doute, il est pris dans tout un ensemble de jugements moraux : mais cet horizon
ne modi e que très peu l'appréhension médicale de la maladie 2.
Fait curieux à constater : c'est sous l'in uence du monde de l'internement tel qu'il s'est constitué
au XVIIe siècle, que la maladie vénérienne s'est détachée, dans une certaine mesure, de son
contexte médical, et qu'elle s'est intégrée, à côté de la folie, dans un espace moral d'exclusion. 18

L'eau et la navigation ont bien ce rôle. Enfermé dans le navire, d'où on n'échappe pas, le fou est
confié à la rivière aux mille bras, à la mer aux mille chemins, à cette grande incerti tude
extérieure à tout. Il est prisonnier au milieu de la plus libre, de la plus ouverte des routes :
solidement enchaîné à l'in ni carrefour. Il est le Passager par excellence, c'est-à-dire le prisonnier
du passage. Et la terre sur laquelle il abordera, on ne la connaît pas, tout comme on ne sait pas,
quand il prend pied, de quelle terre il vient. Il n'a sa vérité et sa patrie que dans cette étendue
inféconde entre deux terres qui ne peuvent lui appartenir. (…)Une chose au moins est certaine :
l'eau et la folie sont liées pour longtemps dans le rêve de l'homme européen. 22
Ce lien de la folie et du néant est noué d'une façon si ser rée' au xve siècle qu'il subsistera
longtemps, et qu'on le retrou vera encore au centre de l'expérience classique de la folie 2. 27

Au pôle opposé à cette nature de ténèbres, la folie fascine parce qu'elle est savoir. Elle est savoir,
d'abord, parce que toutes ces gures absurdes sont en réalité les éléments d'un savoir di icile,
fermé, ésotérique. Ces formes étranges sont situées, d'emblée, dans l'espace du grand secret, et le
saint Antoine qui est tenté par elles, n'est pas soumis à la violence du Désir, mais à l'aiguillon,
bien plus insidieux, de la curiosité; il est tenté par ce lointain et si proche savoir, qui est o ert, et
esquivé en même temps, par le sourire du Grylle; son mou vement de recul n'est autre que celui
par lequel il se défend de franchir les limites interdites du savoir; il sait déjà - et c'est là sa
Tentation - ce que Cardan dira plus tard : « La Sagesse, comme les autres matières précieuses,
doit être arrachée aux entrailles de la Terre 1. » Ce savoir, si inaccessible, et si redoutable, le
Fou, daus sa niaiserie innocente, le détient. 31-32

Sous la conscience critique de la folie, et ses formes philosophiques ou scienti ques, morales ou
médicales, une sourde conscience tragique n'a cessé de veiller. C'est elle qu'ont réveillée les
dernières paroles de Nietzsche, les dernières visions de Van Gogh. C'est elle sans doute qu'au
point le plus extrême de son cheminement, Freud a commencé à pressentir : ce sont ses grands
déchirements qu'il a voulu symboliser par la lutte mythologique de la libido et de l'instinct de
mort. C'est elle, enfin, cette conscience, qui est venue à s'exprimer dans l'œuvre d'Artaud, dans
cette œuvre qui devrait poser à la pensée du Xxe siècle, si elle y prêtait attention, la plus urgente
des questions, et la moins susceptible de laisser le questionneur échapper au vertige, dans cette
œuvre qui n'a cessé de proclamer que notre culture avait perdu son foyer tragique, du jour où elle
avait repoussé hors de soi la grande folie solaire du monde, les déchirements où s'accomplit sans
cesse la « vie et mort de Satan le Feu ». 40

La belle rectitude qui conduit la pensée rationnelle jusqu'à l'analyse de la folie comme maladie
mentale, il faut la réinterpréter dans une dimension verticale; alors il apparaît que sous chacune
de ses formes, elle masque d'une manière plus complète, plus périlleuse aussi cette expérience
tragique, qu'elle n'est pas cependant parve nue à réduire du tout au tout. Au point dernier de la
contrainte, l'éclatement était nécessaire, auquel nous assistons depuis Nietzsche. 40

C'est-à-dire qu'il n'y a jamais folie qu'en référence à une raison, mais toute la vérité de celle-ci est
de faire un instant apparaître une folie qu'elle récuse, pour se perdre à son tour dans une folie qui
la dissipe. En un sens la folie n'est rien : la folie des hommes, rien en face de la raison suprême
qui est seule à détenir l'être; et l'abîme de la folie fondamentale, rien puis qu'elle n'est telle que
pour la fragile raison des hommes. Mais la raison n'est rien puisque celle au nom de qui on
dénonce la folie humaine se révèle, quand on y accède en n, n'être qu'un vertige où doit se taire la
raison. 44
(avec l age classique, donc) 20 La folie devient une des formes mêmes de la raison. Elle s'intègre
à elle, constituant soit une de ses forces secrètes, soit un des moments de sa manifestation, soit
une forme paradoxale dans laquelle elle peut prendre conscience d'elle-même. De toutes façons,
la folie ne détient sens et valeur que dans le champ même de la raison. 44

La folie est un dur moment, mais essentiel, dans le labeur de la raison; à travers elle, et même
dans ses apparentes victoires, la raison se mani feste et triomphe. La folie n'était, pour elle, que
sa force vive et secrète 3. 46

Tel fut donc le rôle ambigu de cette pensée sceptique, disons plutôt de cette raison si vivement
consciente des formes qui la limitent et des forces qui la contredisent : elle découvre la folie
comme l'une de ses propres gures - ce qui est une manière de conjurer tout ce qui peut être
pouvoir extérieur, irréductible hostilité, signe de transcendance; mais en même temps, elle place
la folie au cœur de son propre travail, la désignant comme un moment essentiel de sa propre
nature. 46

C'est aussi au monde moral qu'appartient la folie du j châtiment. Elle punit, par les désordres de
l'esprit, les désordres du cœur. Mais elle a d'autres pouvoirs encore : le châtiment qu'elle infige se
multiplie par lui-même, dans la mesure où, en punissant, il dévoile la vérité. 49

Chez Cervantes ou Shakespeare, la folie occupe toujours une place extrême en ce sens qu'elle est
sans recours. Rien ne la ramène jamais à la vérité ni à la raison. Elle n'ouvre que sur le
déchirement, et, de là, sur la mort. La folie, en ses vains propos, n'est pas vanité; le vide qui
l'emplit, c'est « un mal bien au-delà de ma pratique », comme dit le médecin à propos de Lady
Macbeth; c'est déjà la plénitude de la mort : une folie qui n'a pas Lesoin de médecin, mais de la
seule miséri corde divine 1. La joie douce, retrouvée en n par Ophélie, ne réconcilie avec aucun
bonheur; son chant insensé est aussi proche de l'essentiel que « le cri de femme » qui annonce
tout au long des corridors du château de Macbeth que « la Reine est morte 2 ». Sans doute, la
mort de Don Quichotte s'accomplit dans un paysage apaisé, qui a renoué au dernier instant avec
la raison et la vérité. D'un coup la folie du Chevalier a pris conscience d'elle-même, et à ses
propres yeux se défait dans la sottise. Mais cette brusque sagesse de sa folie est-elle autre chose
qu' « une nouvelle folie qui vient de lui entrer dans la tête »? Équivoque indéfiniment réversible
qui ne peut être tranchée en dernier lieu que par la mort elle-même. La folie dissipée ne peut
faire qu'une seule et même chose avec l'immi nence de la n; « et même un des signes auxquels ils
conjec turèrent que le malade se mourait, ce fut qu'il était revenu si facilement de la folie à la
raison ». Mais la mort elle-même n'apporte pas la paix : la folie triomphera encore - vérité
dérisoirement éternelle, par-delà la n d'une vie qui pourtant s'était délivrée de la folie par cette n
même. Ironiquement sa vie insensée le poursuit et ne l'immortalise que par sa démence; la folie
est encore la vie impérissable de la mort : « Ci-gît l'hidalgo redoutable qui poussa si loin la
vaillance qu'on remarqua que la mort ne put triompher de la vie par son trépas 3. » 50
La Folie dont la Renaissance vient de lihérer les voix, mais dont elle a maîtrisé déjà la violence,
l'âge classique va la réduire au silence par un étrange coup de force. Dans le cheminement du
doute, Descartes rencontre la folie à côté du rêve et de toutes les formes d'erreur. 56

Dans l'économie du doute, il y a un déséquilibre fondamental entre folie d'une part, rêve et erreur
de l'autre. Leur situation est différente par rapport à la vérité et à celui qui la cherche; songes ou
illusions sont surmontés dans la structure même de la vérité; mais la folie est exclue par le sujet
qui doute. Comme bientôt sera exclu qu'il ne pense pas, et qu'il n'existe pas. 57

Le doute de Descartes dénoue les charmes des sens, traverse les paysages du rêve, guidé toujours
par la lumière des choses vraies; mais il bannit la folie au nom de celui qui doute, et qui ne peut
pas plus déraisonner que ne pas penser et ne pas être. 58

Une date peut servir de repère : 1656, décret de fondation, à Paris, de l'Hôpital général. Au
premier regard, il s'agit seu lement d'une réforme - à peine, d'une réorganisation administrative.
(…) D'entrée de jeu, un fait est clair : l'Hôpital général n'est pas un établissement médica!. Il est
plutôt une structure semi-juridique, une sorte d'entité administrative qui, à côté des pouvoirs déjà
constitués, et en dehors des tribunaux, décide, juge et exécute. 60

Cette structure propre à l'ordre monarchique et bourgeois, et qui est contemporaine de son
organisation sous la forme de l'absolutisme, étend bientôt son réseau sur toute la France. Un édit
du Roi, daté du 16 juin 1676, prescrit l'établissement d'un « Hôpital général dans chacune ville
de son royaume )). 62

C'est le cas à la Salpêtrière où les . sœurs . doivent se recruter parmi les • filles ou jeunes veuves,
sans enfants et sans embarras d'affaires '. 63

Dans ces insti tutions viennent ainsi se mêler, non sans conflits souvent, les vieux privilèges de
l'Église dans l'assistance aux pauvres et dans les rites de l'hospitalité, et le souci bourgeois de
mettre en ordre le monde de la misère; le désir d'assister, et le besoin de réprimer; le devoir de
charité, et la volonté de châtier : toute une pratique équivoque dont il faudra dégager le sens,
symbolisé sans doute par ces léproseries, vides depuis la Renaissance, mais brusquement
réaffectées au XVIIe siècle et qu'on a réarmées de pouvoirs obscurs_ Le classicisme a inventé
l'internement, un peu comme le Moyen Age la ségrégation des lépreux; la place laissée vide par
ceux-ci a été occupée par des personnages nouveaux dans le monde européen : ce sont les «
internés »_ 64

C'est ce mode de perception qu'il faut interroger pour savoir quelle fut la forme de sensibilité à la
folie d'une époque qu'on a coutume de dé nir par les privilèges de la Raison. 67
Tout interné est placé dans le champ de cette valorisation éthique - et bien avant d'être objet de
connais sance ou de pitié, il est traité comme sujet moral. 73

Mais le misérable ne peut être sujet moral que dans la mesure où il a cessé d'être, sur la terre,
l'invisible représentant de Dieu. Jusqu'à la fin du XVIIe siècle, ce sera encore l'objection majeure
pour les consciences catholiques. L'Écriture ne dit-elle pas : « Ce que tu fais au plus petit d'entre
mes frères... »? Et les Pères de l'Église Il'ont-ils point toujours commenté ce texte en disant qu'il
ne faut point refuser l'aumône à un pauvre de crainte de repousser le Christ lui-même? Ces
objections, le Père Guevarre ne les ignore pas. Mais il donne - et, à travers lui, l'Église de
l'époque classique - une réponse fort claire : depuis la création de l'Hôpital général et des
Bureaux de Cha rité, Dieu ne se cache plus sous les haillons du pauvre. La peur de refuser un
morceau de pain à Jésus mourant de faim, cette crainte qui avait animé toute la mythologie
chrétienne de la charité, et donné son sens absolu au grand rituel médiéval de l'hospitalité, cette
crainte « serait mal fondée; quand un bureau de chaité est établi dans la ville, Jésus-Christ ne
prendra pas la gure d'un pauvre qui, pour entretenir sa fainéantise et sa mauvaise vie, ne veut
point se soumettre à un ordre qui est si saintement établi pour le secours de tous les vrais pauvres
Z . Cette fois la misère a perdu son sens mystique. Rien, dans sa douleur, ne renvoie plus à la
miraculeuse et fugitive présence d'un dieu. Elle est dépouillée de son pouvoir de manifestation.
Et si elle est encore pour le chrétien occasion de charité, il ne peut plus s'adresser à elle que selon
l'ordre et la prévoyance des États. D'elle-même, elle ne sait plus montrer que ses propres fautes,
et si elle apparaît, c'est dans le cercle de la culpabilité. La réduire sera, d'abord, la faire entrer
dans l'ordre de la pénitence. 73
Voilà le premier des grands anneaux dans lesquels l'âge classique va enfermer la folie. On a
l'habitude de dire que le fou du Moyen Age était considéré comme un personnage sacré, parce
que possédé. Rien n'est plus faux 1. S'il était sacré, c'est avant tout que, pour la charité
médiévale, il participait aux pouvoirs obscurs de la misère. Plus qu'un autre, peut-être, il
l'exaltait. 74

Si la folie, au XVIIe siècle, est comme désa cralisée, c'est d'abord parce que la misère a subi cette
sorte de déchéance qui la fait percevoir maintenant sur le seul horizon de la morale. D'hospitalité,
la folie n'en trouvera plus désormais qu'entre les murs de l'hôpital, à côté de tous les pauvres.
C'est là que nous la trouverons encore à la n du XVIIIe siècle. Une sensibilité nouvelle est née à
son égard : non plus religieuse, mais sociale. Si le fou apparaissait familièrement dans le paysage
humain du Moyen Age, c'était en venant d'un autre monde. Maintenant, il va se détacher sur fond
d'un problème de « police », concernant l'ordre des individus dans la cité. On
l'accueillaitautrefoisparcequ'ilvenaitd'ailleurs; onval'exclure maintenant parce qu'il vient d'ici
même, et qu'il prend rang parmi les pauvres, les miséreux, les vagabonds. L'hospitalité qui
l'accueille va devenir, dans une nouvelle équivoque, la mesure d'assainissement qui le met hors
circuit. 74
Travail et oisiveté ont tracé dans le monde classique une ligne de partage qui s'est substituée à la
grande exclusion de la lèpre. L'asile a pris rigoureusement la place de la léproserie dans la
géographie des lieux hantés comme dans les paysages de l'univers moral. On a renoué avec les
vieux rites de l'excommunication, mais dans le monde de la production et du commerce. C'est
dans ces lieux de l'oisiveté maudite et condamnée, dans cet espace inventé par une société qui
déchiffrait dans la loi du travail une transcendance éthique, que la folie va apparaître et monter
bientôt au point de les annexer. (…) Le XIXe siècle acceptera, il exigera même que l'on transfère
aux seuls fous ces terres où cent cinquante ans auparavant on avait voulu parquer les misérables,
les gueux, les chômeurs. 84-85

L'édit de 1656, lui aussi, portait au milieu de dénon ciations morales d'étranges menaces. « Le
libertinage des men diants est venu jusqu'à l'excès par un malheureux abandon à toutcs sortes de
crimes, qui attire la malédiction de Dieu sur les États, quand ils sont impunis. » Ce « libertinage
», ce n'est pas celui qu'on peut dé nir par rapport à la grande loi du travail, mais bien un
libertinage moral : « L'expérience ayant fait connaître aux personnes qui se sont occupées dans
les charitables emplois que plusieurs d'entre eux de l'un et l'autre sexe habitent ensemble sans
mariage, beaucoup de leurs enfants sont sans baptême, et ils vivent presque tous dans
l'ignorance de la religion, le mépris des sacrements, et dans l'habitude continuelle de toutes sortes
de vices. » Aussi bien l'Hôpital général n'a-t-il pas l'allure d'un simple refuge pour ceux que la
vieillesse, l'infirmité ou la maladie empêchent de travailler; il n'aura pas seulement l'aspect d'un
atelier de travail forcé, mais plutôt d'une institution morale chargée de châtier, de corriger une
certaine « vacance )) morale, qui ne mérite pas le tribunal des hommes, mais ne saurait être
redressée par la seule sévérité de la pénitence. L'Hôpital général a un statut éthique. C'est de cette
charge morale que sont revêtus ses directeurs, et on leur attribue tout l'appareil juridique et
matériel de la répression : « Ils ont tout pouvoir d'autorité, de direction, d'administration, de
police, juridiction, correc tion et châtiment »; et pour accomplir cette tâche, on met à leur
disposition « poteaux et carcans, prisons et basses-fosses 2 ». 86

On voit ainsi s'inscrire dans les institutions de la monarchie absolue - dans celles mêmes qui
demeurèrent longtemps le symbole de son arbitraire - la grande idée bourgeoise, et bientôt
républicaine, que la vertu, elle aussi, est une affaire d'État, qu'on peut prendre des décrets pour la
faire régner, établir une autorité pour s'assurer qu'on la respecte. Les murs de l'internement
enferment en quelque sorte le négatif de cette cité morale, dont la conscience bourgeoise
commence à
rêver au XVIIe siècle : cité morale destinée à ceux qui vou draient, d'entrée de jeu, s'y soustraire,
cité où le droit ne règne que par la vertu d'une force sans appel - une sorte de sou veraineté du
bien où triomphe la seule menace, et où la vertu, tant elle a son prix en elle-même, n'a pour
récompense que d'échapper au châtiment. Dans l'ombre de la cité bourgeoise, naît cette étrange
république du bien qu'on impose de force à tous ceux qu'on soupçonne d'appartenir au mal. C'est
l'envers du grand rêve et de la grande préoccupation de la bourgeoisie à l'époque classique : les
lois de l'État et les lois du cœur en n identi ées. « Que nos politiques daignent suspendre leurs
calculs... et qu'ils apprennent une fois qu'on a de tout avec de l'argent, hormis des mœurs et des
citoyens 1. » 87-88

N'est-ce pas le rêve qui semble avoir hanté les fondateurs de la maison d'internement de
Hambourg? Un des directeurs doit veiller à ce que « tous ceux qui sont dans la maison
s'acquittent de leurs devoirs religieux et en soient instruits... Le maître d'école doit instruire les
enfants dans la religion, et les exhorter, les encourager à lire, dans leurs moments de loisir,
diverses parties de l'Écriture Sainte. Il doit leur enseigner à lire, à écrire, à compter, à être
honnêtes et décents envers ceux qui visitent la maison. Il doit prendre soin qu'ils assistent au ser
vice divin, et qu'ils s'y comportent avec modestie 2 ». En Angle terre, le règlement des workho
fait une large place à la sur veillance des mœurs et à l'éducation religieuse. C'est ainsi que pour la
maison de Plymouth, on a prévu la nomination d'un « schoolmaster » qui doit répondre à la triple
condition d'être « pieux, sobre, et discret »; tous les matins et tous les soirs, à heure fixe, il aura
pour tâche de présider les prières; chaque samedi, dans l'après-midi, et à chaque jour de fête, il
devra s'adresser aux internés, les exhorter et les instruire des « élé ments fondamentaux de la
religion protestante, conformément à la doctrine de l'Église anglicane 3 ». Hambourg ou
Plymouth, Zuchth ern et workhous - dans toute l'Europe protes tante, on édifie ces forteresses de
l'ordre moral où on enseigne de la religion ce qui est nécessaire au repos des cités. 88

Toutes ces prisons de l'ordre moral auraient pu porter cette devise que Howard, encore, a pu lire
sur celle de Mayence : « Si on a pu soumettre au jour des animaux féroces, on ne doit pas
désespérer de corriger l'homme qui s'est égaré 3. » Pour l'Église catholique, comme pour les pays
protestants, l'inter nement représente, sous forme de modèle autoritaire, le mythe d'un bonheur
social : une police dont l'ordre serait entièrement transparent aux principes de la religion, et une
religion dont les exigences seraient satisfaites, sans restriction, dans les règles de la police et les
contraintes dont elle peut s'armer. Il y a, dans ces institutions, comme une tentative pour
démontrer que l'ordre peut être adéquat à la vertu. 89

La folie est ainsi arrachée à cette liberté imaginaire qui la faisait foisonner cncore sur le ciel de la
Renaissance. II n'y a pas si longtemps encore, elle se débattait en plein jour : c'est Le Roi Leal',
c'était Don Qui chotte. Mais en moins d'un demi-siècle, elle s'est trouvée recluse, et, dans la
forteresse de l'internement, liée à la Raison, aux règles de la morale et à leurs nuits monotones.
91

Car l'internement n'a pas joué seulement un rôle négatif d'exclusion; mais aussi un rôle positif
d'organisation. Ses pratiques et ses règles ont constitué un domaine d'expérience qui a eu son
unité, sa cohérence et sa fonction. Il a rapproché, dans un champ unitaire, des personnages et des
valeurs entre lesquels les cultures précédentes n'avaient perçu aucune res semblance; il les a
imperceptiblement décalés vers la folie, préparant une expérience - la nôtre - où ils se signaleront
comme intégrés déjà au domaine d'appartenance de l'aliéna tion mentale. Pour que ces
rapprochements fussent faits, il a fallu toute une réorganisation du monde éthique, de nou velles
lignes de partage entre le bien et le mal, le reconnu et le condamné, et l'établissement de
nouvelles normes dans l'intégration sociale. L'internement n'est que le phénomène de ce travail
en profondeur, qui fait corps avec tout l'ensemble de la culture classique. Il y a en e et certaines
expériences que le XVIe siècle avait acceptées ou refusées, qu'il avait for mulées, ou au contraire
laissées en marge, et que, maintenant, le XVIIe siècle va reprendre, grouper, et bannir d'un seul
geste, pour les envoyer dans l'exil où elles voisineront avec la folie -formant ainsi un monde
uniforme de la Déraison. Ces expériences, on peut les résumer, en disant qu'elles touchent toutes,
soit à la sexualité dans ses rapports avec l'organisa tion de la famille bourgeoise, soit à la
profanation dans ses rapports avec la nouvelle conception du sacré et des rites reli gieux, soit au
« libertinage », c'est-à-dire aux rapports nouveaux qui sont en train de s'instaurer entre la pensée
libre et le système des passions. 96-97

Il est étrange justement que ce soit le rationalisme qui ait autorisé cette confusion du châtiment et
du remède, cette quasi-identité du geste qui punit et de celui qui guérit. Il suppose un certain
traitement qui, à l'articulation précise de la médecine et de la morale, sera tout ensemble une
anticipa tion sur les châtiments éternels et un effort vers le rétablisse ment de la santé. Ce qu'on
cherche au fond, c'est la ruse de la raison médicale qui fait le bien en faisant mal. Et cette
recherche, c'est elle sans doute qu'il faut déchi rer sous cette phrase que saint Vincent de Paul a
fait inscrire en tête des règlements de Saint-Lazare, à la fois promesse et menace pour tous les
prisonniers : « Considérant que leurs sou rances tem porelles ne les exempteront pas des
éternelles... »; suit alors tout le système religieux de contrôle et de répression qui, en inscrivant
les souffrances temporelles dans cet ordre de la péni tence toujours réversible en termes
d'éternité, peut et doit exempter le pécheur des éternelles sou rances. La contrainte humaine aide
la justice divine en s'efforçant de la rendre inutile. La répression acquiert ainsi une double e
icacité, dans la gué rison des corps et dans la puri cation des âmes. L'internement rend ainsi
possibles ces fameux remèdes moraux - châtiments et thérapeutiques - qui seront l'activité
principale des pre miers asiles du XIXe siècle, et dont Pinel, avant Leuret, donnera la formule, en
assurant qu'il est bon parfois « d'ébranler forte ment l'imagination d'un aliéné, et de lui imprimer
un sentiment de terreur 1 ». 100-101

Lorsque l'époque classique internait tous ceux qui, par la maladie vénérienne, l'homosexualité, la
débauche, la prodi galité, manifestaient une liberté sexuelle que la morale des âges précédents
avait pu condamner, mais sans songer jamais à les assimiler, de près ou de loin, aux insensés,
elle opérait une étrange révolution morale : elle découvrait un commun dé minateur de déraison
à des expériences qui longtemps étaient restées fort éloignées les unes des autres. Elle groupait
tout un ensemble de conduites condamnées, formant une sorte de halo de culpabilité autour de la
folie. La psychopathologie aura beau jeu à retrouver cette culpabilité mêlée à la maladie e " tale,
puisqu'elle y aura été mise précisément par cet obséur travail préparatoire, qui s'est fait tout au
long du classicisme. Tant il est vrai que notre connaissance scienti que et médi cale de la folie
repose implicitement sur la constitution anté rieure d'une expérience éthique de la déraison. 106
On ne condamne plus ceux qui ont cherché à se suicider 5, on les enferme, et on leur impose un
régime qui est à la fois une punition et un moyen de prévenir toute nouvelle tentative. C'est à eux
qu'on a appliqué, pour la première fois au XVIIIe siècle, les fameux appareils de contrainte, que
l'âge positiviste utilisera comme thérapeutique : la cage en osier, vec un couvercle échancré en
haut pour la tête, et dans laquelle les mains sont liées 1 , ou « l'armoire » qui e nferme le sujet
debout , jusqu'à la hauteur du cou, laissant seulement la tète libre 2. Ainsi le sacrilège du suicide
se trouve annexé au domaine nrutre de la déraison. 108-109

N'est-il pas important pour notre culture que la déraison n'ait pu y devenir objet de connaissance
que dans la mesure où elle a été au préalable objet d'excommunication? 119
De la culpabilité, et du pathétique sexuel, aux vieux rituels obsédants de l'invoca tion et de la
magie, aux prestiges et aux délires de la loi du cœur, un réseau souterrain s'établit qui dessine
comme les fondations secrètes de notre expérience moderne de la folie. Sur ce domaine ainsi
structuré, on va mettre l'étiquette de la déraison : « Bon à interner. » Cette déraison dont la
pensée du XVIe siècle avait fait le point dialectique du renversement de la raison, dans le
cheminement de son discours, reçoit par là un contenu concret. 119

Nous autres modernes, nous commen çons à nous rendre compte que, sous la folie, sous la
névrose,
sous le crime, sous les inadaptations sociales, court une sorte d'expérience commune de
l'angoisse. Peut-être, pour le monde classique, y avait-il aussi dans l'économie du mal, une expé
rience générale de la déraison. Et, dans ce cas, ce serait elle qui sert d'horizon à ce que fut la
folie, pendant les cent cin quante ans qui séparent le grand Renfermement de la cc libé ration ))
de Pinel et de Tuke. 122

En tout cas, c'est de cette libération que date le moment où l'homme européen cesse d'éprouver et
de comprendre ce qu'est la déraison - qui est l'époque aussi où il ne saisit plus l'évidence des lois
de l'internement. Cet instant, il est symbolisé par une étrange rencontre : celle du seul homme qui
ait for mulé la théorie de ces existences de déraison, et d'un des premiers hommes qui ait voulu
faire une science positive de la folie, c'est-à-dire faire taire les propos de la déraison, pour ne plus
écouter que les voix pathologiques de la folie. Cette confrontation se produit, au tout début du
Xlxe siècle, lorsque Royer-CoUard veut chasser Sade de cette maison de Charenton dont il a
l'intention de faire un hôpital. Lui, le philanthrope de la folie, il veut la protéger de la présence de
la déraison, car il se rend bien compte que cette existence, si normalement internée au XVIIIe
siècle, n'a plus sa place dans l'asile du XIXej il demande la prison. « Il existe à Charenton »,
écrit-il à Fouché le 1er ao t 1808, (( un hùmme que son audacieuse immoralité a rendu trop
célèbre et dont la présence dans cet hospice entraîne les inconvénients les plus graves. Je veux
parler de l'auteur de l'infâme roman de J tine. Cet homme n'est pas aliéné. Son seul délire est
celui du vice, et ce n'est point dans une maison consacrée au traitement médical de l'aliénation
que cette espèce de vice peut être réprimée. Il faut que l'in dividu qui en est atteint soit soumis à
la séquestration la plus sévère. » Royer-CoUard ne comprend plus l'existence correc tionnaire; il
en cherche le sens du côté de la maladie et ne l'y trouve pas; il la renvoie au mal à l'état pur, un
mal, sans autre raison que sa propre déraison : (( Délire du vice. » Le jour de la lettre à Fouché,
la déraison classique s'est close sur sa propre énigme; son étrange unité qui groupait tant de
visages divers s'est dé nitivement perdue pour nous. 122-123
139
Ocheanul întors, Radu Petrescu,Ed. Cartea Românească

Teama de a fi uitat? A, ipocritule. Știi prea bine că ți-ai și vârât un deget în eternitate. 5

Nu lucrurile însele ale acestui loc, ci culoarea și forma pe care ele le trimit prin aer până la mine
(…) 6

Între oameni care îți cer lucruri contradictorii, dar egal de amenințători, scăparea e să poți face
din nimicuri car enu supără pe nimeni o geometrie de aer, un cântec pentru urechea expertă
(adică liniștită) a norilor. 9

(…) Ideile care jur că singure există dintre câte pretind că există. 15

Uneori visez că undeva în aer, la înălțimi incalculabile, printre stelele înghețate, o mare fantomă
a mea trăiește exact ca mine, cel de pe pământ, aceleași evenimente, nu însă întotdeauna
sincronic și de aceea uneori existențele noastre interferează. Ar trebui să scriu deci nu
coincidențe, ci interferențe, 15

Nu știu alții cum sânt alții, dar eu citind o frază din Madame Bovary de pildă, sau din Rabelais,
văd fraza ca un voal străveziu, colorat magnific și delicat, pe care două mâini îl întorc în toate
felurile, făcând să-i strălucească apele și culorile, arătându-i moliciunile sau câte o neașteptată
asperitate amenințătoare și, dincolo de țesătura lui de esență translucidă, apărând nu bustul sau
genunchii celui care îl ține, ci viscolele de ceață ale golului. 17

Căci oamenii sunt antrenați în viață ca într-un tunel iremediabil, cu sângele și carnea lor, fiecare
gest, fiecare gând e o ardere, un efort, și încă un efort înăbușit, - și iată artistul reproducând
aceste mișcări în câteva linii, ca și jucându-se, și demonstrând astfel, implicit, neantul lor. Toate
operele veritabile parodiază, orice artist este implicit un umorist - fiind vorba însă de un umor în
care urechile delicate aud un foșnet sinistru. 18

Ciudat cât de prost scriam acum patru ani, acum trei, anul trecut! Ciudat și faptul că pe cât
scriam de prost, pe atât vorbeam mai mult și aveam mai mulți amici: când voi realiza cartea
desăvâtșită o să fiu cu desăvârșire singur? 28
Sânt idei dincolo de caiet, știu, dar netrase anatomiile lor aeriene, atât de mobile și de delicate, în
pagină se transformă în niște cadavre ce satelizează în jurul nostru, împuțind aerul și otrăvindu-l.
47

Gospodăriile românești, atât de deschide, de neapărate! 57

(…) visez la o mulțime de scriitori, Rimbaud, Lafarogue și alții, cărora o secundă am dorința de a
le mulțumi, emoționat, pentru toate micile perfecționări ale sensibilității mele. 62

Mici disperări ca acum opt ani. De unde vin această nevoie de finalitate în noi? De ce fiecare pas
face o umbră de melancolie pe flori, oameni pietre ziduri? De ce atașamentele acestea stupide?
75

Gândurile, lăsate un moment în libertate, fără control, se întunecă și se încurcă. 78

Toată lumea, furioasă la culme. Dar desigur că e doar o părere a mea, căci toți s-au purtat foarte
prietenos cu mine tot timpul, foarte îngăduitori cu ce va fi greșit un profesor în primul lui an de
învățământ (….) (80)

Scrisul de azi mă nemulțumește. În afară de călătoria în tren, a ieșit greoi, aproape ilizibil. Ca și
tonul meu vital. 82

Prin cuvântul artă înțeleg astăzi ceva incomparabil mai adânc ca acum opt ani - și incomparabil
mai simplu. Este încă pentru mine o primejdie evocarea operelor unora, mă înșel încă dureros
asupra cadenței proprii, dar, prin fum, înaintez sigur, de la sine. 82

(…) problema e să exploatez această uscăciune, să o aduc la demnitatea artei. 83

Lucrurile, oamenii, împrejurările, printr-o mică deplasare a noastră față de ele în spațiu ori timp,
se răstoarnă, se amestecă, intră în compoziții deosebite, atât de deosebite, încât de fiecare dată
puternică rămânde senzația de inedit, de miracol. 85

Gust moartea când am încheiat pagini de care sunt mulțumit, când ritmurile care trebuiau
exprimate s-au exprimat. 86

Deocamdată scriu continuu, cu răceala unui asasin. Deocamdată nu ma interesează o reușită, ci

învățarea unui ritm. 86

realitatea nouă - a Ideilor 87

Poate că toate concluziile la care am ajuns până acum sunt false și ceea ce denumim viață nu e
decât nemișcata eternitate pe care, ca să o putem suporta, o părăsim spre a visa spre mișcare - în
artă. Viața, mișcarea, poate că sunt invenții ale artiștilor. 91

N-am să încetez niciodată să înregistrez mișcările aerului și ale oamenilor, să mă încânt de felul
în care decurg unele din altele, se desfac și se refac în alte chipuri și înțelesuri. 92

o carte trebuie să fie astfel scrisă încât ritmul compoziției să se poată urmări ca al inimii, și
ritmul acesta să fie esențialmente muzical, chiar dacă celelalte elemente, cuvintele să zicem, nu
prezintă această calitate. 98

Mă preocupă compoziția, frazele le-am lăsat să se facă singure, nu ele au importanță.99

(…) singur mea grijă trebuie să rămână scrisul. 102

A învăța să înțelegem lumea. A trăi în voința noastră de a învăța. (…) Notez pe marginea cărții
că doar fanaticii sunt rezonabili. 105

O arhitectură de idei este o cantitate de mișcare concentrată. Opera de artă nu este deci bine
numită printr-un substantiv, ar trebui un verb. 108

Cum ai putea crede că, parte a universului infinit, ești altfel decât infinit, innumerabil? 109

Oricare ar fi ușa pe unde romancierul este chemat să pătrundă în cartea sa, personaj, intrigă,
atmosferă, etc., aecasta trebuie să aibă asupra lui o apreciabilă putere de fascinație. Cu cât
fascinația este mai intensă, cu atât probabilitatea ca el să se angajeze în aventura scrierii este mai
mare. Fascinația înseamnă mister, o prezență copleșitoare prin aceea că, ascunsă, cu neputință de
numit, manifestă un sens dens și înalt. 111

nu e vorba de parodierea literaturii, ci a vieții. 113

Romanul francez din sec. al XVIII-lea, moralist, a ospostaziat trăsătura care-l interesa, în
personajul libertinului. 114

(…) o carte reactualizând toate epocile artistice, toate stilurile care au precedat-o, având în plus,
bineînțeles, timbrul specific momentului la care se scrie cartea. 114

Se poate prea bine ca un mare artist să nu fie conemporan cu un mare critic, dar e mai rar să nu
fie contemporan nici cu un public luminat. 118

Niciodată niciun critic nu s-a socotit un neînțeles: criticul nu este poet. 119
Puterea de a gândi, de a visa și de a înfăptui creează lucruri eterne, apoi această putere se duce, la
fel de misterios cum a venit, și în locul ei rămâne doar un fel de biată facultate ed a gusta și de a
se uimi de cele înfăptuite, dar nici aceasta decât uneori, cel mai ades înstăpânindu-se recea, neta
indiferență pentru orice. 120

Dar sistemul entuziasmului pentru realizări trebuie să înceteze, e mai periculos! 123

(…) nu pot face deosebire între viață și literatură, aceste două lucururi sunt identice de la un
mom dat, când am devenit interior lumii și m-am instalat astfel între Idei. 125

Poziția lui Goncourt, care a inventat și termenul “noul roman”, are însă și alt înțeles/ 137

Încep să cred că toată viața mi-aș putea-o petrece într-un sat, ocupar numai cu scrisul. 139

“inimă tandră și neliniștită” 139

Singurul lucru pe lume care merită seriozitate este opera. 143

Încă n-am învățat să ne suportam pe noi înșine? 145

A face pentru roman ce a făcut Cezanne pentru pictură, cu riscul de a nu avea în următorii o sută
de ani nici un cititor. 165

Să admitem că artisti este cel care debutează mereu. 171

Adevărul e că scriu la întămplare cu o minină grijă doar pentru a fi clar și cât mai puțin
plictisitor. 171

(…) niciodată nu voi fi capabil de disciplină. 175

Persoana întâi este mai restictivă decât a treia, admite mai puțină intimitate. Cu persoana a treia
poți spune, într-adevăr , orice. 172

Orice om e contradictoriu dacă nu intuim mobilul actelor lui, sensul vieții sale. Oamenii cei mai
inteligenți pe care i-am cunoscut au rămas, într-un fel sau altul, lângă mine. Ceea ce probează.
176

A scrie înseamnă să-ți pui urechea pe pieptul imaginilor, să le asculți spusele, să le accepți și
înțelepciunea și absurditatea.
Nu moravurile mă interesează, ci pasiunile. Pasiuniule, adică fixația. În ciuda aparențelor, orice
pasiune este torpoare și soare, paralizie. 176

În ce mă privește, am băgat de seamă că stările pe care le încerc sunt duale, imposibil să încerc o
adevărată durere, o adevărata bucurie, pentru că ce mi se întâmplă acum, de fapt mi se întâmplă
în eternitate și capătă un sunet complex. 183

Să înțelegem prin suflet personajul nostru de aer, umanitatea noastră. 182

Frazele lui limpezi, drepte, îmi fac bine, iată o prietenie. 191

“Știam că sunt pasiunea lui rămasă din adolescență, cum rămâne puțin ilogică și copilăroasă
mintea bolnavilor după meningită.” 194

Portretul este dogmatic. Lasă-l pentru visele cititorului. 200

Romancier este nu cel care cunoaște bine viața, ci acela care o inventează cum trebuie.
Experiența personală e prea costisitoare pentru a fi recomandabilă după o anumită vârstă. 200

“fete cântând” 201

Opera de artă veritabilă e până la un punct incoerență, contradicție, oboseală - a căror substanță
însă e vie, impresionantă pentru că participă și ele la arhitectura generală, pentru că și ele fac
parte din rimtica artistului, marcându-i limita de jos. 229

“gingășie singuratică” 230

Aerul, pulverizat, nu mai vernisează lucrurile acoperindu-le cu armura lucioasă care le izolează
în spațiu, dându-le specifica materialitate, ci le înfășoară într-o difuziune instabilă de atomi
pâlâietori, care le răpește autonomia și soliditatea. 232

E dealtmiteri în univers o continuă schimbare de calități, un schimb a cârui substanță e egalitatea

și a cărui expresie e paradoxul. 233

Nu știu dacă aduc un folos prin ce scriu eu și, sincer, vbind, nu mă interesează asta.(…) N-am
crezut niciodată că pagina e o fereastră pe care o deschid spre ceva strâin ei, ea mi-a fost
totdeauna de ajuns. 237

(…)idea de a da preemineță viații asupra creației mi se părea ridiculă când vine din partea unui
scriitor, ridiculă și prin agresivitatea ei implicită și, fără, îndoială, naivă. 244
Nu știu ce vreau, știu doar că sânt - și sânt pentru că în fiecare clipă vreau să fiu. Ce mi-aș putea
dori mai mult decât să continui de a fi, sau de a avea puterea să aștept a fi, deși sunt, oarecum, în
vid, situația nu e rea. 249

(…) momentul scrisului și cel al unei largi fericiri e coincidență (265)

“infinitul devenirii” 280

Mă interesează ce se întâmplă când două personaje se găsesc față în față. Ce se întâmplă cu

fiecare în parte și cu amândouă împreună, ca în chimie. 301

Spectacol penibil al lumii acesteia, dacă îl privesc uitând că în el însuși văd frumusețea lumii -
dramatismul, mișcarea. 307

Spre timpanul care ascultă, nu trimitem cuvinte, ci sunete. 316

“transumanare”

Dac-aș fi bogat aș ține pe lângă mine câțiva dintre elevii mei, până ar împlini vărsta de 25 de ani.
331

Nu știu dacă Matei va simți în el infinitul, dar va trebui sâ fie infinit. 341

Luptă înseamnă punere în prezență, raport. Raportul uman cel mai adânc, de unde ființa este
vizibilă în toate direcțiile, până acolo unde orice vizibilitate, pentru noi, încetează, este dragostea,
în înțelesul total, neredusă la caz. Numai din perspectiva ei pot face un personaj al cărui corp
fizic și spiritual să fie universul. 346
“școală” exclusivă
Un suflet pur, de liniștită vitalitate în alegrețea descoperirii unui tărâm unde întălnirile esențiale
sunt nu numai posibile, ci curente și firești, fiind vorba însă de un firesc poetic, transfigurat (…)
360

“vâjâit de zmee” 363

Rosi Braidotti, “Postumanul”, Hecate, 2016

De asemenea, animalele sunt vândute drept comodități exotice și reprezintă al treilea cel mai
mare comerț ilegal din lumea de azi, după droguri și armament, dar înaintea traficului cu femei.
16
Noile tehnologii ale morții acționează într-un climat social dominat de economia politică a
nostalgiei și de paranoia, pe de o parte, și de euforie și exaltare, pe de altă parte. 18

Considerată mai degrabă un hobby personal decât un domeniu de cercetare profesionist,

umanioarele, cred eu, se alfă într-un real pericol de dispariție din programa universitară
europeană a sec. XXI. 19

S-ar putea spune că interesul meu pentru postuman pleacă de la o îngrijorare prea umană cu
privire la tipul de cunoaștere și valorile intelectuale pe care le producem azi ca societate. 19

De asemenea, acest simț al responsabilității exprimă un anume tipar de gândire, care îmi este
aproape de suflet și de minte, din moment ce provin dintr-o generație care avea un vis. (…) este
visul de a produce cunoaștere relevantă din punct de vedere social și racordată la principuule
fundamentale de justiție socială, respect pentru diversitate și decența umană, respingerea falselor
universalisme, afirmarea pozitivității diferenței, principiile libertății academice, antirasism,
deschidere către ceilalți și convivialitate. 20

Într-un fel, interesul meu pentru postuman este direct proporțional cu sentimentul frustrării față
de resursele și limitele umane, prea umane, care determină nivelurile personale și colective de
crativitate. 21

(…) majoritatea autorilor pe care Michel Foucault i-a evidențiat ca fiind vestitorii erei filosofice
a postmodernității critice (Marx, Freud, Darwin) sunt aceiași autori pe care naziștii i-au
condamnat și ars pe rug în anii 1930. 29

Luce Irigaray 1993, Cixous, Braidotti

Frantz Fanon
trad feminista radicală a celui de-al doilea val american: Audre Lorde (1984), Alice Walker
(1984), Adrienne Rich (1987)
Mary Daly (1973 - lucrări), Schussler Fiorenza (1983)

Hardt și Negri (2000, 2004) sau școala italiană a lui Lazzarato (2004) și Virno (2004) au tendința
de a evita știința și tehnologia și de a nu le trata cu profunzimea și sofisticarea pe care le dedică
analizei subiectivității. 61

Isaac Asimov (1942), legile pt roboți : (1) Robotul nu are voie să pricinuiască vreun rău unei
ființe umane sau, prin neintervenție, să permită ca unei ființe umane să i se facă rău. (2) Robotul
trebuie să se supună ordinelor date de către o ființă umană atât timp cât ele nu intră în
contradicție cu Legea 1. (3) Robotul trebuie să-și protejeze propria existență atât timp cât acest
lucru nu intră în contradicție cu legea 1 sau 2. (p.62)
Din moment ce devin mult ai deștepte și mai răspândite, mașinile autonome sunt nevoite să ia
decizii de viață și de moarte și, astfel, să-și asume un soi de agențialitate. 63

(…) nu este timp pentru dorințe nostalgice față de trecutul umanist, ci mai degrabă pentru
experimente anticipative cu noi forme de subiectivitate. 64

Aime Cesaire (1955)

Avtar Brah (1996)

Vandana Shiva 1997
Patricia Hill Collins
Drucilla Cornell
Edouard Glissant
Homi Bhabha
Edward Said - teoreticieni postcoloniali, postumanism cosmopolitan contextualizat

Paul Gilroy(2000)

mobilitate diasporică și interconectări transculturale (67)

Subiecții europeni contemporani ai cunoașterii trebuie să îndeplinească obligația etică de a fi

responsabili pentru istoria lor trecută și pentru umbra lungă pe care o aruncă aceasta asupra
politicii din prezent. (Morin, Passerini, Balibar, Bauman) (73)

Seyla Benhabib, în opera ei splendidă despre cosmopolitanismul alternativ (2007), discută

problematica Europei ca loc de tranformare. 74

Grupul din jurul lui Althusser a inițiat debaterea la mijlocul anilor 1960; studiul de pionierat a lui
Deleuze despre Spinoza datează din 1968 (în engleză în 1990); analiza despre Hegel și Spinoza a
lui Macherey a apărut în 1979 (în engleză în 2011); opera lui Negri asupra imaginației la Spinoza
e publicată în 1981 (în engleză în 1991). 78

“mașinile sunt atât de vii, pe când oamenii sunt atât de inerți.” (Donna Haraway) (81)

Cu ajutorul unei taxonomii ironice în stilul lui Borges, Deleuze a clasificat animalele în 3
grupuri: cele cu care ne uităm împreună la televizor, cele pe care le mâncăm și cele de care ne
este frică. 94
—> Relația oedipală dintre oameni și animale este inegală și condiționată de atitudinea umană
dominantă și structural masculină de a lua de-a gata accesul liber la corpul celorlalți și
consumarea acestui corp, inclusiv al animalelor. Ca mod de relație, această legătura este, așadar,
nevrotică prin faptul că e saturată cu proiecții, tabuuri și fantezii. 94

Deși Chakrabarty nu ia calea postantropocentrismului, ajunge la aceeașă concluzie ca și mine:

problema perspectivelor centrate pe planetă și pe schimbarea poziției oamenilor de la simpli
agentți biologici la agenți geologici solicită reconfigurări atât ale subiectivității, cât și ale
comunității. 113

Scopul teoriei critice este de a deranja opinia comună (doxa), nu de a o confirma. Această
abordare a fost receptată cu multă ostilitate în spațiul academic, însă eu o consider un gest
generos și deliberat de asumare a riscului și, în consecință, o declarație în favoarea libertății
academice. 118

feministe-spinoziste: Moira Gatens și Genevieve Lloyd (120)

Cadrul conceptual de referință pe care l-am adoptat pentru metoda de-familiarizării este
monismul. Aceasta implică fluxuri deschise, inter-relaționale, multi-sexuate și situate dincolo de
ideea de specii, de devenire prin interacțiuni cu ceilalți numeroși. Un subiect postuman astfel
constituit excede atât granițele antropocentrismului, cât limitele umanismului compensatoriu,
obținând o dimensiune planetară. 120

(…) modalitățile vizuale de reprezentare au fost înlocuite de modalitățile senzorial-neuronale ale

simulării. Cum spunea și Patricia Clough, am devenit corpuri “biomediate”. (121)

Astfel, cyborgii se referă nu doar la corpurile încântătoare ale piloților de avioane de luptă de
înaltă tehnologie, ale atleților sau vedetelor de cinema, ci și la masele anonime ale proletariatului
digital post plătit care alimentează economia globală bazată pe tehnologie, fără ca ei înșiși să o
acceseze vreodată (Braidotii, 2006). 122

Vitalitatea mașinică nu are prea multă legătură cu determinismul, cu un obiectiv predefinit sau cu
o finalitate, ci mai degrabă cu definirea și transformarea. Asta introduce un proces pe care
Deleuze și Guattari îl numesc “devenire-mașină”, inspirat din “mașinile celibatare” ale
suprarealiștilor, însemnând o relație jucăușă și predispusă spre plăcere cu tehnologia care nu se
bazează pe funționalism. 123
eco-sofia

“postumanism post-antropocentric”

“o înstrainare radicală față de noțiuni precum raționalitate morală, identitate unitară, conștiință
transcedentală sau valori morale înnăscute și unviersale”. 125

Humbeto Maturana
Francisco Varela

În analiza despre “mutațiile existențiale colective” care se petrec la acest moment, Guattari se
referă la distincția lui Varela între sistemele autopoietice (autorganizatoare) și sistemele
alopoietice. Guattari trece dincolo de distincția propusa de Varela, extinzând principiul
autopoiezei (care, pentru Varela, este rezervat organismelor biologice) pentru a acoperi și
mașinile sau ceilalții tehnologici. Un alt nume pentru subiectivitate, potrivit lui Guattari, este
subiectivitarea autopoietică, sau construcția, și se referă atât la organismele vii și oameni ca
sisteme autoorganizatoare, cât și la materia anorganică și mașini. 126

(…) crearea unei metastabilități, care este condiția individuației. 127

(…) efectele postantropocentriste oportuniste ale economiei globale creează un cosmopolitanism

negativ sau un sentiment de conexiune pan-umană reactivă prin introducerea noțiunii de “Viață
ca surplus” și de vulnerabilitate umană comună. 129

Katherine Hayles
Balsamo
Claire Colebrook
Patricia MacCormack

relaționalitate radicală 137

“tendință spre melancolie a Stândii progresiste”(Derrida, Butler, Gilroy, 2005)

Postantropocentrismul critic crează noi perspective care merg dincolo de panică și doliu și
produc o platformă mult mai realizabilă. 139

“activitatea de a gândi trebuie să fie experimentală și chiar transgresivă prin combinarea criticii
cu creativitatea.”139

Inumanul: conversații despre timp, Lyotard 145

Ceva s-a schimbat fundamental pornind de la fantezia modernistă a eroticizării interacțiunii de

tip uman-tehnologic până la dezvrăjirea postmodernistă sau cel puțin distanța ironică față de
obiectul tehnologic. A intrat în acțiune o economie politică diferită a afectelor; o sensibilitate
mult mai rece a intrat în sistemul nostru, pavând drumul spre postuman. Zygmunt Bauman
(2000, 2005) s-a numărat printre primii care au comentat această abordare crudă și mai rece. 147

(…) metafizica finitudinii este o modalitate mioapă de interogare a limitelor a ceea ce numim
“viață”. 162
Legătura cu colonialismul este explicită: decolonizarea a creat statele-națiuni, ale căror popoare,
cândva subjugate, acum sunt libere să circule global. Aceste popoare constituie cea mai amre
parte din imigranții, refugiații și solicitanții de azil nedoriți care sunt reținuți și închiși de-ea
lungul lumii dezvoltate. Printr-o întorsătură nu lipsită de forță ironică, migrația globală este
percepută ca un pericol specific în Europa pentru că periclitează principala infrastructură socială
europeană: statul bunăstării. Gama crescândă de arme de război și tehnici de ucidere ridică
întrebări grave cu privire la statutul morții ca obiect de analiză politică contemporană. 170

“Politica devenirii” (19990 a lui WIlliamConnolly susține o idee similară: împotriva distrugerii
necropolitice trebuie să dezvoltăm “un etos al angajamentului” cu condițiile sociale și politice
date - incuzând ororile timpurilor noastre - pentru a produce contra-efecte, adică transformări și
consecințe neașteptate. (…) Etica afirmativă se bazează pe practica de a construi pozitivități,
generând astfel noi relații și condiții sociale, fără vătămare și durere. Produce activ energie prin
transformarea încărcăturii negative a acestor experiențe, chiar și în cadrul relațiilor intime bazate
pe dialectica dominației (Benjamin, 1988). 172

Reprezintă o provocare ocnstantă pentru noi să ne ridicăm la înălțimea situației, să fim “vrednici
de timpurile noastre” și în același timp să le ținem piept și, astfel, să practicăm amor fati în mod
afirmtiv. (…) Nu-i de mirare că mulți dintre noi, după cum constata George Eliot, întorc sptele
vuietului energiei cosmice. 174

Perspectiva mea vitalistă asupra morții este că ceea ce ne eliberează în viață e inumanul din
noi.178

Dincolo de plăcere și de durere, viața este un proes al devenirii, de întindere a limitelor de

rezistență. 178

Viața este dorință care urmărește în esență să se autoexprime și, în consecință, se bazează pe
energie entropică: își atinge scopul, apoi piere, precum somonul care înoată în amonte pentru a
procrea, ca apoi să moară. Dorința de a muri poate fi văzută, așadar, ca echivalent și ca altă
expresie a dorinței de a trăi în mod intens. 179

(…) ceea ce noi oamenii ne dorim profund este nu atât de mult să dispărem, cât mai degrabă să o
facem în spațiul vieții noastre și în felul nostru. (….) Este ca și cum fiecare dintre noi vrea să
moară în propria manieră. 179

Urmărind un fel de seducție întru nemurire, viața etică e viața ca suicid virtual. Viața ca suicid
virtual e viața ca o creație consutantă. Viața trăită ca să întrerupi ciclurile repetițiilor inerte care
te intoroduc în banalitate. Ca nu cumva să ne amăgim cu pretexte narcisiste, trebuie să cultvăm
rezistență, imortalitate în timp, adică moarte în viață. 180
Dizolvă moartea în transformări procesuale în perpetua schimbare și, astfel, dezintegrează eul, cu
al său capital de narcisism, paranoia și negativitate. 183

Afirmarea, nu nostalgia, este calea de urmat: nu idealizarea metadiscursului filosofic, ci misiunea

mult mai pragmatică de autotransformare prin experimentare smerită. 198

Uniunea Europeană este dominată la momentul actual de o agendă de dreapta a economiei

neoliberale, pe de o parte, și de agende sociale și culturale xenofobe și populiste, pe de altă parte.
(…) univ. ca instituție și în special disciplinele umaniste se află sub atac. Ele sunt acuzate de a fi
neproductive, narcisiste și învechite în abordarea lor și, de asemenea, că nu sunt racordate la
cultura științei și tehnologiei contemporane. 201

p.204! epistemologia feminină și studiile despre știință

!interdisciplinaritate

Cumva, disciplinele umaniste au o relație diferită cu complexitatea față de aceea pe care o au

științele naturale și ale vieții. 206

(…) una dintre cele mai eficiente strategii dezvoltate de cercetători din disciplinele umaniste
contemporane este de fapt teoretizarea prin intermediul și cu ajutorul științei. 208

“noua teorie a științei” : Ansell Pearson, Massumi, De Landa, Barad, Grosz, Colebrook, Bennett,
Clough, Protvi, Braidotti

(…)Dcaă obeictul clasic de cercetare al umanității a fost umanul, decurge că obiectul potrivit de
cercetare al condiției postumane este postumanul însuși. 210

“zoonoza” (Rudolf Virchow 1821-1902) : nu ar trebui să existe linii despărțitoare între medicina
umană și cea animală. 212

“Inițiativa pentru O Singură Sănătate” subliniază varietatea de boli comune care-i leagă pe
oameni de animale. 213

(…) criteriile majore pentru teoria postumană (…): acuratețe cartografică, cu corolarul
responsabilității etice, transdisciplinaritate, importanța combinării criticii cu figurațiile creatoare,
principiul nonliniarității, puterile memoriei și ale imaginației și strategia de-familiarizării. (….)
o cartografie este o citire a prezentului bazatâ pe teorie și informată politic.
Cartografiile urmăresc responsabilitatea epistemică și etică prin descoperirea locațiilor de putere
care ne structurează poziția subiectivală. 215
O figurație este expresia reprezentărilor alternative ale subiectului ca entitate nonunitară
dinamică; este dramatizarea proceselor de devenire. 216

Zigzagarea/ nonliniaritatea 216

“să rememorezi și să suporți încărcăturile afective ale textelor ca evenimente” 218

Eliberată de liniaritatea cronologică și de forța gravitațională logocentrică, memoria, în felul ei

nomadic postuman, reprezintă reinventarea activă a sinelui care este discontinuu în mod jovial,
cu totul diferit de faptul că a fi în mod lamentabil consistent. Amintirile au nevoie de imaginație
pentru a facilita actualizarea posibilităților virtuale în subiect, care se redefinește ca o uniatate
relațională transversală cu o memorie vitalistă și multidirecțională. Memoria lucrează în termeni
de transpoziții nomadice (…) 220

Epistemicul și eticul merg mână în mână în peisajul complicat al celui de-al treilea mileniu.
Avem nevoie de creativitate conceptuală și curaj intelectual pentru a face față situației, din
moment ce nu există cale de întoarcere. 233

de la universitate la “multi-versitate” 233

După porturi navale și aeroporturi, porturile e internet vor fi portaluri de navigare în orașele
mileniului III.237

!cercetare independentă, pedagogie constructivă și gândire critică

“intelectuali”= “furnizor de conținut” (Anderson)

“brokeri de idei” 238

“o etică de experimentare a intensităților”

“o forță mai vizionară sau energie profetică, calități care nu sunt nici în mod special la modă în
cercurile academice, nici prea prețuite din punct de vedere științific în aceste vremuri de căutare
forțată a “excelenței” globalizate. 249

Ce se întâmplă când conștiința este incapabilă de a găsi un remediu pentru boala sa obscură,
aecastă viață, această zoe, o forță impersonală car ene mișcă fără a ne cere permisiunea să facă
asta? Zoe este o forță inumană care se întinde dincolo de viață, spre noi forme vitaliste de
abordare a morții ca eveniment impersonal. 252

“fără concesii, nici față de panica morală, nici față de melancolie” 252
Michel Serres, “Modelul lui Hermes”, Ed. Universității de Vest, Timișoara 2003

-filosofie a relației

Pierre Hassner

(…) Leibniz făcea o împărțire a lumii în care nu exista acest dispreț față de non-civilizație. El
considera că există tot atâta civilizație în a treia Europă despre care vorbiți voi și în propria lui
Europă. 16

Auzeam partidul comunist prin glasul profesorilor de la Ecole Normale condamnând calculul
probabilității, fizica cuantică, ecuațiile lui Heisenberg și chiar l-am auzit pe profesorul meu de
filosofie luând la un moment dat poziție în scandalul medicilor sovietici într-o manieră complet
antiștiințifică. 19

Multe din textele afișate în timpul mișcării ’68 erau o emanare a curentului suprarealist, pur și
simplu. 20

Or, să nu uităm că civilizația agricolă a fost comună întregii umanități încă din neolitic. Și
nimeni nu spune la începutul mileniului trei că evenimentul cel mai important al sec. XX este
tocmai dispariția agriculturii ca model cultural vital în toate țările pe care le numim occidentale.
21

Adevărata diferență între științele umane și cele exacte este că, așa cum arătam mai devreme,
primele se folosesc de condiții necesare pentru ca cele din urmă să se folosească de condiții
suficiente. Condițiile suficiente sunt marca, indicele realului, pe când condițiile necesare pe care
le acumulezi fără încetare definesc o libertate totală. Degeaba acumulez condiții necesre pt viață
și opera mea; le pot nega sau inversa oricând. Aceasta este libertatea mea. De fapt, condițiile
necesare se află în același timp de partea libertății și de partea convenției. Dar cum toți lucrați cu
științele umaniste, toți credeți că lumea se suprapune acestei legi. Răspuns: nu. 30

Aș spune că, astăzi, ne lipsește de fapt filosofia pentru că unul din proiectele inconștiente și
ireductibile ale umanității moderne este știința. Atâta vreme cât filosofii vor rămâne departe de
știință, nu-și vor face datoria. 32

Gafa eniormă a lui Hedegger a fost că nu a știut să citească Logosul și totuși, a vorbit enorm de
mult despre el. El nu-și dă seama că Logos la greci înseamnă a/b=c/d și că Logosul este
interesant nu atât ca și cuvânt rostit, ci ca și cuvânt evaluat și golit de sens prin proporție.
Invenția abstractului se datorează faptului că a și b au sensuri diferite, iar a/b are un al treilea
sens independent de primele două. Relația dintre ele este chiar Logosul. Cuvântul Logos este
folosit de greci cu sensul de “analogie”, analogia.33-34

Or, zeul comerțului este Hermes. Zeul comunicării este Hermes. Zeul traducătorilor este Hermes.
Zeul care a inventat limbajul este Hermes. Zeul hoților este Hermes. Hermes, în greacă, este
angelos, mesagerul. Iar angelos nu este altceva decât îngerul. În consecință, trăiam într-o epocă
în care nu mai era Prometeu zeul absolut - zeul marxiștilor, al gânditorilor de stânga și al
revoluționarilor secolului al XIX-lea, zeul care dăduse omului focul pentru a produce unelte. Îi
spuneam maestrului meu, Althusser, că s-a sfârșit cu Prometeu, că astăzi comunicarea este miza.
36

Într-un fel, cultura noastră este șarmul. Dar nu poți vorbi așa unui student american sau german.
Deci, trebuie de fiecare dată să te adaptezi unui tip cultural dat. 42-43

Ce este o relație in asstracto? Eu cred că relația precede ființa, că este mult mai importantă decât
ființa, că fiecare relație presupune o patologie și că simbolul acestei patologii este parazitul.
Cartea despre paraziți a fost scrisă în urmă cu douâzeci de ani dar cred și acum când mă
interesează foarte mult biologia că nu ne putem raporta decât cu mare greutate la problema
originii vieții fără să luăm în considerare operatorul parazitar. Acesta este chiar mai important
decât credeam când am început cartea. 43

De exemplu, din zece molecule indispensabile pentru digesta noastră, nouă sunt urmașele
microbilor care i-au ucis pe strămoșii voștri în anumite condiții. Strămoșii voștri au murit, dar
domnul și doamna au rezistat pentru că au găsit o cale pentru a păstra parazitul și pentru a
supraviețui în același timp. Iar parazitul a primit o funcție în organismul lor. Toate simbiozele
sunt, de fapt, parazitisme reușite. 45
Este probabil ca și spermatozoidul să fie invaziv în raport cu ovulul, deci să fie un parazit și, o
dată ce embrionul se dezvoltă în uterul matern, mama în consideră un simbiot o anumită perioadă
pentru ca apoi să-l elimine ca pe un parazit. Și atunci, întreaga educație a unui copil constră în a-l
aduce din stare parazitară în stare simbiotică. Pentru că trăiește în pântecele mamei, suge la
pieptul ei, deci este în tot acest parazitar față de aceasta. 46

Ai posibilitatea să alegi, dar în cazul parazitului, după ce ai citit Tartuffe, vei putea să te ferești
ca și cum ai fi trăit experiența personal sau vei putea să ignori lecția și să cazi în capcană. Da,
există o alegere dar nu cred că o filosofie a libertății de-a alege ar putea fi interesantă aici. 48

Dacă vreți să vorbim despre rău nu există decât unul singur. Violența. Toată problema răului
poate fi rezolvată rezolvând problema violenței. (…) Stiți, suntem animaul cel mai violent.
Singurul, în afara șobolanului, care își omoară seamănul. 49

Orice situație comunicațională este un careu; comunicarea se joacă în patru: cei doi subiecți,
diavolul și cel care facilitează contractul, simbiotul. Simbioza este condiția dialogului nostru. El
poate avea ca scop căsătoria, o afacere, o călătorie împreună etc. Luptăm împotriva zgomotului
care ne-ar împiedica să ne înțelegem, dar avem cu noi un înger; îl avem pe Hermes. Dacă primul
este parazitar, acesta este Hermes. Și aici se află, dacă vreți, sfârșitul simbolului. 52

Cum a ajuns homo habilis să producă prima formă? Și așa am descoperit că există un raport
secret între producerea unei forme și prima constatare a morții. Dintr-o dată, cartea mea despre
arta statuară a devenit o meditație asupra morții. Mi se pare că primul obiect pe care îl
descoperim - în sens antropologic, originar, aproape metafizic - este cadavrul. Animalele nu au
aproape deloc simțul morții, noi, dimpotrivă…62

Acest stop-cadru vrea să spună: “El este ultimul condamnat la moarte din istorie.” Este vorba de
maortea morții. Reprezentarea lui Isus pe cruce este moartea morții. Și moartea morții se cheamă
înviere. Creștinismul este, deci, religia care ucide moartea și întoarce spatele definitiv întregii
antichități. 65

Corpul dvs. nu e tăcut. La începutul lumii a fost zgomotul, apoi, pentru a-l acoperi, a început
muzica. Obiectul emană zgomot, zgomotul naște muzică, iar limbajul este doar al patrulea sau al
cincilea etaj în această construcție genetică. Realismul zgomotului mă desparte complet de
abordările celorlalți, care mi se par arbitrare. 73

Așadar nu sunt deloc heideggerian. Nu pot din motive existențiale și filosofice. Și apoi, ființa nu
ne privește. Noi nu suntem pur și simplu. Suntem structuri modale. Ce este omul? Cele patru
categorii ale modalității: definim un care în care avem necesarul, posibilul, contingentul și
imposibilul. Suntem ființe contingente în raport cu necesitatea și posibilitatea. Dacă vreau să
construiesc casa omului - în sens heideggerian dacă doriți - aceasta se înalță pe patru moduri, pe
patru piloni: necesitatea, posibilul, imposibilul și contingentul. 79

informația
Primul este sensul dat de Aristotel: forma, impunerea unei forme, in-format. Al doilea sens este
cel uzual: deschid televizorul pentru a afla informații. Este sensul mediatic, dacă vreți. Al treilea
sens este cel dat de teoria informației: ce este informația? Negentropie. Acesta este singurul sens
științific: informația este ceea ce se opune prăbușirii în dezordine. Negentropie este să
construiești o casă. Cea de-a treia definiție este cea mai apropiată de prima, doar că Aristotel nu a
prevăzut - firește - și sensul de ordine-dezordine. 82

Suntem tot timpul pe punctul de a intra în bifurcație, într-un evantai de posibilități. 82

Ce este artistul, marele gânditor? Este omul care se află la limita zgomotului. Cel care produce
un sunte foarte fin la vioară - ascultați-l. Dacă produce un sunet mediu, e în regulă. Dar dacă
produce un sunet cu adevărat original, dacă ar fi doar cu o jumătate de milimetru mai la dreapta
ar fi zgomot. Artistul adevărat este cel care riscă zgomotul. La fel și gânditorul. 83

Esența omului este nesupunerea. 84

(ce este nebunia?) Nu știm încă. 84

ethos traduce exact mores din latină (92)

(…) de la inventarea geneticii, nu mai știm ce înseamnă înnăscut. 93

Suntem îmbrăcați pentru a ne ascunde defectele. 98

Or, odată cu apariția sulfamidelor în 1945, nu mai avem nici tuberculoză nici sifilis. Bolile
infecțioase regresează în așa măsură încât nu mai lasă urme pe corp. Asta se întâmplă cel târziu
în anii ’60-’70. 99

(…) ultimii fizicieni care vorbesc despre materie au scris în jurul anului 1880. Vorbesc despre
atomi, despre molecule etc. 106

Global vorbind, homonitatea pare să evolueze de la modelul sedentar, instalat prin revoluția
agrară din neolitic, către modelul nomad ce se arată dominant astăzi. De la închis la deschis, de
la habitat la pasaj, de la cămin la rătăcire. La fel și gânditorul, la fel și gândul. 118

Venim din lucruri înainte de a ne naște din cuvânt, iesiți dina piatră inertă și tumulară, stelă ori
inscripție ce oprește trecătorul în fața obstacolului funerar. 121
Cine nu mai are nimic trăiește în locul în care se învecinează viața și moartea, unde începe ființa.
129

Marile cuceriri nu vin niciodată de la o armată agresivă, ci de la turma celor excluși de către
frații lor feroce. 131

Nu se moare decât dintr-un exces de iubire a locului. Nu se scrie decât din exces de iubire.
Semnătura vine de dincolo de mormânt. 135

Întâile îndatoriri ale celui care transportă: eclipsarea, eschivarea, dispariția sau retragerea. 140

Bourbaki

(…) când ai studiat în detaliu istoria religiilor, aceea a științelor ți se pare că o mimează sau o
repetă! 153

Să reluăm cazul lui Gilles Deleuze, care a fost cu adevărat și fără glumă scos din joc: cel mai
frumos elogiu pe care i-l pot aduce este că gândirea filosofică l-a făcut într-adevăr fericit. Senin
în adâncime. Și încă o dată exemplar. 159

Dumezil (amenințat cu scandaluri din partea colegior întreaga viață)

Lumea - în sens geologic - e, înainte de toate (la urma urmei) vulcanică, călătoria extraordinară
spre punctul sublim este un itinerar spre un crater, pornind de la un crater sau trecând pe lângă un
crater : vedeți Meșterul Antifer, Vulcanul de aur, Servadac. 186

Lanquedem e condamnat la călătorie, la rătăcire. 187

În general, ce este aceea o Călăorie extraordinară? 191

A amuza,a preda, a iniția. 192

(în Contractul Natural) am descoperit (…) faptul că filozofia cea mai tradițională, cel puțin în
Occident, își ia ca scop ultim, chiar dacă ce mai adesea fără să o știe sau să o spună, descoperirea
unui loc terț, dificil de decelat, schimbător, fără îndoială în fiecare epocă, și din care pot fi
deduse, în același timp și conjugate, rațiunea științifică și rațiunea juridică, legile lumii fizice și
legile politice ale colectivităților umane, regulile Naturii și regulile Contractelor; de aceea, în
limbile de referință, termenii care desemnează aceste principii sunt aceiași în cele două cazuri.
Este adevărat că pentru Platon, pentru Aristotel, pentru Lucrețiu și Toma d’Aquino, în Evul
Mediu, la Spinoza și Hobbes, în epoca clasică, la Kant, Hegel și mulți alții, mai apropiați în timp
de noi. Profesorii mei păreau să ignore această stare de lucruri și contemporanii i-au urmat în
această direcție, crezând că pot practica filosofia fără a cunoaște științele și dreptul.
În căutarea acestui loc terț, Contractul Natural tratează filozofia cunoașterii și a acțiunii (…)
199

De la Nagasaki și Hiroșima, ar fi trebuit deja să ne schimbăm filozofia. 203

(…) stăpânirii lumii trebuie să îi succeadă, astăzi, stăpânirea stăpânirii. 207

Primul subiect cunoscut este subiectul de drept. Astfel, Contractul Natural tratează aproape în
excusivitate această problemă: cine are dreptul de a deveni subiect de drept? Dacă istoria arată
ceva, întreaga istorie a dreptului arată universalizarea progresivă a dreptului devenind subiect de
drept: scavii în trecut au devenit subiect de drept, urmați de copii și femei, mai recent, iar
întârzierea acestei decizii ar trebui și umple de rușine întreaga umanitate.

Subiectul ia totul și nu dă nimic, în timp ce obiectul dă totul și nu primește nimic. Cunoașterea,

grațioasă cum e , poate, astfel, să fie dublată de acțiuni nu mai puțin gratuite. Raportul activ sau
tehnicist față de lume nu face decât să o exploateze și nimic mai mult. 217

Secolul al XX-lea a construit obiecte-lume globale, dar gândirea sa nu a depășit mijloacele

filozofiei vechi, locale. Amintiți-vă, de pildă, cum abordează acest secol puterea: Hegel îl
consfințește Stâpân pe cel care se apropie mai mult de moarte și Sclav pe cel care se ține cât mai
departe de ea. 220

Faptul că rețeaua devine astăzi cea mai bună dintre tehnicile noastre arată că forma sa devine cel
mai bun dintre conceptele noastre. Dar rețeaua nu este oare un ansamblu de contracte? 222

distincție între principiul resposabilității și principiul precauției. Reamintesc că acest principiu al

precauției trebuie să fie aplicat ori de câte ori știința nu are niciun răspuns asupra unei probleme
date. 225

Viața este mai degrabă un dezechilibru evitat decât un echilibru în raport cu mediul. Noțiunea de
echilibru este aproape peste tot abandonată de științele despre viață. De altfel, unul dintre ultimii
laureați ai premiului Nobel a obținut acest premiu pentru că a inventat o termodinamică în afara
echilibrului. 226

(…) lăsați copiii fără nici o educație și cu siguranță veți vedea că societatea va avea mult de
suferit. (…) Pe de altă parte, am fost întotdeauna convins că artiștii au fost cei mai înaintați în
ceea ce privește cunoașterea, că ideile științifice ajung întotdeauna mai târziu față de ideile
artistice cu aceeași temă, că intuițiile artistice precedă descoperirile științei. 228
Altădată nu puteam direcționa evoluția decât observând fenotipul, adică organismul; astăzi
putem acea acces la genotip. Și, deci, la limită am putea spune că nu va mai exista hazard.(…)
Noi suntem cei care naștem natura. Dar încă nu cunoaștem această natură. (…) după părerea
mea, am intrat într-o nouă epocă a responsabilității. 239

Nocive în științe și în filozofie, aproape toate cuvintele tehnice nu au alt scop decât separarea
intoleranțelor acelui domeniu de exclușii de care nu se preocupă, pentru a-și păstra o oarecare
putere, dacă aceștia participă la conersație. 243

Dialectica se reduce la eterna reîntoarcere și eterna reîntoarcere a războaielor ne aduce în lume.

Ceea ce numim istorie de mai multe secole ajunge la acest punct de acumulare, la această
frontieră, la această schimbare globală. 250

Omul este un stoc, cel mai puternic și conectat la natură. El este o ființă-pretutindeni. Și, de
asemenea, legată. 258

Astfel, prințul, vechiul păstor de animale, va trebui să devină pilor sau cibernetician, fizician în
orice caz. 259

“Ego-ul” lui “cogito” are aceeași putere și aceeași cauzalitate sau influență la distanță ca această
aripă fremătătoare a lepidopterului; stridulației elitrelor unui greier care țârâie îi este echivalentă
gândirea. 259

Ar mai trebui demonstrat faptul că rațiunea noastră violentează lumea? Nu va resimți ea încă mai
mult nevoia vitală de frumusețe? Frumusețea reclamă pacea; pacea presupune un nou contract.
268
MICHEL SERRES with BRUNO LATOUR Conversations on Science,
Culture, and Time, University of Michigan 1995

In a certain sense it was already structuralism-well defined in mathematics-which l sought to

redefine in philoso- phy, long before it came into fashion in the humanities a good decade later.
10

MS Yeso AlI things considered, l was formed by three revolutions.

First, the mathematical transformation from infinitesimal calculus
or geometry to algebraic and topological structures; that was my
first school-the bifurcation of the two mathematics, from which
we emerged with a whole new way of thinking. The second was in the world of physics. l had
leamed classical physics, and suddenly here was quantum mechanics, but especially information
theory, from which we emerged with a completely new world. 12

One of my friends had lent me, in 1959, Brillouin's Science and Information Theory, which had
just been published. From it l understood that Brillouin was a veritable philosopher of physics-an
authentic physics and a philosophy at the same time, somewhat like thermodynamics, from
which, in fact, it sprang. 12

third revolution came later, from having known Jacques Monod and from having had him as a
friend for a long time-a wonderful friend, who taught me contemporary biochemistry. l was very
close to him, since he asked me to read his manuscript of Chance and Necessil:y. That was
my third school, from which l emerged with a changed Iife. But that was much later. To give you
an idea of how much later-at the very end of the 1960s my professors of philosophy were still
attacking Monod, and for un- sound ideological reasons. 13

Thus, 1 developed the habit, which you may find strange, of learning philosophy elsewhere than
in the places where it was a1legedly taught. l learned a1most everything on the outside and
a1most nothing on the inside. Yes-we can safely put il that way- everything oljl the outside,
a1most nothing on the inside. 13

1used to laugh at physicists' problems of conscience, because 1 was a biologist·at the Pasteur
Institute. By creating and propos- ing cures, 1 always worked with a clear conscience, while
the physicists made contributions to anns, to violence and war. Now 1 see clearly that the
population explosion of the third world could not have happened without our intervention. So, 1
ask myself as many questions as physicists ask themselves about the atomic bomb. The
population bomb will perhaps prove more dangerous. (Monod) 17

Simone Weil, Philosopher of Violence - Gravitty and Grace 18

The higher one goes on the ladder of social recognition, ilie doser one cames to the most evil
forces. 19-20

But l am driven by a strong disinclination to "belong" to any group, because it has always
seemed to require excluding and killing those who don't belong to the sect. l have an almost
physi- cal hOITor of the libidinous drive to belong. You will notice that this drive is rarely
analyzed as such, since it supports aIl ambitions and serves up the most widespread morality.
20

Weighing those early years in the balance, l can say that l only learned to disobey. Ali the events
that took place around me only left me with a taste for disobedience. l had the impression, during
my student years and at the university, that ilie war was not over, that the Occupation was
still going on, and that therefore one still had to resist, still had to go underground, still had to
say no to the CUITent conventional wisdom that influenced careers or guided what the press
calls "the great intellectual movements." It's terrible or tragic, but perhaps also lucky, to go
through the best institu- tions of learning and research and only learn there to rebel. Time wasted
or weil spent-who can say? 20

"When you have no affiliations and want above all to avoid them, when you have no home and
cannot live anywhere, you are very much obliged to begin a project. Ali my life I have had the
distress- ful feeling of wandering in the desert or on the high seas. And when you are lost and it
is stormy, you quickly feel the need to build a raft or a boat or an ark-even an island-solid and
consis- tent, and to supply it with tools, with objects, with shelters, and to people it with
characters ... doesn't philosophy consist of such a series of domestic improvements? Later,
whoever wants can seek shelter there." 21

Nonetheless, 1 remain as much as possible in everyday lan- guage-I simply use it in aIl its
amplitude. And an author who uses lots ofwords is usuaIly considered difficult. He forces
readers to refer to the dictionary, but, in reviving language, he puts new life into it. 24

So, one must be inter- ested in everything. Try ta name a single great philosopher who defies this
description. So why would I exclude Iiterature? 27

Cross-breeding-that's my cultural ideal. Black and white, science and humanities, monotheism
and polytheism-with no reciprocal hatred, for a peacemaking that 1wish for and prac- tice.
It's always peace, for a child of war. Add to that the fact that as a corrected left-handed person, 1
write with my right hand but work with the left. 1 now call this a completed body. Never any
fragmentation or schizophrenia. Don't imagine that 1 advocate this kind of upbringing
because it was my own. On the contrary, ail my life 1 have attempted to follow its mie.
Lots of authors practice the same connectedness. Plato was not
afraid to mix problems of geometry with quotes from Pindar; Aris-
totIe addresses medicine and rhetoric; Lucretius writes hyrnns to
physics; as analysts, Leibniz and Pascal write with perfection; Zola novelizes genealogy; Balzac,
La Fontaine, Jules Verne-what author doesn't do it? 28

Now then, in rereading him in detail, 1 found Auguste Comte to be more profound than his
successors, first as the inventor of sociology, and for having been the first to ask the question
about the relations between science and society, and, more important, between the histories of
science and religion. In this he remains unequaled; none of his successors, in any language, go as
far on this decisive point. 30

No matter how beautifully poetry sings, it remains imaginary and material-this is the theory of a
two-pronged culture, which quickly struck me as scholastic and dangerous. On the contrary, the
poems of La Fontaine, Verlaine, or Mallarmé require as much rigor as a geometric theorem, and
a demonstration of the latter can sometimes deploy as much beauty as those poems themselves.
So. it was worthwhile to reflect on this cammon rigor and
heauty, on this obviously single culture. We have neither two
brains nar two bodies nor two souls. 31

BL What is hardest for me to understand, perhaps because l belong more to the Anglo-Saxon
world, is your relationship to discussion. Vou never see it as anything but a dispute. FM you the
intellectual milieu is always one ofwaifare with each and ail. Nonetheless, you have had
colleagues who have influenœd you. Was it much later that you knew René Girard?
MS Yes, much later, when l taught atJohns Hopkins in Baltimore and in Buffalo, New York, and
at Stanford, in California. He had an influence on me similar ta what rd received from
Simone Weil. He also had read Gravity and Grace in his youth, and he freely admits that his
thoughts on violence were born from meditating on Simone Weil's texts. 35

It seemed to me that he applied an authentic structuralism to the humanities, to religious history-

a discipline that has always fascinated me, since l am still convinced that it forms the deepest
plate in the history of cultures. By plate 1mean what earth scientists mean by this word-thus
continuing the image Husserl used when he spoke of "formation." A plate that is deeply
submerged, buried, often opaque and dark, that transfonns itself with infinite slowness but
which explains very weil the discontinuous changes and per- ceptible ruptures that take place
above. Indeed, in comparison to religious history, that of the sciences seems superficial,
recent- like a surface landscape, quite visible and shimmering. What's more, when you study
religious history in detail, that of the sci- ences seems to imitate or repeat it! 36

What makes for advancement in philosophy and also in science, is inventing concepts, and
this invention always takes place in solitude, independence, and freedom indeed. In silence.
We have a surfeit of colloquia these days; what comes out of them? Collective repetitions. On
the other hand, we are cruelly deprived of convents and quiet cells and the taciturn rules of the
cenobites and anchorites. 37

BL This negative experience of discussions, do you hold to it?

MS Why get into discussions of determinism and chaos, when the same things have been
said, by the same factions, in nearly every generation? No, debate is not productive. This is
why a few years ago I sent to a journal organizing an issue on Balzac a pastiche of Balzac
on La Belle Noiseuse, in which chaos takes her oldest name, Noise. Yes, chaos itself is
interesting-I even believe I was the first philosopher to speak about it-but discussion is not
interesting; it is so repetitive.
Polemic never invents anything, because nothing is older, anthropologically, than war. The
opposite notion has become conventional wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon world, which today holds
sway. It is because it holds sway that this method is propagated. That's always the strategy of
victors. Reread Plato: Socrates always imposes the methodology by which he always wins.
Dialectics is the Iogic of the masters. It's necessary first of aIl to impose, in a manner
defying discussion, the methodology for discussion. 38

But did those who didn't choose the superhighways really con- tribute something new? Like
Gilles Deleuze, for example. He sepa- rated himself from the traditional history of philosophy,
from the human sciences, from epistemology. He's an excellent example of the dynamic
movement of free and inventive thinking. 39

BL Dumézil too. He had a completely atypical career.

MS Dumézil was ridiculed byall of his colleagues, all his life. Even at the Collège de France and
at the French Academy he was considered not only as atypical but often as eccentric, like
Bergson, who also did not have the good fortune of pleasing his university colleagues. Was
Bergson ever discussed? Can an intuition be dis- cussed? Aren't the great inventions, including
the conceptual ones, based on an intuition? lt always makes the first move; the rank and file
discuss afterward, to tear one another apart. 39

Through family tradition 1 seemed more destined for fairly servile, manual labor. And because
my youth was contemporary to so many wars, seemed more destined to negative emotions
and thoughts. But in both cases I found myself completely on the other side of things. Indeed, I
only love positive values, and i feel an irrepressible happiness in practicing my chosen vocation,
in teach- ing (i love my students) and in writing books (if necessary, 1would pay to do it).
Enthusiasm for the philosophical life has never left me. If 1 had to name (perhaps immodestly)
the dominant senti- ment that is aIways with me, 1 would not hesitate a moment: joy, the
immense, sparkling, indeed holyjoy of having to think-a joy that is sometimes even serenity. 42
BL J'm painting out the difficulties ta you sa that you can explain them away. This time machine,
this freedom ofmovement, is at the bottom ofthe accusations of "poetry" leveled at your books,
harmful accusations that l know exasperate you . ..
MS What a sign of the times, when, to cruelly criticize a book, one says that it is only poetry!
Poetry comes from the Greek, meaning "invention," "creation"-so aIl is weIl, thank YOU. 44

MS Let me say a word on the idea of progress. We conceive of

time as an irreversible line, whether interrupted or continuous, of acquisitions and
inventions. We go from generalizations to dis- coveries, leaving behind us a trail of effOTS
finally corrected-like a cloud of ink from a squid. "Whew! We've finally arrived at the truth."
Il can never he demonstrated whether this idea of time is true or false.
But, irresistibly, 1 cannot help thinking that this idea is the equivalent of those ancient diagrams
we laugh at today, which place the Earth at the center of everything, or our galaxy at the middle
of the universe, ta satisfy our narcissism. 48

MS That's not time, only a simple line. It's not even a line, but a trajectory of the race for first
place--in school, in the Olympie Garnes, for the Nobel Prize. This isn't time, but a simple
competi-tion-once again, war. Why replace temporaiity, duration, with a quarrel? The first ta
arrive, the winner of the battle, obtains as his prize the right ta reinvent history ta his own
advantage. Once again dialec- tics-which is nothing more than the logic of appearances. 49

MS Can I return to my training? I earned a degree In classical studies, in Latin and Greek, and
1 was aiso trained in science, earning two degrees in mathematics. Through my entire life 1
have never abandoned this double route. 1still read Plutarch and the great physicists, at the same
time, as a refusaI of the separation between science and literature, of this divorce that
informs the temporaiity of so-called contemporary thought.
50

ln earlier times people dreamed; now we think. 50

But time is in reality somewhat more cornpli- cated than that. You no doubt are familiar with
chaos theory, which says that disorder occurring in nature can be explained, or reor- dered, by
means offractal attractors. 57

But in this, order as such is harder to perceive, and customary determinism has a slightly
different appearance. Time does not always flow according to a line (my first intuition of this is
in my book on Leibniz [284-86]) nor according to a plan but, rather, according to an
extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells,
chimneys of thunderous acceleration, renrlings, gaps-all sown al random, at least in a visible
disorder. Thus, the development of history truly resembles what chaos theory describes. Once
you understand this, it's not hard to accept the fact that time doesn't a1ways develop according
to a line and thus things that are very close can exist in culture, but the line makes them
appear very distant from one another. Or, on the other hand, that there are things that seem very
close that, in fact, are very distant from one anoilier. Lucretius and modem theory of fluids
are considered as two places sepa- rated by an immense distance, whereas 1 see them as in
the same neighborhood. 57

There is in Lucretius a global theory of turbulence, which can make that time really
understandable. His physics seems to me truly very advanced. Along with the contemporary
sciences, it holds out the hope of a chaotic theory of time. 59

This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-
defined distances is called metrical geometry. Classical time is related to geometry, having
nothing to do with
space, as Bergson pointed out aIl too briefly, but with metrics.
On the contrary, take your inspiration from topology, and perhaps
you will discover the rigidity of those proximities and distances you consider arbitrary.
And their simplicity, in the literai sense of the word pli [fold]: it's simply the difference
between topology (the handkerchief is folded, crumpled, shredded) and geometry (the same
fabric is ironed out fiat).
60

In other words, in antiquity physics was not mathematized as it is now. Two systems look at each
other and describe the same world: one, that of Archimedes, with mathematical theorems; the
other with descriptions in ordinary language, although extremely precise and exact. But both
have the same object: turbulences, whirlpools, their spiral shape and their liquid nature-in short,
their formation and, based on their construction, the formation of the world.
What changes is the style of the mathematization, its manner, but what endures is the
mathematization itself. It consists of a correspondence of system ta system and not of the
processes of measurement and quantification. Once again this is very modern. 64

We must conceive or imagine how Hermes Dies and gets about when he carries messages from
the gods-or how angels travel. And for this one must describe the spaces situ- ated between
things that are already marked out-spaces of inter- Jerenœ, as 1 called them in the title of my
second book on Her- mes. This god or liese angels pass through folded time, making millions of
connections. Between has always struck me as a preposi-
( tion of prime importance.64

One of the most beautiful things that our era is teaching us is to approach with light and
simplicity the very complex things previously believed to be the result of chance, of noise, of
chaos, in the ancient sense of the word. Hermes the messenger first brings light to texts and signs
that are hermetic, that is, obSCure. 65
5peed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and
says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability. 67

Because in fact, every time I approached something it wasn't an idle voyage: I only assigned
myself the undertaking on the condition that 1 invent something. Each time 1 passed somewhere
1 tried to leave a truly original solution. I didn't pass by Lucretius by repeating other
commentators, as far as I know. Nor by Kant withoutdiscovering that he was the first to have
invented an eternal return-a solution not commonplace among the specialists. Sa, 1 traveled
everywhere, and in order to do il YOll have to travel fast. You have to have a compendium of
thought, take shortcuts. ….. !!!! In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light ta
express the clarity of thought; 1 would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but
also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment. 67

Rapidity. To move, while writing, from one point of the universe ta another. 71

Is there a big difference between the theoretical expression of the message, defending itself
physieally against the background noise, and the grasp of language that a poet can have in
relation to the noise he hears in his own coenesthesis? 80

On the other hand, honesty consists of writing only what one thinks and what one believes
oneself to have invented. My books come only from me. "My glass is not big, but l drink from
it." That's my only quote. 81

The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework ofthought.
New ideas COme from the desert, from hermits, from solitary beings, from those who live
in retreat and are not plunged into the sound and fury of repetitive discussion. 81

MS l have a great repugnance for master-disciple relationships.

"Here, 1 am your servant": This declaration would give me a lasting
disgust for the master's power. 84

yes yes : The choice of philosophy supposes an altogether different behavior-independence,

freedom of thought, escape from lobbying support groups ... and therefore, indeed, solitude. I
repeat: this is not a question of being exceptional but, rather, of being independent. 85

To compose-that is the issue. 93

There is a diabolical link bernreen repetition and recognition. The imitable is doubly ugly,
especially in philosophy, because it enslaves.
94
A unique style cornes from the gesture, the proj-
ect, the itinerary, the risk-indeed, from the acceptance of a
specific solitude. 94

In literary works one sometimes finds perlect intuitions of scientific instruments that come later.
It sometimes happens that the artist-musician. painter, poet-sees a scientific truth be- fore it
is born. Indeed, music is always in the lead: the popular saying is true, that you can't go faster
than the music. 99

Do you want to taIk about invention? It's impossible without that dazzling, obscure, and hard-to-
define emotion called intui- tion. Intuition is, of ail things in the world, the rarest, but most
equally distributed among inventors-be they artists or scientists.
Yes, intuition strikes the first blows. 99

Each route invents itself. 105

Do you notice that, in relation to other parts of speech, the

preposition has almost ail meaning and has almost none? It simul- taneously has the
maximum and minimum of meaning, exactly like a variable in classical analysis. 106

So-stand up, run,jump, move, dance! Like the body, the mind needs movement, especiaIly subtIe
and complex movement. 107

Lucretius launches us into movement--everything in his work

begins with turbulence-it's a very complex figure, which you cali difficult. 107

My way of abstracting is still not so far from that of certain very contemporary sciences, and
perhaps generalizes them, in the sense that, in mathematics, for example, and even
sometimes in physics, relations outnumber subjects or objects. 107

Yes, modes. By a theory of modaIity, of means, of relations, of rapports, of transports,

ofwandering. Isn't that, overaIl, a contem- porary manner of thinking? For example, aren't
physicists seeking to understand interactions in general? 113

I mean by This that 1 am seeking compatibility more than imitation.

113

I will reply that my goal is not above ail ta be right but, rather, ta produce a global intuition,
profound and sensible. 115
Restless, in order to go everywhere, throughout the entire
encyclopedia-what an undertaking! Restless-in other words, ac-
tive, not lazy. Unsystematic, in order to criticize outdated systems.
To show, with a laugh, that the space of knowledge has changed :1
its contours and that these are more tortuous than we realize.
Unsystematic-that is to say, fertilely inventive in the middle of chaos….
Hermes is worse than a tourist; he is a miserable wanderer, crossing the desert. And, worse
yet, he's a troublemaker. Even a thief, if you will! He's both good and bad. And hermetical, in the
bargain. Do you lind this terrible? l imagine Hermes as flilled with joy.
117

Traditional philosophy usually has either a central god who is a producer, a radiating source of
life like a sun, or a story of the origin of time. My philosophy is more like a heaven filled with
angels, obscuring Gad somewhat. They are restless, unsystematic
(which you find suspect), troublemakers, boisterous, always trans- mitting, not easily
classifiable, since they f1uctuate. Making noise, carrying messages, playing music, tracing paths,
changing paths, carrying ... 118

Inversely, to construct on a large scale is ta move in the direc- tion of fragility, to accept it,
to run its risk. To move in the direc- tion of the fragment is the same as to protect oneself. The
philoso- phy of fragments is a by-product of war but equally a technique of conservation.
Museums are stuffed with bits and pieces, with disparate members. The philosophy of
fragments brings together the philosophy of the museum and the museum of philosophy; thus, it
is doubly conservative.
123

Mankind is the mother of aIl weaknesses. The word springs from the birth wail, life springs
from chance encounters, thought cornes from a momentary fluctuation, science cornes
from an in- tuition that clicks and then vanishes instantly. Life and thought live in closest
proximity to nothingness. Even more so does man when he approaches weakness-woman,
child, old person, the sick, the mad, the poor, the indigent, the hungry, the miserable. 122

1 prefer invention accompanied by the danger of error to rigorous verification, which is

paralleled by the risk of immobility-in phi- losophy as in life, in life as in the sciences. 131

It's better to do than to judge, to produce than to evaluate. Or, rather, it's in mining coal that one
learns if it is gray or black. It's better to create than to criticize, to invent than ta classify
copies. 136
HERMES
LITERA TURE, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY
by MICHEL SERRES
Edited by Josue V. Harari & David F. Bell
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE & LONDON, 1982

Don Juan is the first hero of modernity both numerically and func tionally, by the double despair
of representation and of will. 3

Let us suppose that he was: he can thus be classified as a scientific observer of society.
Excluding all anachronistic hypotheses, let us restrict our atten tion to the mystery of literary
creation. Let us decide on the basis of the evidence, and remember that we are dealing with a
feast. 3

Do not return tobacco for tobacco, that is, goods for goods, words for words, love for love ; give
instead words for goods4 and love for money. 5

(…) here we have'''the bride groom of the human race," the unbridled "taker of all hands" (II, 1),
who only gives his hand to take it back, except at the fatal feast. A "madman" outsid the law of
reason, a "dog" outside the law of man, a "devil" outside the law of God, a "Turk" outside the
law of Spain, a "heretic" outside the law of Christ. All these rules come down to one: you must
give back the hand. 10

Elvira takes a loftier tone, but repeats the theme: "your offenses have exhausted heaven's mercy."
Then she asks to be paid: "I have done everything for you, and all I ask as recompense is that you
correct your life and prevent your damnation" (IV, 9). In passing, let us note that here again Don
Juan changes his tack and proposes love for discourse : stay, it is late, and we will find you
lodging. In short, we find him converted, but in an inverse sense. He still returns words for
credit-to the forsaken woman, to her brothers, to his own duped father. His changed ways, or
change of clothes, restore to him those "favors" from which he duly "intends to profit" until the
final reparation, "remission" of his debt (V, 1). Beneath the mask he can "ensure his affairs": all
one must do is avenge "heaven's interests" (V, 2). Let there be no mistake: the law of tobacco
still reigns. The libertine declared he was not bound (I, 2) by its binding and obliging quality, but
the hypocrite's grimace is a successful method (Ie bon tabac) for constituting a caste, Thus false
piety: "by grimacing, one can bind together a tight society with men of like mind" (V, 2). Sign
and roll your eyes; you are sheltered, shielded; the cabal will take up your interests. Thus again,
Don Juan is not alone, the solitary hero outside the common law, the pretext vs. the text. The
false exchange generates the protective social cell.
The reversal here is universal. Don Juan says: I am not the one who is breaking the promise; it is
you who have failed to live up to your vows, And the extreme conclusion follows : I am not the
hypocrite; the whole society is an imposture. 11

In order that the treatise be a comedy, Dam Juan had to be a feast. Let us eat, drink, to the health
of one another, let us exchange tobacco to finish off the meal, while an invisible hand writes
upon the wall the unknown words of death. 13

Marcel Mauss, The GIft

For Plato and a tradition which lasted throughout the classical age, knowledge is a hunt. To know
is t put to death - to kill the lamb, deep in the woods, in order to eat it. Moving from combat with
prey outside the species to killing inside the species, knowledge now becomes military, a martial
art. It is then more than a game; it is, literally, a strategy. These epistemologies are not innocent:
at the critical tribunal they are calling for executions. They are policies promulgated by military
strategists. To know is to kill, to rely on death, as in the case of the master and the slave.
Today we live out the major results of these wolfish actions. For the "I," who played the role of
the lamb by minimizing his powers and placing the declared powers upstream from himself, this
"I" is the wolf. In the ordering relation, in the game-space, the "I" is clearly in the middle,
between the victorious sheepdog and the defeated devil or the wax. It has taken the wolf's place,
its true place. The reason of the strongest is reason by itself. Western man is a wolf of science.
28
Jules Michelet, La Mer

I arrive at exactly the same conclusion: the strategy of criticism is located in the object of
criticism. All the strategies I need are in the text of Michelet. All I need to do is to answer two
simple questions which have been formulated by analyzing the text in terms of the encyclopedia:
what is a reservoir? what is circulation? It is not necessary to introduce methods to read this text:
the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application.
This is not a special
'case; it is one that is perfectly generalizable. Why should there be a dichotomy between texts,
between the ones that operate and the ones that are operated upon? There are texts, and that is all.
38

It was thermodynamics that shook the traditional world and shaped the one in which we now
work. On the other hand, I maintain that the history of science is not worth an hour's trouble if it
does not become as effective as the sciences themselves. In other words, it offers less interest as
an object or a domain than as a set of operators, a method or strategy working on formations
different from itself. 39

Georg Riemann
Rene Thom

Two centuries ago, almost exactly, Kant began his philo sophical career by observing a
paradoxical property of space. He based an esthetics on an unspoken or unspeakable asymmetry.
But his was a twofold mistake: he recognized only one space, whereas one can define a varied,
multiple, and increasing number of them; on the other hand, he attempted the foolish project of
laying a foundation in the transcendental subject, whereas we can receive everything from
language and practical experience. 44

Cultures are differentiated by the form of the set of junctions, its appearance, its place, as well as
by its changes of state, its fluctuations. But what they have in common and what constitutes them
as such is the operation itself of joining, of connecting. The image of the weaver arises at this
point: to link, to tie, to open bridges, path ways, wells, or relays among radically different
spaces; to say (dire) what takes place between them; to inter-dict (inter-dire). The category of be
tween is fundamental in topology and for our purposes here: to inter dict in the rupture and
cracks between varieties completely enclosed upon themselves. "Enclosed" means isolated,
closed, separated; it also means untainted, pure, and chaste. Now, that which is not chaste,
incestus, can be incest. The incest prohibition (inter-diction) is, then, literally a local singularity
exemplary of this operation in general, of the global project of connecting the disconnected, or
the opposite, of opening what is closed, or again the opposite, and so forth. We find ourselves
once
again in the same domain through this general formal esthetics. There fore, we must speak about
these difficult operations. The identity of a culture is to be read on a map, its identification card :
this is the map of its homeomorphisms. 45

It would be necessary to draw graphs of itineraries , to define as closely as possible the spaces at
stake, to examine nodes, caducei, wheels, arborescences, a whole set Of spatial tools, the
technology of this discourse and its special mor phologies. 50

On the, contrary, physics has shown that any laminar flow sooner or later produces a pocket of
turbulence which fundamentally alters the ori laminal flow.

This logos was first myth, in order to succeed in creating at least one koine.12 All the principles
of the Greek cities go beyond this arm of the sea, before Troy, in order to found a language of
communication-that the gods first make possible. The gods are en countered as the same-here,
everywhere-because in their other space they enjoy a single space. It is essenti l that one no
longer know where Dionysus was born, where Oedipus and Theseus died. Anywhere : this is far
preferable. Thus, in this discourse, chaos begins again: scattered members, the diasparagmos, the
bones of Mother Earth, the first family of Spartol, dissemination in space, or, rather,
dissemination of morphologies themselves. Whereupon the first problem: to find the single space
or the set of operators by which these spatial varieties in impractical, inconceivable vicinity will
be joined together. To open the route, way, track, path in this incoherent chaos, this tattered
cloud, whose dichotomic thicket is reformulated in the common space of transport when it is
reconstructed. To find the relation, the logos of analogy, the chain of mediations, the common
measure, the asses' bridge; to find the equilibrium or the clinamen. 51

And thus one must find first, find conditionally, a word, a logos, that has already worked to
connect the crevices which run across the spatial chaos of disconnected varieties. One must find
the Weaver, the proto-worker of space, the prosopopeia of topology and nodes, the Weaver who
works locally to join two worlds that are separated, according to the autochton's myth, by a
sudden stoppage, the metastrophic caesura amassing deaths and shipwrecks: the catastrophe. He
works, according to Plato, in a discourse where rational dichotomy and the myth of the two
space-times, common measure and the Weaver, all converge. He untangles, interlaces, twists,
assembles, passes above and below, rejoins the rational, the irra tional, namely, the speakable
and the unspeakable, communication and the incommunicable. He is a worker of the single
space, the space of measure and transport, the Euclidean space of every possible displace ment
without change of state, royally substituted one fine day in place of the proliferating
multiplicities of unlinked morphologies. In order to practice dichotomy and its connected paths,
one must know that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative in which worlds
are torn asunder by a catastrophe-and only the Weaver knows how to link them again or can
reunite them. Then and only then geometry is born and myth falls silent. Then the logos or
relation unfolds, the chains and networks on the smooth space of transport, which itself alone
replaces the discourse (discours) of itineraries (parcours). Linked homogeneity erases
catastrophes, and congruent identity forgets difficult homeomorphisms. Reason, as the saying
goes, has triumphed over myth. No, it is Euclidean space that has repressed a barbarous
topology, it is transport and displace ment without obstacles that have suddenly taken the place
of the journey, the ancient journey from islands to catastrophes, from passage to fault, from
bridge to well, from relay to labyrinth. Myth is effaced in its original function, and the new space
is universal, as is reason or the ratio that it sustains, only because within it there are no more
encounters. As Plato says, one can walk there on two or four legs, follow the diagonal, freely
choose the longest or shortest road, route, ode, or period, and so on, as much as one wishes. The
earth is measured (geo-metry) by means of just measure (the King). The multiplicity, the
dangerous flock of chaotic morphologies, is subdued. Thus the Statesman is written. Hence the
two great vicissitudes of the nineteenth century. Beneath the apparent unity of Euclidean space,
mathematics, turning back toward its origins, rediscovers the teeming multiplicity of diverse and
original spaces-and topology emerges as a science. We have not finished nor shall we ever again
finish dealing with spaces. At the same moment, in an aged Europe asleep beneath the mantle of
reason and measure, mythology reappears as an authentic discourse. The coupling of these
rediscoveries becomes clear : Euler's bridge and the vessels' bridge across the Hellespont during
the storm, Listing's or Maxwell's complex and the Cretan maze.14 Let us not forget that Leibniz,
proto-inventor of the new science, said in time and against his time that one should listen to old
wives' tales.
14Leonhard Eulcr (1707-1783). the Swiss mathematician, proved in 1736 that it was impossible
to cross the seven bridges of Konigsberg in a continuous walk without recrossing any of them.
This proof was one of the early contributions to the development of topology. The vessels' bridge
refers to an incident recounted in Herodotus' Histories (7:34-37). Xerxes' army crossed the
narrow strait of the Hellespont into Greece using a bridge constructed of ships lashed together
side by side. The first attempt to construct the bridge was a failure when a storm tore the ships
apart. The second attempt succeeded. The German mathematician Johann Listing published
various works on what was earlier called the geometry of position and what we now call
topology. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) used Listing's work (notably Der Census R
umlicher Complexe) in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in order to devise methods for
describing the behavior of lines of force in an electrical field. The Cretan maze refers, of course,
to the labyrinth which contained the Minotaur and which was solved by Theseus with the help of
Ariadne's thread. - Ed.
52-53

From Garrard to Turner, the path is very simple. It is the same path that runs from Lagrange to
Carnot, from simple machines to steam en gines, from mechanics to thermodynamics-by way of
the Industrial Revolution. Wind and water were tamed in diagrams. One simply needed to know
geometry or to know how to draw. Matter was dominated by form. With fire, everything
changes, even water and wind. Look at The Forge, painted by Joseph Wright in 1772. Water, the
paddlewheel, the hammer, weights, strictly and geometrically drawn, still triumph over the ingot
in fusion. But the time approaches when victory changes camps. Turner no longer looks from the
outside; he enters into Wright's ingot, he enters into the boiler, the furnace, the firebox. He sees
matter transformed by fire. This is the new matter of the world at work, where geometry is
limited. Everything is overturned. Matter and color triumph over line, geometry, and form. No,
Turner is not a pre-impressionist. He is a realist, a proper realist. He makes one see matter in
1844, as Garrard made one see forms and forces in 1784. And he is the first to see it, the very
first. No one had really perceived it before, neither scientist nor philosopher, and Carnot had not
yet been read. Who understood it? Those who worked with fire and Turner-Turner or the
introduction of fiery matter into culture. The first true genius in thermodynamics. 56-57

Turner sees the world in terms of water and fire, as Garrard saw it in terms of figures and
motion. 57

Roger Martin, Logique contemporaine et formalisation

The cacographer and the epigraphist, the ca cophonous speaker and the auditor, exchange their
reciprocal roles in dialogue, where the source becomes reception, and the reception source
(according to a given rhythm). They exchange roles sufficiently often for us to view them as
struggling together against a common enp y_ To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to
seek to exclude him. a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man. The most
profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety -or a
variation-of the Same, it is the problem of the third man. We might call this third man the
demon, the prosopopeia of noise. 67

Alfred Tarski, Introduction to L ic and to the Methodology ofDeductive Sciences

In other words, the act of eliminating cacography, the attempt to eliminate noise, is at the same
time the condition of the apprehension of the abstract form and the con dition of the success of
communication. If the mathematician becomes impatient, it is because he thinks inside a society
that has triumphed over noise so well and for such long time that he is amazed when the problem
is raised anew. He thinks within the world of "we" and within the world of the abstract, two
isomorphic and perhaps even identical worlds. The subject of abstract mathematics is the "we" of
an ideal republic which is the city of communication maximally purged of noiselO (which,
parenthetically, shows why Plato and Leibniz were not idealists). 68

And, as has often been seen in any discussion between an empiricist and a rationalist - Locke and
Leibniz, for example- empiri sm would alwaye be correct 'I mathematics did not exist.
Empiricism is the true philosophy as soon as mathematics is bracketed. Before the latter imposes
itself and in order that it may do so, one must want not to listen to Protagoras and Callicles-
because they are right. But the more they are right, the less we can hear them:
they end up only makin noise. The arument put forth aainst Locke by Leibniz, "You do not know
mathematics," is not an ad hominem arument; it is the only loical defense possible. 70

At the extreme limits of empIrICISm, meaning is totally plunged into noise, the space of
communication is granular,ll dialogue is condemned to cacophony: the transmission of
communication is chronic transformation. Thus, the empirical is strictly essential and accidental
noise. The first "third man" to exclude is the em piricist, along with his empirical domain. And
this demon is the strongest demon, since one has only to open one's eyes and ears to see that he is
master of the world.l2 Consequently, in order for dialogue to be possible, one must close one's
eyes and cover one's ears to the song and the beauty of the sirens. In a single blow, we eliminate
hearing and noie, yision and failed drawing; in a single blow, we conceive the form and we
under stand each other. And therefore, once again, the Greek miracle, that of mathematics, must
be born at the same time-historical time, logical time, and reflexive time - as a philosophy of
dialogue and by dialogue. 70

In another essayl I have called mechanical systems "statues" or stateurs: they are based on a
fixity or an equilibrium. After Carnot they become motors. They create movement, they go
beyond the simple relation of forces, they create them by energy or power. They produce
circulation by means
of reservoirs and differences of temperature. As soon as one can build them and theorize about
them-steam or combustion engines, chemical, electrical, and turbine engines, and so forth - the
notion of time changes. T h e second law o f thermodynamics accounts for the impossibility o f
per petual motion of the second type; energy dissipates and entropy increases. From this moment
on, time is endowed with a direction. It is irreversible and drifts from order to disorder, or from
difference to the dissolution or dissemination of a homogeneous mixture from which no energy,
no force, and no motion can arise. 71-72

At the beginning of the twentieth century, communication theory introduced a series of

concepts such as information, noise, and redundancy, for which a link to thermodynamics was
rather quickly demonstrated. It was shown, for example, that information (emitted, transmitted,
or received) was a form of negentropy. 73

Right in the middle of the traditional classification of beings, a classi fication that no longer
makes sense since matter, life, and sign are nothing but properties of a system, we find exactly
what I want to talk about: the living orgaism. Most often conceived of according to the models
we have already considered, the organism has been seen as a machine (by figures and
movements, or by invariance through variations) from the classical age up to the recent notion of
homeostasis. Equilibrium and mobility. It is evidently a thermodynamic system, sometimes
operating at very high temperatures, and tending toward death according to an 73
unpredictable and irreversible time (that of ontogenesis), but going up the entropic stream by
means of phylogenetic invariances and the muta tions of selection. 74

It is a hypercomplex system, reducible only with diffi culty to known models that we have now
mastered. What can we presently say about this system ? First, that it is an information and
thermodynamic system. Indeed, it receives, stores, exchanges, and gives off both energy and
information-in all forms, from the light of the sun to the flow of matter which passes through it
(food, oxygen, heat, signals). This system is not in equilibrium, since thermodynamic stability
spells death for it, purely and simply. It is in a temporary state of imbalance, and it tends as much
as possible to maintain this imbalance. It is hence subject to the irreversible time of the second
law, since it is dying. But it struggles against this time. We can improve upon the classical
formulation of this problem. Indeed, due to the energy and information torrent which passes
through the system without interruption, it is henceforth impossible to conceive of it as an
isolated-closed system, except, perhaps, in its geno typical form. It is an open system. It should
thus be regulated by a thermodynamics, of open systems which has been developing over the
past ten years and which provides a complex theory for this state of imbalance. In and by this
imbalance, it is relatively stable. But here invariance is unique: neither static nor homeostatic, it
is homeorrhetic. It is a river that flows and yet remains stable in the continual collapse of its
banks and the irreversible erosion of the mountains around it. One always swims in the same
river, one never sits down on the same bank.
The fluvial basin is stable in its flux and the passage of its chreodes ; as a system open to
evaporation, rain, and clouds, it always-but stochasti cally-brings back the same water. What is
slowly destroyed is the solid basin. The fluid is stable ; the solid which wears away is unstable -
Hera clitus and Parmenides were both right. Hence the notion of home orrhesis.3 The living
system is homeorrhetic.
This river, almost stable although irreversible, this basin, poised on its own imbalance in a
precarious state of quasi-equilibrium in its flow toward death, ferries energy and information,
knowledge of entropy and negentropy, of order and disorder. Both a syrrhesis (rather than a
system) and a diarrhesis,4 the organism is hence defined from a global perspective. 74

3The word "homeorrhesis" is formed from the Greek words homos, meanin "same," and rhysis,
meanin "flow," Serres replaces the normal term describin the equilibrium of a self reulatin
system, "homeostasis," by "homeorrhesis" in order to emphasize the idea of continual movement
and exchane as opposed to the less dynamic idea of stasis. - Ed.
4The Greek verbs syrrhein and diarrhein mean "to flow toether" and "to flow throuh." Ain the
attempt is to capture the dynamic nature of the oranism by means of a terminoloh'Y that avoids
suestions of the static. The word "'system" is.abandoned because of its oriin in the Greek verb
hislanai, "to cause to stand." -Ed,

Not actually defined (the word meansjn effect the opposite of open), but assessed, described,
evaluated, and understood. Or, within the context of an even more general circulation which goes
from the sun to the black depths of space, the organism is a barrier of braided links that leaks like
a wicker basket but can still function as a dam. Better yet, it is the quasi stable turbulence that a
flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instant, which finds its balance in the middle of
the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else
where. And experience shows that there is no flux without eddy, no laminar flow which does not
become turbulent.5 Now, and here is the crux of the matter, all times converge in this temporary
knot: the drift of entropy or the irreversible thermal flow, wear and aging, the exhaustion of
initial redundancy, time which turns back on feedback rings or the quasi-stability of eddies, the
conservative invariance of genetic nuclei, the permanence of a form, the erratic blinking of
aleatory mutations, the implacable filtering out of all non-viable elements, the local flow
upsteam toward negentropic islands-refuse, recycling, memory, increase in com plexities. The
living organism , ontogenesis and phylogenesis combined, is of all times. This does not at all
mean that it is eternal, but rather that it is an original complex, woven out of all the different
times that our in tellect subjects to analysis or that our habits distinguish or that our spatial
environment tolerates. Homeorrhetic means at least that: the rhesis flows, but similarity pushes
upstream and resists. All the temporal vectors possessing a directional arrow are here, in this
place, arranged in the shape of a star. What is an organism? A sheaf of times. What is a living
system? A bouquet of times.
It is indeed surprising that this solution has not been reached more qUIckly. Perhaps it seemed
difficult to intuit a multitemporality. We willingly accept, however, the fact that the things
around us do not all share the same temporality: negentropic islands on or in the entropic sea, or
distinct universes as Boltzmann described them, pockets of local orders in rising entropy, crystal
depositories sunk in ashes-none of these things disturbs us. Living syrrhesis combines sea and
islands. In a completely new sense, the organism is synchronous for meanings and directions, for
the continuous and discontinuous, for the local and the global; it combines memory, invariance,
plan, message, loss, redundancy, and so forth. It is old, mortal, and the transmitter of a new
cycle. The organism is fixed on top of a temporal converter-no, it is a converter of 75

time. This is perhaps why it is able to learn about systems differentiated by their individual time:
the world, fire, and signs. 76

Francois Jacob, The Logic of LIfe: A History of Heredity,

Henri Atlan, L 'Organisation biol ique et la theorie de information
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theo o/Communication

The body is an extraordinarily complex system that creates language from information and noise,
with as many mediations as there are inte grating levels, with as many changes in sign for the
function which just occupied our attention. I know who the final observer is, the receiver at the
chain's end : precisely he who utters language. But I do not know who the initial dispatcher is at
the other end.
82
!!!!The real produces the conditions and the means for its self-knowledge. The "rational" is a tiny
island of reality, a rare summit, exceptional, as miraculous as the complex system that produces
it, by a slow conquest of the surf's randomness along the coast. All knowledge is bordered by
that about which we have no information.
It is no longer necessary to maintain the distinction between introspective knowledge, or "deep"
knowledge, and objective knowledge. There is only one type of knowledge and it is always
linked to an observer, an observer submerged in a system or in its proximity. And this observer is
structured exactly like what he observes. His position changes only the relationship between
noise and information, but he himself never effaces these two stable presences. There is no more
separation between the subject, on the one hand, and the object, on the other (an instance of
clarity and an instance of shadow). This separation makes everything inexplicable and unreal.
Instead, each term of the traditional subject object dichotomy is itself split by something like a
geographical divide (in the same way as am I, who speak and write today): noise, disorder, and
chaos on one side ; complexity, arrangement, and distribution on the other. Nothing distinguishes
me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world; we are drifting
together toward the noise and the black depths of the universe, and our diverse systemic
complexions are flowing up the entropic stream, toward the solar origin, itself adrift. Knowledge
is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional
drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called being. Virtually stable turbulence
within the flow. To be or to know from now on will be translated by : see the islands, rare or
fortunate, the work of chance or of necessity. 83

In fact, Thales has dis covered nothing but the possibility of reduction, the idea of a module, the
notion of model. The pyramid itself is inaccessible; he invents a scale, a type of ladder. . 85

Can one measure visually the distance to the sun, to the moon, to a ship, to the apex of a
pyramid? This is the whole story of Thales who discovered nothing but the precise virtues of the
human gaze, just as, somewhat later, Berkeley organized in
an erudite manner a spectacle of light beneath his microscope, a rigorous organon of optical
representation. Since he cannot use his ruler, he sets up lines of sight or, rather, he lets light
project them for him…..
As far as I know, even for accessible objects, vision alone is my guarantee that the ruler has been
placed accurately on the thing. To measure is to align ; the eye is the best witness of an accurate
covering-over. Thales invents the notion of model, of module, but he also brings the visible to
the tangible. To measure is, supposedly, to relate. True, but the relation implies a transporting: of
the ruler, of the point of view, of the things lined up, and so on. In the realm of the accessible, the
transporting is always possible: i n the realm o f the inaccessible, vision must take care o f
displacements : hence the angle of sight, hence the cast shadow. Measurement, the problem of
relation ; sight, the cast shadow ; in any case, the essential element is the transporting.
86
Thales's idea (for we must give it a name) consists simply in turning the process around, that is,
in considering and then resolving the reverse problem of the gnomon. Instead of letting the
pyramid speak of the sun, or the constant determine the scale of the variable, he asks the sun to
speak of the pyramid; that is, he asks the object in motion to provide a constant flow of
information about the object at rest. This ruse is much more clever than the one we described
earlier: the constant is no longer what gauges the regular intervals of the variable ; on the
contrary, Thales gauges, within the variable realm, the stable unknown of the constant. Or rather,
with the gnomon, whoever measured space also measured time. By inverting the terms, Thales
stops time in order to measure space. He stops the course of the sun at the precise instant of
isoceles triangles; he homogenizes the day to obtain the general case. And so do Joshua and
Copernicus. Hence it hecomes necessary to freeze time in order to conceive ofgeometry Once the
gnomon has disappeared, Thales enters into the eternity of the mathematical figure. Plato will
follow him. This is the old Bergsonian conclusion. 87

A genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.
Exchange the functions of the variable and the invariable. The origin of geometry is a confluence
of geneses. 87

The origin of knowledge acquired through everyday practice is on the side of shadow; the origin
of a practice ac
quired through knowledge is on the side of light. 90

Still, what Thales's mathematics recounts, at its very inception, is the de-centering of the subject
of clear thought with regard to the body that casts its shadow: the subject is the sun, placed
beyond the object, on the other side of the shadow. This was also Copernicus' lesson. What this
mathematics articulates is the Platonic decision that a geometry of mea surement is but a
propaedeutic. What it announces, for the first time, is a philosophy of representation, dominating
both the pure diagram and its dramatization beneath the torches of the solstice. 91

Thales's story is perhaps the instauration of the moment of representation, taken up ad infinitum
by philosophers, but also and above all by geometers, from Descartes and his representational
plane to Desargues and his point of view, from Monge and his descriptive diagram to Gergonne
and his legislative transfers:8 the first word of a perspectival geometry, of an architectural optics
of volumes, of an in tuitive mathematics immersed in a global organon of representation, the first
instance of the Ptolemaic model of knowledge. But from Thales's time to the present day we
have forgotten that the shadow was cast, transported by some supporting device, that it itself
transported certain information. We have read that first spectral analysis without analyzing its
condition. The most important question - which messenger transports (and how?) which
message?-was covered over for centuries by the blinding scenography of the shadow-light
opposition.
 91- 92
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Gerard Desargues (1591-1661), Gaspar Monge (1746-1818), and
Joseph Gergonne (1771-1859) were all instrumental in the development of descriptive and
perspective geometry.

on lucretius
Lucretius's De Rerum Natu is a treatise on physics.
….
The hymn to Venus is a song to voluptuousness, to the original power, victorious-without having
fought-over Mars and over the death in stinct, a song to the pleasure of life, to guilt-free
knowledge. The knowl edge of the world is not guilty but peaceful and creative. It is generative
and not destructive. But these words already drift toward morality-to ward deeply felt emotions,
toward ataraxia and toward the gaze, the theatrical gesture: to see everything serenely, in quiet
contemplation; to be at last free from the gods. As if Venus were not a god. As if De Rerum
Natura did not begin in prayer. A believer, an atheist? It is a clear-cut decision: there is only
transcendence. Let the figures on the mountain carouse endlessly. We shall come back later to
these peaks which are untouched by marine waterspouts. Transcendence is all there is, and it
must be allowed its own peculiarity. But it is a matter of immanence.
Venus sive'natura. Mavors sive natura. It is a question of physics and not of feelings, of nature
and not of cruel hallucinations. Immanence: laws criss-cross the world, which is unreservedly the
locus of reasons. 98

What has been modestly called Lucretius's pessimism, seen in the drifting of h;s text from
Aphrodite to the plague in Athens, is the recognition that he has lost his bet, and that his physics
has been lost as well. Thus science, or what we call science, forbids us to read this lost science.
The laws of Venus-Mother Nature cannot be deciphered by the children of Mars-these children
who die and will continue to die at the stake before they ever understand that locally, within the
walls of Athens for example, but also globally, at some indefinite time and place, the
aforementioned decomposition brings back a large, teeming, atomic
populace sliding down some thalweg, and thereby, by this declination, reconstitutes a world. 99

The order of reasons is repetitive, and the train of thought that comes from it, infinitely iterative,
is but a science of death. A science of dead things and a strategy of the kill. The order of reasons
is martial. The world is in order, according to this mathematical physics in which the Stoics are
met by Plato up the line and by Descartes further down, and where order reigns supreme over
piles of cadavers. The laws are the same everywhere ; they are thanatocratic. There is nothing to
be learned, to be discovered, to be invented, in this repetitive world, which falls in the parallel
lines of identity. Nothing new under the SUIl of identity. It is information-free, complete
redundance. The c ains of cause and effect, the fall of atoms, and the indefinite repetition of
letters are the three necessary figures of science's nullity. You might very well think that the
bloodied rulers were thrilled to find this world and to seize upon its laws of determination-their
own, in fact-the very same ones as they had: the laws of extermination . Determination, identity,
repetition, informa tion-free, not a drop of knowledge : extermination, not even> the shadow of a
life, death at the end of entropy. Then Mars rules the world, cutting up the bodies into atomized
pieces, letting them fall. This is the foedus
fati, what physics understands as a law; things are that way. It is also the legal statute in the sense
of dominant legislation: they wish things to be that way. Mars chose this sort of physics, the
science of the fall and of silence. And here again is the plague. It is always the same sequence of
events: an epidemic becomes pandemic in proportions, if not to say a pandemonium ; violence
never stops, streaming the length of the !halweg ; the atoms fall endlessly; reasons repeat
indefinitely. Buboes, weapons, miasmas, causes : it is always the same law, in which the effect
repeats the cause in exactly the same way. Nothing is new under the sun of identity and nothing
is kept under the same old sun. Nothing new and nothing born, there is no nature. There is death
forever. Nature is put to death or it is not allowed to be born. And the science of all this is
nothing, can be summed up as nothing. Stable, unchanging, redundant, it recopies the same
writing in the same atoms-letters. The law is the plague; the reason is the fall; the repeated cause
is death; the repetitive is redundance. And identity is death. Everything falls to zero, a complete
lack of information, the nothingness of knowledge , non-existence . The Same is Non-Being.
The angle of inclination cures the plague, breaks the chain of violence, interrupts the reign of the
same, invents the new reason and the new law, foedera natu e, gives birth to nature as it really is.
The minimal angle of turbulence produces the first spirals here and there. It is literally revolu
tion. Or it is the first evolution toward something else other than the same. Turbulence perturbs
the chain, troubling the flow of the identical
as Venus had troubled Mars. 100

n these lofty heights that have· been strengthened by the wisdom of the sages, one must choose.
between these two sorts of physics. The physics of the military troops in their rank and file
forma tion of parallel lines, chains, and sequences. Here are the federated ones bound to fate,
sheets of atoms bearing arms, exactly arranged, instructa, in a well-ordered fashion, in columns.
This is the learned science of the teachers, the structure of divisions, the Heraclitean physics of
war, rivalry, power, competition, which miserably repeats to death the blind shadows of its
redundant law. Arrange yourselves in ranks; you will learn about order, about the structure of
order, about the chain of reasons, the knowledge of ranks, of blood. Or else the physics of
vortices, of sweetness, and of smiling voluptuousness. On the high seas, people work among
these vortices: they are tossed about in the roll that, until recently, was called "turbination." They
are perturbed. The uexan; however, is only
cruel to a few landlubbers who have never been at sea. The sea-swept movement of intertwined
lovers, or the voluptuous movements of the roll of the high seas. Listen to the line that swirls its
spirals : suaue, uentis, uexari, uoluptas. It's the revolution of voluptuousness, the physics of
Venus chosen over that of Mars. 101
The fact that life disturbs the order of the world means literally that at first, life is turbulence.
What you see from the top of the cliff, in its sweetness, is the first-born being arising out of the
waters, Aphrodite, who has just been born in the swirl of liquid spirals, Nature being born in
smiling voluptuousness. 102

Flow did not follow the theorems of general mechanics that had been around since the eighteenth
century. Until the beginning of this century, no one could bring himself to describe flow in all its
concrete complexity. It is as difficult to become a phenome nologist again as it is to bre,ak the
contracts of fate. Epicurus and Lucre tius change the paradigm. 103

Atoms are not souls; the soul itself is atomic. 103

What shapes a generation is less what it knows than the learning process that led it to this
knowledge.
107

The fall of atoms and of bodies not at equilibrium, the forma tion of flows, turbulent fluxions,
fire. They are charged with the birth of everything and everyone. What is a living thing? A thing
in equilibrium and in disequilibrium, a flow, a vortex, heat-perhaps like any other object. The
definition is Lucretius's-as it is our own. Atomist physics is our own. 113

Venus assembles the atoms, like the compounds. She is not transcendent like the other gods, but
immanent in this world, the being of relation. She is identical to the relation. 114

The atoms flow downstream from upstream, and do not form a convention. Events are
adventitious, neither uniting nor joining in a coitus, but becoming immediately undone by abitu.
They spread out and spill over, funditus, from top to bottom and back again. Unstable, they flow
around the resistant and conjoined centers of objects. They cross, irrevocably, carried along by
the flow. 115

Here is the complement of the model. Given a flow of atoms, by the declination, the first tangent
to the given curve, and afterward, by the vortex, a relatively stable thing is constituted. It stays in
disequilibrium, ready to break, then to die and disappear but nonetheless resistant by its
established conjunctions, between the torrential flow from the upstream currents and the river
flowing downstream to the sea. It is a stationary turbulence. At the heart of this nucleus, the
coniuncta crystallize in a network. The thing thereby has weight and, as a liquid, it heats up.
Physics studies these stabilities. All around these volutes, which together are the very nature of
things, the unending flow continues to shower atoms. They occur, finding these voluminous
knots here and there, conjugate vaguely with the profiles of the objects, and then quickly move
toward the exit, disheveled and undone, resuming their parallel path. Barely a disturbance or
ripple on the water's surface. Without objects of matter and space, without quasi-stationary
formations, this movement would not be thus, nor would it be perceived. It is a poorly grounded
phenomenon, totally bereft of conjunctions. It occurs, crosses, expires, or disperses: it is an
event. 115

Slavery and freedom are symptoms of wealth and poverty, themselves symptoms of better-
connected material things. History is a symptom of nature. Time is the symptom 9f symp toms.
116

This morning my soul is tumultuous, con vulsive, and tempestuous, but from its birth and in its
very being, it is only a troublemaker, a product of a storm in the atomic cloud, of an oblique
lightning bolt. It is a taraxia, just like my body, and like things themselves. I know it; the laws of
physics tell me so. And I make my revolution. The physics of the vortex is revolutionary. It goes
back to the first disturbance, toward the original clinamen. And from there to the streaming, .to
the constancies of movements, to general invariabilities, whatever the random variations, to the
primordial paths of matter itself, pricked here and there, marked with convulsions. Thus, ataraxia
is a physical state, the fundamental state of matter; on this base, worlds are formed, disturbed by
circumstances. Morality is physics. Wisdom com pletes its revolution, going back up the helix
toward this first state of things; ataraxia is the absence of vortices. The soul of the wise man is
extended to the global universe. The wise man is the universe. He is,
when pacified, the pact itself. 121

Violence is the only problem so poorly resolved that our own culture is, without a doubt, the
continuation, through other means, of barbarian Ism .
Violence is a major component of the relations among men. It is there, running free, perhaps
fatal for us; maybe it is our destiny and our greatest risk, our greatest disequilibrium. Lucretius is
well aware of sacrificial purging, and, recognizing the sacrificial solution, sets it aside. He is also
aware of the legal solution, which is merely the interpretation of the previous solution by the
rationalization of the guilty parties. 122

The most revolutionary event in the history of mankind and, perhaps, in the evolution of
hominids in general was less, it seems to me, the attainment of abstracts orgene lities in and
through language than it was a turningawayfrom the set ofrelations that we have within
thefamily, the group, and so on, and that (mly concern us and them, toward an agreement, maybe
a confused one, but a sudden and speetfic one, about something exterior to this set. Before this
event, there was only the network of relations in which we had been plunged without any other
resort. And suddenly, a thing, something, appears outside the network. The messages exchanged
no longer say: I, you, he, we, they, and so on, but this, here. Ecce. Here is the thing itself.
122 !!!!!!
Humanization consists of the following message: here is some bread, whoever I am, whoever
you are. Hoc est, that is, in the neuter. Neuter for the gender, neutral for war. Paradoxically, there
are men or human groups only after the appearance of the object as such. The object as an object,
more or less independent from us and more or less invariable in the variation of our relations,
separates man from mammals. The political animal, the one who subordinates every object to
relations among subjects, is only a mammal among others, a wolf for example, a wolf among
wolves.In pure politics, the dictum of Hobbes, that man is a wolf to other men, is not a metaphor
but the exact index of a regression to the state which precedes the emergence of the object. 123

Listen now to the lessons of Epicureanism, which boil down to the

following: reduce to a minimum the network of relations in which you are submerged. Live in
the garden, a small space, with a few friends. No family, if it is possible, and, in any case, no
politics. But especially this. Here is the object, objects, the world, nature, physics. Aphrodite-
pleasure is born of the world and the waters. Mars is in the forum and in the armed crowd.
Reduce your relations to a minimum and bring your objects to the fore; reduce the
intersubjective to a minimum and the objective to a maximum. With your back turned on
politics, study physics. Peace through neutrality. Such knowledge brings happiness, or at least
the end of our worst pains. Forget the sacred; that means: forget the violence which founds it and
forget the religious which links men to each other. Consider the object, objects, nature. Yes,
Memmius, he who said here, ecce, hoc est, that one, is a god, a god among men, for he changed
human nature. 123

It is not politics or sociology that is

projected on nature, but the sacred. Beneath the sacred, there is violence. Beneath the object,
relations reappear. 124

Jean Baudrilllard, The Agony of Power, 2010 by Semiotext(e)

Actually, Baudrillard had two mnjor ideas: the first one, critical, was that reality lins disappeared
and was replaced by simulacra; che second one, more agonistic, was to turn this disappearance
into a symbolic challenge. 9

Like Anton in Artaud, Baudrillard realized from the onset that our culture was getting divorced
from life. 9
Baudrillard was hailed as the inventor of “post-modernism,” a concept he rejected. 9

Contrary to what Marx believed,the process of production wasn’t set up to extract from them a
surplus-value, its real purpose was to subject them to a sacrifice. 12

Clastres, a controversial political anthropologist, concluded in T6r Archeolo of Violence,

“because this love of the subjects for the master equally denatures the relations between
subjects.”’ The people's love for their own subjection became the well-hidden secret of
domination. Every relation of power is oppressive, regardless of who, cruel or benevolent,
comes to assume it. 14
Contrary to the sovereign, Indian chiefs are remarkable for their complete lack of authority. The
only power they own resides in the pm/mrs, in their capacity to maintain by their speeches an
equilibrium within the group. They recapitulate out loud, like a mantra, the tribe’s genealogy and
tradition, while no one, ostensibly, is paying attention. 16

La Boetie’s purpose wasn’t to encourage subjects to rebel, but to remind them that any
domination is illegitimate: “From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would
not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to
be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. . . sup- port him no longer; then you
will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own
weight and break in pieces.” “From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field
would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by
willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. . . sup- port him no
longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall
of his own weight and break in pieces.” La Boetie showed no respect for the sovereign’s right,
divine or not, let alone for those who subjected themselves willingly to it. There was something
that nothing could subdue, even under the most vicious tortures: the power that death affords.
Montaigne, an exile like him in his own time, wrote: “Premeditation of death is premeditation of
freedom. . . Acknowledging death frees us from every subjection and con- straint.” Only death
resists domination. 17

HEGEMON means the one who commands, orders, leads and governs (and not the one who
dominates and exploits). This brings us back to the literal meaning of the word “cybernetic
(Kubernetil::é, the art of governing). Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world j9OWér i no
longer a dual, personal or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of
calculation and integral exchange. 34

A bitter truth: radicalness is on the side of the i gence of evil. 39

A world of total, spontantaneous, perpetual communication is inkable and, in any case,

intolerable. 45
Asorbing the negative continues to be the p blem. en the emancipated slave intern izes master,
the work of the negative is abolished. mination becomes hegemony. 59

This global masquerade of power passes through several phases. First, in the name of uni versals,
the West imposes its political and economic models on the entire world along with its principle
of technic rationality. That was the essence of its domination but not yet its quintessence.
Beyond economics and politics, its quintessence relies on the hold of simulation, an operational
simulation of every value, every culture-that is where hege mony today asserts itself. No longer
through exporting techniques, values, ideologies but through the universal extrapolation of a
parody of these values. Underdeveloped countries keep align ing themselves on a simulacrum of
development and growth; they get their independence om a simulacrum of democracy, and every
endangered culture dreams of a staged rehabilitation-all sci nated by the same universal model
(of which America, while bene ting om it, is the rst victim). Thus, a er imposing its domination
through History, the West is now imposing its hegemony through the F CE of History. Global
power is the power of the simulacrum. 66

Hyper-real zones, still sub-lunar but eady extraterrestrial, at once globalized and territorialized.
Opposition to global hegemony cannot be the e as opposition to traditional oppression. It only be
something unpredictable, irreducible the preventive terror of programming, rced culation,
irreducible to the White terror of the rld order. Something antagonistic, in the literal nse, that
opens a hole in this Western agony. mething that leaves a trace in the monotony of e global order
of terror. Something that rein duces a rm of impossible exchange in this neralized exchange.
Hegemony is only broken this type of event, by anything that irrupts as m unexchangeable
singularity. A revolt, therefore that targets systematic deregulation under the cover of rced
conviviality, that targets the tot organization of reality.
75-76

It marks the point where humans de nitively nounced their destiny in vor of technological
authority and its unquestionable superiority. 81

We are, in our Promethean excesses, the only ture to have invented the perspective of ideal wth,
of total per rmance, up to the supreme e of reality. But we can no longer measure ourselves
against this vertiginous dimension. odernity (the West) can no longer respond to its values of
unlimited progress and growth. 83
Obsolescența lumii, Gunther Andres

Dar înainte de‐a face acest salt, aș dori să avansez totuși câteva considerații metodologice, mai
precis: două avertizări care mi se par necesare, indcă textele următoare nu sunt nici simple eseuri
literare, nici analize loso ce în maniera academică obișnuită, ci exemple a ceea ce s‐ar putea
desemna prin vechiul termen de „ocazionalism”, deci „ loso e a ocaziei”. Prin aceasta înțeleg
ceva ce trebuie să apară negreșit, la prima vedere, ca o absurditate, ca o încrucișare hibridă între
metafzică și jurnalism; adică o manieră de a filosofa ce are ca obiect situația actuală, respectiv
elementele caracteristice ale lumii zilelor noastre; însă nu doar ca obiect, căci abia caracterul
opac și neliniștitor al acestor elemente înseși este chiar cel care pune de fapt în mișcare acest
mod de a filosofa. Din hibriditatea proiectului rezultă un stil neobișnuit al expunerii. 42

Că există fenomene în cazul cărora accentuarea și mărirea exagerată nu pot evitate; și asta pentru
că fără această distorsiune ele ar rămâne neidentificabile sau invizibile; fenomene care,
refuzându‐se ochiului liber, ne pun în fața alternativei: „exagerare sau renunțare la cunoaștere”.
– Microscopia sau telescopia sunt cele mai la îndemână exemple, căci ele caută să obțină
adevărul prin intermediul unei imagistici exagerate. 49

Această a‐sincronie a diferitelor „facultăți” omenești, adică a‐sincronia omului cu produsele sale,
deci „decalajul prometeic”, reprezintă una dintre temele principale ale lucrării noastre.
51

Nimic mai înșelător decât subsumarea aceastei „depășiri” vechii categorii a „podoabei”; ea este
de‐a dreptul inversul ei: în vreme ce podoaba caută să ridice frumusețea corpului viu, prelucrarea
trupului caută să împrumute acestuia frumusețea lucrului făcut. 66

Vezi Robert Jungk, Die Zukunft hat schon begonnen, cap. II. Acestuia îi corespunde o sentință a
șefului departamentului american de cercetări aeriene, omas Power. – În mai 1956 o bombă cu
hidrogen a ratat cu 6 km ținta prevăzută. Solicitat să explice o eroare atât de mare, Power a
răspuns (citat de Reuter): „Astfel de lucruri se întâmplă când ai de‐a face cu ființe umane”.
Pilotul ar omis să folosească o anumită manetă. – Să luam aminte la acest răspuns. Cel care
extrage din el doar vechiul „greșeala e omenească”, acela l‐a înțeles greșit. El implică mult mai
mult: adică faptul că, întrucât greșeala e omenească, adică: întrucât omul funcționează într‐o
manieră pe care nu ne putem baza, utilizarea lui în relația cu un aparat atât de perfecționat este de
fapt nepotrivită.. Aici omul este văzut în primul rând ca origine a erorii. 67

Căci ceea ce speră persoana experimentului, cel care‐și expune trupul unei experiențe atât de
chinuitoare, este ca la absolvirea acestui examen să e într‐adevăr ceva de felul unei investituri,
primirea sa în sânul comunității „adulților”, unde să se țină cont de el, ca de unul dintre cei care
„contează”. Întrucât pentru el aparatele sunt cele care „contează”. – Experiementele de human
engineering sunt cu adevărat riturile de inițiere ale epocii roboților, iar subiecții experimentelor
sunt candidații și, finalmente, neofiții, cei mândri să fi lăsat în urmă‐le „copilăria” și să fi trecut
prin „educația neamului omenesc” care‐i la ordinea zilei. 78

Să consideri „genurile” existente (inclusiv specia „om”), a căror eidos și constanță morfologică
le face să fie ceea ce sunt, ca fiind ceva „bun” sau „obligatoriu” și să le sancționezi din urmă
(respectiv să condamni transformarea lor drept ceva „neautorizat cosmic”), îmi este însă cu totul
străin. 83

Nu, alterarea trupului nostru nu este fundamental nouă și nemaiîntâlnită deoarece ne dispensăm
de „destinul nostru morfologic” sau întrucât transcendem limita stabilită pentru capacitățile
noastre, ci fiindcă realizăm această transformare de dragul aparatelor noastre, pentru că facem
din ele un model al alterărilor noastre; deci întrucât renunțăm să mai facem din noi
măsura, limitându‐ne astfel libertatea sau abandonând‐o. De aceea expresia „hibrid ” nu
pare tocmai potrivită, oricât de aventuroase ar experimentele și țelurile experimentelor noastre.
Ce‐i drept, în sensul împerecherii selecționate, în sensul că noi înșine producem noi
hermafrodiți, noi încrucișări între fabricanți și fabricate, termenul are sens. Dar în sensul
obișnuit, al „excesului” și al „superbiei”? Renunțările nu sunt totuși acțiuni hibride. Iar „a se
măsura” nu‐i „nemăsură”. Ci reprezintă mai curând simptome ale negării de sine, ale
autoumilirii. 84

Acest „human engineer” este ambele: fără măsură și umil, hibrid și submisiv. Atitudinea sa este
„autoumilire excesivă” și „umilință hibridă”. 84

Pe lângă faptul că‐i inept în comparație cu produsele sale, omul are și viața mai scurtă, e mai
muritor decât acestea.
87

Jazzul a dat voce nu numai „letargiei existenței arhaice” sau „poftei clocotitoare a sexului”, ci,
mereu în același timp, obstinației precise a mașinii de ștanțat, ce rupe impasibil, aseptic, în bucăți
identice, glissando‐ul animalității. ….
Prin aceasta nu afirmăm, evident, că din energia vitală câștigată din dans ar extras un lucru
mecanic. Dar întrucât mașina nu tolerează, în pretențiile sale autocratice, nicio altă energie pe
lângă a sa, ea eliberează prin frenezia dansului energia vitală suplimentară și o face să se
împrăștie; și anume în așa fel încât însuși procesul răbufnirii preia deja tipul de mișcare al
mașinii. De aceea melodiile care pun în mișcare acest dans poartă în sine, fără excepție, carac‐
teristicile unui mers obiectual și automat: furor‐ul lor al repetiției, neutralizând orice noțiune a
timpului, călcând în picioare orice timp, este furor‐ul mașinii mergând mereu la fel43; iar
sincopa ce le‐a devenit principiu nu este o caracteristică „pur muzicală”, semni ‐ când o „contră”;
dimpotrivă, este simbolul obstinației necontenite și neslăbite cu care mașina întrerupe ritmul
trupului; într‐un fel, interferența, batută din nou în ecare tact, este mereu și mereu biruitoarea
recuzare a trupului și a pretenția acesteia de a „conta” și ea și de a‐și avea propria‐i iterabilitate.
Dar întrucât acum trupul, spre a‐și devedi conformismul față de mașină, împărtășește el însuși
această recuzare, ceea ce dansea‐ ză dansatorul este nu doar apoteoza mașinii, ci totodată
serviciu funerar și celebrare a conivenței, pantomimă entuziastă a propriei sale înfrângeri totale.
–
124-125

Că dansatorii sunt realmente „terminați” prin acest ritual, iar egoitatea lor este cu pierdută
complet se poate demonstra prin‐ tr‐un fenomen absolut frapant: anume prin faptul că, în orgie,
își pierd chipul. Și nu mă refer aici la caracterul clișeizat, șablonard, al zionomiilor astăzi, atât de
adesea observat, nici la faptul că, în zilele noastre, fețele, ștanțate de modele identice, devin
produse de serie asemănătoare unele cu altele, iar o față se deosebește de alta așa cum se
deosebește o batistă de alta: adică prin defectele individuale ale țesăturii, ci am în vedere
pierderea însăși a acestor chipuri mai mult sau mai puțin șablonizate. Această pierdere se poate
arăta în mai multe feluri. De pildă, prin aceea că însuși chipul e neglijat și se deteriorează în
timpul orgiei, că încetează să mai e oglindă a individualității și spațiu central de expresie a
omului, că se transformă într‐o simplă parte a corpului, a cărei expunere goală și necontrolată nu
o depășește cu nimic pe cea a umărului sau a fesei; e prin aceea că el, oarecum separat de orgie
și dez‐informat cu privire la ce se întâmplă la etajul inferior, devine pokeristic și neted, ind
„purtat” ca „dotă” doar pentru că nu poate predat la garderobă înainte de începerea ritualului; e
prin aceea că e vitri cat în timpul orgiei – și când spun asta înțeleg că el încetează, în mod
evident, să vadă ceva sau să mai e conștient de propria‐i vizibili‐ tate. 126

Această pretenție nu este falsă indcă această muzică ar „prea ușoară”, indcă ar doar „popular
music”, ci invers, indcă ea este teribil de serioasă, prea serioasă pentru sala de concert. Și înțeleg
prin asta că afectează oamenii incomparabil mai adânc și mai puternic, le modi că „ethos”‐ul (în
sensul moral‐muzical al gre‐ cilor) incomparabil mai radical decât o pot face concertele atât de
sărbătorești astăzi, căci atunci când apoteozele de nal simfonice au amuțit, ascultătorii lor –
simplu public – sunt lăsați cu o „trăire” care se disipează imediat, indcă nu are absolut nimic de‐a
face cu existența din afara sălii de concert. Nu există nimic mai neserios decât efectul muzicii
serioase. Și, dimpotrivă, nimic mai serios: adică nimic mai încărcat de consecințe, nimic mai
periculos, nimic mai distrugător decât efectul celei catalogate cu atâta ușurință ca „neserioasă”.
Căci ea reprezintă o intervenție reală, o metamorfoză violentă, și anume una care are enorm de
mult de‐a face cu lumea și viața dinafara sălii, indcă tipul de existenţă care obsedează oamenii
este tocmai cel al mașinii, adică tipul de existență care domnește de dimineața până seara, și
indcă ea îi conformează complet pe oameni acestui tip de existenţă. 128

Sursa principală a confortării este – oricât de paradoxal ar suna – alienarea însăși. 167

Într-un basm molusian apare o zână rea care vindecă un orb; dar nu-l vindecă luându-i albeața, ci
lovindu-l cu încă o orbire: adică orbindu-l cu privire la faptul propriei lui orbiri, facându-l să uite
cum arată realitatea în realitate; și ce-i mai face încă este să-i trimită necontenit vise. Această
zână se aseamănă alienării travestite în confortare.
168

Când, întrând într-un compartiment al unui vagon Pullman, i-am urat bună-dimineața unei
călătoare care tocmai se lăsa în voia unei voci bărbătești ce-i era, evident, foarte dragă și care
răsuna vioaie din micul ei aparat, ea a tresărit de parcă eu eram fantoma, nu domnul din cutie; și
de parcă m-aș făcut vinovat de o îngrozitoare tulburare a liniștii domestice, a celei reale, a ei, mai
precis a vieții ei amoroase.
170

Dacă aici mai poate vorba despre „subiect” sau „subiecte”, ele constau doar în organele sale: în
ochii săi, care se a ă la imagini; urechile lui, care-s la match; maxilarele, care-s la gum – pe scurt:
identitatea sa e atât de fundamental dezorganizată, încât o căutare a „lui însuși” ar căutarea a
ceva inexistent. El este distras nu doar (precum anterior) într-o multitudine de locuri ale lumii,
ci într-o pluralitate de funcțiuni individuale.21 182
Dacă-i îndreptățit să vedem în tumoră o boală sui generis: adică acea stare în care forța centrală a
organismului nu mai este capabilă să țină sub control toate celulele, astfel că acestea încep să
prolifereze ecare pe cont propriu, atunci această independență a funcțiunilor individuale tratată
aici este un analogon psihic al tumorei. 182
191

De fapt, orice marfă este, în măsura în care este expusă și oferită – și ea este marfă doar în acest
fel, doar ca ofertă –, deja propria ei evaluare; mai precis, propria ei laudă de sine. 207

Ceea ce-i valabil cu privire la știre: că ne face neliberi indcă ori ne arată absentul numai în
versiunea prede nită, preparată, predicată a măr i, ori deloc, este valabil cu atât mai mult cu
privire la emisiunea TV: suntem absolviți de judecata proprie; și cu atât mai de nitiv cu cât nu ne
putem feri să acceptăm judecata livrată drept realitatea însăși. 208

Într-adevăr, dacă un istoric ar încerca peste o sută de ani să alcătuiască un mozaic al epocii
zilelor noastre din orilegiul pe care-l oferă revistele noastre ilustrate ca ind „reali- tatea de azi”,
ar ajunge nu doar la un rezultat absurd în genere, nu doar la unul mult prea înfricoșător, ci în
același timp la unul mult prea plictisitor. – 213

Șabloanele sunt, așadar, forme de condiționare apriori; dar nu doar ale ideației, nu doar ale
înțelegerii, nu doar ale simțirii, ci și ale comportamentului și acțiunii – deci matrițe cu un spectru
atât de larg al utilizării și cu o asemenea universalitate a intervenției cum n-au prevăzut niciodată
nici măcar loso i cei mai speculativi; cu atât mai puțin epoca empirismului în care chipurile
trăim. 214-215

Standarizării, ba chiar producției zilelor noastre îi revine, în consecință, nu doar sarcina

standardizării produselor, ci și cea a ne- voilor (care tânjesc după produsele standardizate). 217

Astfel că, pentru a închisă această sură, trebuie mobilizată o forță ajutătoare. Iar această forță
ajutătoare este morala. Evident că și aceasta, pentru a aptă ca forță ajutătoare, este premodelată,
și anume în așa fel încât să e considerat „imoral”, adică nonconformist, cel care nu dorește ceea
ce trebuie să primească; 217

Aceasta înseamnă, pe de-o parte, o anumită comoditate: aceea că nu mai e nevoie de niciun fel
de gânduri cu privire la viață, nu mai trebuie luată nicio decizie proprie, indcă ea e deja luată și
anunțată în gura mare de ecare dată de membrii însetați ai familiei de mărfuri, iar asta e valabil zi
după zi: „time goes on”. Însă, pe de altă parte, nu-i comod, totuși, indcă el e stăpânit, angajat și
vânat de miile de membri ai acestei familii care-l țin în mișcare, indcă viața se petrece sub ordin,
pentru că mereu s-a decis deja asupra nevoilor viitoare, deci pentru că nu se mai găsește timp sau
timp liber pentru formularea unei dorințe proprii, ba nici măcar timp pentru a o simți. – 224
În orice caz, visul său nu-i altul decât cel al violării totale a materiei lumii.
233

În ochii ontolo- gilor economici, misiunea noastră este deci de a aduce lumea „la sine” și, pentru
a o aduce la această determinare a sa, de a o aduce la noi: în furnale, fabrici, uzine electrice,
reactoare nucleare, stații radio și TV. Acestea sunt „casele Ființei” în care omul caută să supună
transformării lumea ca totalitate: o sarcină enormă, întrucât de niția clasică a lui homo faber deja
nu se mai potrivește acestui om cuprins de febra transformării. Clasicul homo faber se mărginea
să utilizeze bucăți ale lumii pentru a-și construi propria-i lume, neprevăzută de lumea însăși,
văzându-și în asta sensul și liberta- tea. El lăsa intact ceea ce nu-i era de trebuință. În vreme ce
omul actual vede în lumea ca întreg eo ipso doar material; mai curând se silește la noi nevoi
decât să lase ințarea intactă și neutilizată; și vrea să prelucreze, să transforme, să „termine”
lumea ca totalitate. Pretenția sa nu-i, în mod sigur, cu nimic mai mică și cu nimic mai puțin
universală decât cea religioasă sau cea a loso ei sistematice.
234

Ceea ce doar există e precum ne ința. Ceea ce doar există e risipă. Dacă trebuie să e, atunci
trebuie recoltat. Iar această recoltare, această recoltare a întâmplărilor și a istoriei are loc în cea
mai mare parte în emisiuni TV: muribundul, dacă-i transmis, e salvat; înfrângerea, dacă-i
multiplicată, e câștigată; ruga solitară, reprodusă în milioane de exemplare, e auzită. Abia acum,
abia aici sunt ele. Iar ceea ce vor fost, odată ce-au devenit monedă ieftină, se stinge, apunând în
aparența lipsei de ință. –
236

„Realul original” nu este deci astăzi, în sensul cel mai larg, alt- ceva decât pretextul pentru
cópiile sale. Și a participa „cu adevărat” la asemenea „originale” îi tentează pe contemporanii
deveniți ei înșiși cópie la fel de puțin precum îl tentează pe cititor să ajungă la matrițele turnate
ale paginilor, sau cum îl tentează pe locuitorul peșterii platonice să intre în posesia ideii.
240

Însă tocmai această lipsă de rezistență a lumii transmise este, surprinzător, cea care împiedică
înțelegerea și interpretarea. Sau poate nu chiar atât de suprinzător: nu percepem pastila netedă
care alunecă atât de ușor pe gât în jos, dar simțim bucata de carne pe care trebuie să o mestecăm
mai întâi. Și lumea transmisă este de felul pastilei, „ușor de înghițit”. – Sau, folosind o altă
imagine: indcă se lasă prea ușor (oarecum ca o „realité trop facile” analoagă unor „femmes
faciles”), indcă este prea cooperantă, prea disponibilă, indcă în clipa apariției sale s-a și predat,
de aceea n-ajungem s-o „luăm” la propriu, sau nu ajungem s-o cucerim, sau să-i cucerim întâi
sensul.
246
Apărarea tragi-comică:
contemporanul produce rezistențe ca obiecte de consum
248

[…] dominația este atât de totală, încât și activitatea a devenit o variantă a pasivității, luând
forma unui a face în zadar sau a unui a nu face chiar și acolo unde strădania este ucigașă sau
chiar mortală. De aceea nimeni nu poate contesta că Estragon și Vladimir, care nu fac ab- solut
nimic, sunt reprezentativi pentru milioane de oameni activi. 268

Mai curând, indcă în cele din urmă nu-și pierd speranța, nu sunt în stare să-și pierdă speranța, ei
sunt de fapt ideologi naivi de un optimism incurabil. Ceea ce prezintă Beckett nu este așadar
nihilis- mul, ci incapacitatea omului de a nihilist chiar și în situația cea mai lipsită de șanse
imaginabilă. 271

dacă s-a terminat, începem altă partidă, Estragon se joacă da capo de-a „încalțatul-descălțatul”;
iar asta nu pentru a se arăta nebun, ci pentru a ne face nebuni pe noi, adică pentru a arăta, cu
rețeta „inversiunii”, că nici jocurile noastre (a căror lipsă de sens e deja acoperită și ascunsă de
recunoașterea publică) nu-s cu nimic mai bune ca ale sale. Sensul inversiunii din scena „Estragon
se joacă de-a încălțatul-descălțatul” sună astfel: „și jocurile noastre sunt un joc «de-a încălțatul-
descălțatul»”, ceva fantomatic, un a face ca și cum am face. 278

Strădania de a găsi niște trăsături totuși pozitive sau măcar comode acestei imagini a omului și a
lumii n-ar echivala, după tot ce am văzut, decât unui simplu gest de protest. Și cu toate acestea,
piesa lui Beckett se deosebește într-un punct de toate celelalte documente nihiliste în care se
exprimă literar prezentul: în ton. Tonul acestor documente este în mod obișnuit sau unul grav,
care poate numit pe bună dreptate „animalic” (întrucât el nu cunoaște căldura umană a umorului)
sau cinic (întrucât nu mai depinde și nu mai apelează la oameni), adică, din nou, inuman. Însă
clovnul – și am arătat în ce măsură este această piesă clovne- scă – nu-i nici brutal și nici cinic, ci
de o tristețe care, re ectând tristețea soartei oamenilor ca atare, solidarizează inimile tuturor
oamenilor, ușurând astfel solidarizarea. Nu a fost o întâmplare că nicio gură a secolului nostru nu
a trezit atâta apreciere ca cea ridicolă a lui Chaplin. Farsa pare să devenit refugiul iubirii de
oameni; complicitatea celor triști, ultima consolare. Și chiar dacă ceea ce se ivește din adâncurile
inconsolabile și pustii ale lipsei de sens: simplul ton al umanității, e e și numai o câtime de
consolare, și chiar dacă nici consolarea nu știe de ce consolează și nici în care Godot își a ă
consolare – ea dovedește că mai importantă decât sensul e căldura umană și că nu meta zicianul
are dreptul ultimului cuvânt, ci numai iubitorul de oameni. –
281

Ce împiedică împiedicarea
Să presupunem că Bomba ar detonată:
A mai vorbi aici de o „faptă” n-ar potrivit. Procesul prin care ar declanșată o asemenea faptă ar
atât de mediat, atât de inscrutabil, compunându-se din atât de mulți pași și etape inter- mediare
aparținând atâtor instanțe, din care niciun pas n-ar acel pas, încât în cele din urmă ecare doar ar
făcut ceva, dar nimeni n-ar „făcut-o”. În cele din urmă nu va fost nimeni. –
296

La acestea se adaugă faptul că, dacă o organizație funcționează, ideea moralității acțiunii este
înlocuită automat de funcționarea lină. Dacă organizarea unei întreprinderi este „în ordine” și
merge curat, atunci și efectul însuși al activității pare curat și în ordine. Și curat nu doar indcă
întregul funcționează așa de bine, ci totodată și pentru că întregul ca întreg nu este deloc vizibil.
Întrucât ecare din nenumărații lucrători specializați care sunt prinși în mersul ei nu vede decât
acel pas pe care are a-l face el însuși; și întrucât ecare este considerat conștiincios atâta vreme cât
își face pasul său conștiincios, nu există pentru el nimic imoral în lung și-n lat. Sau altfel spus:
pentru el nu există în lung și-n lat nimic imoral, deoarece pentru el nu există „în lung și-n lat”.
„Mizerie împărțit la o mie egal curățenie.” (zicală molusiană) 297

Dacă cineva ar folosi Bomba în speranța prostească de a aduce la îndeplinire un anumit scop nit,
efectul pe care l-ar obține n-ar mai avea nicio asemănare cu scopurile sale. Ceea ce ar apărea n-ar
că drumul ar dispărea în destinație, respectiv mijlocul în scop, ci invers, că scopul și-ar găsi
sfârșitul în efectul acestui presupus „mijloc”. Și anume nu într-un efect, ci într-o serie
imprevizibilă de efecte, în care sfârșitul vieților noastre n-ar decât un element între altele. – 301-
302

la fel cum nu există o căsătorie de probă efectuată doar experimenti causa, care să poată ștearsă
din viața celor care „voiau doar să vadă și ei cum e”, la fel cum nu există o fascinație încercată
„doar o dată” a unei țări, căci ceea ce te încearcă devine destin, iar trecutul o parte de neșters a
istoriei, la fel cum nu există un ex- periment de sterilizare în masă, indcă subiecții ei, în măsura
în care îi supraviețuiesc, sunt ruinați faptic – la fel nu există explozii atomice produse
experimenti causa „numai o dată” sau „numai de câteva ori”. Căci ceea ce desemnăm prin
cuvințelul „numai” nu mai are corespondent în realitate. Nimic nu-i numai „numai”; și nimic nu-
i „numai întâmplare”. Fiecare „o dată” devine imediat „o dată pentru totdeauna”. 313

Și tocmai asta se întâmplă astăzi, fapt demostrat de acel pilot de bombardier care, întrebat la
întoarcere de un interviator la ce s-a gândit în timpul zborului, a răspuns, indiferent dacă din
cinism sau naivitate: „N-am putut și n-am putut să-mi scot din minte cei 175 de dolari pe care îi
mai am de achitat pentru frigiderul de-acasă”.
320

Dacă așa stau lucrurile, atunci, în măsura în care nu-i deja totul pierdut, sarcina decisivă astăzi
constă în dezvoltarea fanteziei morale, adică în încercarea de a depăși „decalajul”, de a măsura
capacita- tea și elasticitatea imaginării și simțirii noastre cu mărimile mari ale propriilor noastre
produse și cu magnitudinea incalculabilă a distrugerii pe care o putem produce; prin urnare, de a
aduce la același nivel cu făptuirea imaginarea și simțirea. – 325

O întreagă generație a celor care au acum cincizeci de ani fusese fascinată când, în ultimele sale
poezii, Rilke vorbise de simțire în termeni de „împlinire”, mai precis de „a nu fi împlinit” sau,
trimițând sumbru la viitor, de „a nu mai fi împlinit”. (Ca de exemplu despre „împlinirea iubirii”
în Elegii duineze.) ….Dar ideea că trebuie să și poți să simți nu fusese niciodată exprimată până
atunci în literatura contemporană. Și dacă eram fascinați de cuvintele sale, asta se întâmpla
pentru că noi, fără a percepe fundamentul, simțeam că prin indicarea simțirii insuficiente era
arătat un defect decisiv al zilelor noastre, și că prin „simțirea împlinită” era atinsă într-adevăr o
sarcină decisivă. –
325

Fiindcă putem înțelege aceste crime abia dacă le vedem în raporturile lor speci ce, adică: abia
atunci când se pune întrebarea după ce model de întreprindere funcționau. Iar răspunsul la
această întrebare este că făptașii, cel puțin mulți dintre ei, nu se purtau, în principiu, în situațiile
în care comiteau crimele, deloc diferit de cum fuseseră obișnuiți în domeniul lor de muncă, cel
care-i formase. 341

Întreprinderea este deci locul în care este produs omul „inconștient medial”, locul de naștere al
conformistului. Omul modelat acolo nu trebuie decât să e transferat în sfera altor sarcini, într-o
altă „întreprindere”, și dintr-o dată, fără să se schimbe în mod esențial, el funcționează
monstruos; dintr-o dată, suspendarea conștiinței sale, care era deja un fait accompli, capătă
aspectul purei lipse de conștiință, suspendarea responsabilității sale pe cea a purei „moral
insanity”. Atâta vreme cât nu privim în față această situație, deci nu recunoaștem că
întreprinderea actuală este forja stilului de muncă după modelul conivenței, rămânem incapabili
să înțelegem gura contemporanului conformist; de a înțelege, prin urmare, ceea ce are el de-a
face cu oamenii „impenitenți” care refuzau, în procesele de care vorbeam mai înainte, să regrete
sau să-și asume crimele lor „co-înfăptuite”. 343

li se cere oamenilor (și anume oamenilor obișnuiți) să încorporeze simultan două tipuri radical
diferite de existență: să se comporte,ca muncitori,„conformist”,„acționând”însă non-con-
formist; deci să ducă și să mențină o viață schizofrenică, o viață care ar dominată de un decalaj
pentru totdeauna imposibil de echilibrat între două tipuri de acțiune care se contrazic. Însă
aceasta: schizofrenia ca postulat ar de fapt ceva atât de îngrozitor, încât toate cerințele, cerințele
morale, chiar și cele mai excesive, care au fost impuse omului s-ar reduce, în comparație cu acest
postulat, la niște sugestii amabile.
345

!!! Și astfel ajungem la ultima noastră teză: stăpânii Bombei sunt nihiliști în acțiune. 349
….
Ei nu se aseamănă psihologic niciunui astfel de tip. Mulți dintre ei nici măcar n-au auzit vreodată
de nihilism, poate cu excepția unor expresii precum „depășirea nihi- lismului”, sau „cruciadă
contra nihilismului”, sau altele asemenea. Și desigur că majoritatea sunt în viața privată oameni
echilibrați, decenți și listini, care nu sunt capabili nici de acea melancolie și nici de acel cinism
fără de care nu o scoate la capăt niciun nihilist de duzină care nu vrea să-și dezonoreze profesia;
ei sunt „pozitivi” până-n măduva oaselor, au conturile la vedere și principii sănătoase.
Și cu toate acestea sunt nihiliști. Căci și dacă s-ar declara adepții celei mai sănătoase loso i și
celei mai pozitive religii, iar nu de formă–înfațainstanței„spirituluiobiectiv”caracterullor, loso a
lor, religia lor, toată integritatea lor ar cu toate acestea numai de podoabă și numai ipocrizie,
indcă ei, că o știu sau nu, că o vor sau nu, țin în realitate de altă loso e și au o altă morală: anume
loso a și morala lucrului care depinde de ei și de care ei depind. Căci în forul „spiritului obiectiv”
e valabil faptul că: „Fiecare are acele principii pe care le au lucrurile pe care le posedă”. 350

Nu există însă nimic mai îngrozitor decât zâmbetul cu adevărat binevoitor al zeităților pierzaniei.
357

Căci Bomba a reușit totuși ceva: există o luptă a omenirii. Ceea ce religiile și loso ile, imperiile și
revoluțiile n-au fost în stare: să ne facă realmente o omenire – i-a reușit ei. Ceea ce ne poate lovi
pe toți, ne privește pe toți. Acoperișul care se prăbușește a devenit acoperișul nostru al tuturor.
Ca morituri suntem acum noi înșine. Cu adevărat pentru prima oară. 363

Mai degrabă ecare religie este un sistem al sentimentelor sui generis; și ecare întemeiere a unei
religii a fost o adevărată revoluție în istoria emoțională a omenirii, o adevărată întemeiere a
sentimentelor. – 367

Sentimentele noi nu sunt o noutate. Noutatea constă doar în a spune lucrurilor pe nume. –
367

că omul nu are a accepta dota sentimente- lor ca primită de-a gata odată pentru totdeauna, că
el mai curând inventează mereu noi sentimente; și anume sentimente care depășesc pe de-a-
ntregul volumul obișnuit al su etului său și care îi solicită elasticitatea și capacitatea de a
concepe, sentimente care pot numite „suprasolicitări”.
Nu este întâmplător că mărturiile noastre trebuie aduse din sfera artei, respectiv a muzicii. Căci
doar acolo: în domeniul fan- teziei, ne este lăsată libertatea; în vreme ce în domeniul libertății,
deci al moralei, fantezia ne-a fost retezată. –
370
ASHBERY

“The academy of the future is

Opening its doors and willing
The fruitless sunlight streams into domes,
The chairs piled high with books and papers.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooksss

“There is after all a kind of promise

To the affair of the waiting weather.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“You see how honey crumbles your universe

Which seems like an institution—how many walls?”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged

And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end
And no attitude which, in the end, would save you.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

tether
festering

“And I sing amid despair and isolation

Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps

Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you,”

You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“But the condition

Of those moments of timeless elasticity and blindness
Was being joined secretly so
That their paths would cross again and be separated
Only to join again in a final assumption rising like a shout
And be endless in the discovery of the declamatory
Nature of the distance traveled. All this is
Not without small variations and surprises, yet
An invisible fountain continually destroys and refreshes the previsions.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“Old heavens,
You lying there above the old, but not ruined, fort,
Can you hear, there, what I am saying?
For it is you I am parodying,
Your invisible denials. And the almost correct impressions
Corroborated by newsprint, which is so fine.
I call to you there, but I do not think that you will answer me.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

to bugger
“Into the secretive, vaporous night with all of us!
Into the unknown, the unknown that loves us, the great unknown!”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“Scarcely we know where to turn to avoid suffering, I mean

There are so many places.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“The sky is white, yet full of outlined stars—it must be night,

Or an early springtime evening, with just a hint of dampness and chill in the air—
Memory of winter, hint of the autumn to come—
Yet the lovers congregate anyway, the lights twinkle slowly on.
Cars move steadily along the street.
It is a scene worthy of the poet’s pen, yet it is the
fire demon
Who has created it, throwing it up on the dubious surface of a phosphorescent fountain
For all the world like a poet. But love can appreciate it,
Use or misuse it for its own ends. Love is stronger than fire.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“In the meantime, back to dreaming,

Your most important activity.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

craggy
hawthorn
cluck
baggy
hoarfrost
“There has, however, been this change, so complete as to be invisible:
You might call it … “passion” might be a good word.
I think we will call it that for easy reference. This room, now, for ”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“It all ends in a smile somewhere,

Notes to be taken on all this,
And you can see in the dark, of which the night
Is the continuation of your ecstasy and apprehension.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

“One seizes these moments as they come along, afraid

To believe too much in the happiness that might result
Or confide too much of one’s love and fear, even in
Oneself.”

Excerpt From: John Ashbery. “Rivers and Mountains.” iBooks.

Performance, Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Edited by Philip

Auslander, 2003

Many philosophers and performance theorists. including Judith Butler, Derrida and Andrew
Parker (to name but three whose work is represented in the present collection) have both
critiqued Austin’s concept of the performative and extended it beyond the realm of language
theory. 2

For Féral, performance art makes use of materials similar to those of theatre but to very different
- even opposed - ends. Performance art negates theatre's dependence on representation and
narrative and partakes of Friedian presentness: "since it tells of nothing and imitates no one,
performance escapes all illusion and representation. With neither past nor future, performance
takes place" (1982: 177, original emphasis). 6

For Phelan, the power of performance as a political discourse resides in its evanescence. Live
performance exists only in the moment; it disappears and, in Phelan's view, thus resists a
political economy based in production, reproduction, and the circulation of reproductions. 10
Foster proposes replacing theatrical and linguistic models of gender with a model derived from
dance: according to this view, gender is choreographed on the body and then performed in
various ways by individuals. 14

In The Performing SeIf (1971), Iiterary critic Richard Poirier examines the poetry and prose of
such writers as Henry James, Robert Frost and Norman Mailer as self-conscious performances of
their own respective senses of themselves as performers and the act of writing as performative.
14

AlIsopp is concerned with the performativity of the acts of writing and reading themselves, but
from the point of view of a writer or performer rather than that of a Iiterary critic. Kimberly W.
Benston (2000) also examines literary and musical texts as self-conscious performances of
identity, focusing on the question of how (or if) African-American artists perform African-
American identity through their artistic productions. 15

the discourse on performance is very, very far from being monological. 18

Goffman's position there is that "What the human nature of males and females really consists of,
then, is a capacity to Iearn to provide and to read depictions of masculinity and femininity and a
willingness to adhere to a schedule for presenting these pictures, and this capacity they have by
virtue of being persons, not females or males. One might just as well say there is no gender
identity. There is only a schedule for the portrayal of gender" (27). 19

The idea of the sanctity of a territory so delimited has sometimes been confused with the belief
in the sanctity of the entire earth as the Earth Mother. In China, according to the most ancient
documents, the deity was not the earth as such, but each plot of ground was sacred for its
inhabitants and owners. It seems to me that the ease of Loango, the territory of Greek cities, and
that of Rome are all analogous. The prohibition against entering a given territory is therefore
intrinsically magico-religious. 28

Today, in our part of the world, one country touches another; but the situation was quite different
in the times when Christian lands comprised only a part of Europe. Each country was surrounded
by a strip of neutral ground which in practice was divided into sections or marches. 28

Because of the pivoting of sacredness, the territories on either side of the neutral zone are
sacred in relation to whoever is in the zone, but the zone, in turn , is sacred for the
inhabitants of the adjacent territories. Whoever passes from one to the other finds himself
physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers
between two worlds. It is this situation which I have designated a transition, and one of the
purposes of this book is to demonstrate that this symbolic and spatial area of transition may be
found in more or less pronounced form in all the ceremonies which accompany the passage from
one social and magico-religious position to another. 28

The neutral zone shrinks progressively till it ceases to exist except as a simple stone, a beam, or a
threshold (except for the pronaos, the narthex, the vestibule, etc.). The portal which symbolizes a
taboo against entering becomes the postern of the ramparts, the gate in the walls of the city
quarter, the door of the house. The quality of sacredness is not localized in the threshold only; it
encompasses the lintels and architrave as well. 29

Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth,
goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play. 38

Laughter, for instance, is in a sense the opposite of seriousness without being absolutely bound
up with play. Children's games. football, and chess are played in profound seriousness; the
players have not the slightest inclination to laugh. It is worth noting that the purely physiological
act of laughing is exclusive to man. whilst the significant function of play is common to both
men and animals. 40

First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity. 41

Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthctic factor is identical with the
impulse lo create orderly form, which animates play in all lis aspects. The words we use ta
denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with witch we try to
describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution,
etc. 43
Baby reaching for a toy, pussy patting a bobbin, a little girl playing ball - all want to achieve
something difficult, to succeed, to end a tension. Play is “tense”, as we say. 44

…an activity coonnected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.46

Examples can be taken from all over the world. According to ancient Chinese lore the purpose of
music and dance is to keep the world in its right course and to force Nature into benevolence
towards man. The year’s prosperity will depend on the right performance of sacred contests and
the seasonal feasts. If these gatherings do not take place the crops will not ripen.
…
The function of the rite, therefore, is far from being merely imitative; it causes the wor- shippers
to participate in the sacred happening itself. As the Greeks would
say, "it is methectic rather than mimetic": It is "a helping-out of the action". 47

Frivolity and ecstasy are the twin poles between which play moves . 51
If we confine ourselves to the sacred rites in archaic culture it is not impossible to adumbrate the
degree of seriousness with witch they are performed. As far as I know, ethnologists and
anthropologists concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great religious feasts
of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying
consciousness of things “not being real”. A vivid picture of this attitude is given by Ad. E.
Jensen in his book on the circumcision and puberty ceremonies in savage society. The men seem
to have no fear of the ghosts that are hovering about everywhere during the feast and appear to
everyone at its heights. 52

The really important thing is the mood, he concludes by saying R.R. Marett, in his chapter on
“Primitive Credulity” in The Threshold of Religion, develops the idea that a certain element of
“make-believe” is operative in all primitive religious. Whether one is a sorcerer or sorcerized one
is always knower and dupe at once. 53

The concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness. 55

Even for the cultured adult of today the mask still retains something of its terrifying power,
although no religious emotions are attached to it. The sight of the masked figure, as a purely
aesthetic experience, carries us beyond "ordinary life" into a world where something other than
daylight reigns: it carries us back to the world of the savage, the child and the poet which is the
world of play. 55

The more secular performances of popular culture are put on in public halls before mixed
audiences and are usually sponsored by cultural associalions or sabhas, when they are not
completely commercialized. 63

There are no professional dancers, actors, doctors, or image-makers in this village, although
residents know about these specialists from having seen them in neighboring villages and towns
or occasionally when they pass through the village. 65

The performer in the latter case must be something of a singer, a linguist, and an “artist”, as well
as a dramatic storyteller. this art form is relatively recent in the Tamil country, having been
developed about 250 years ago from Maharastrian models. It is practiced by non-Brahmans as
well as by Brahmans, and one of the outstanding artists is a woman. Then there is the variety of
dance and dramatic forms, traditional and modern, through which themes from Ramayana are
presented. Folk as well as classical forms are used, and both have been adapted to such mass
media as the film. 68

"The song should be sustained in the throat; its meaning must be shown by the hands; the mood
(bhiil'a) must be shown by the glances; time (la/a) is marked by the feet. For wherever the hand
moves, there the glances follow: where the glances go, the mind follows; where the mind goes,
the mood follows; where the mood goes, there is the flavour (rasa)" The Mirror of gesture:
Being the Abhinaya Darpana 4 Nandikesi'ara,

Charts of meaning are not “right” or “wrong” - they are relative approximation to the truth.74

The body is an actor: as an actor, it participates in the movements of the mind, posturing
correspondingly; in styles of thought and expression we embody these correlations- and the
recognition of this is, as you prefer, either "scientific" or "poetic."
It will thus be seen that, in playing the game of lite, we have al our command a resource whereby
we can shift the rules of this game. It is as though someone who had been losing at checkers
were of a sudden to decide that he had really been playing "give away" (the kind of checkers
where the object is not to take as many of your opponent's rnen as possible, but to lose as many
of your own as possible). 85

What, in fact, is “rationality” but the desire for an accurate chart for naming what is going on?
Isn’t this what Spinoza had in mind, when calling for a philosophy whose structure would
parallel the structure of reality? We thus need not despair of human rationality, even in eruptive
days like ours. I am sure that even the most arbitrary of Nazis can be shown to possess it; for no
matter how inadequate his chart of meaning may be as developed under the deprivations of the
quietus and oversimplifying dialectical pressure, he at least wants it to tell him accurately what is
going on in his world and in the world at large.
Spinoza perfected an especially inventive strategy, by this stress upon the “adequate idea” as the
ideal of a chart, for uniting free will and determinism, with rationality as the bridge. For if one’s
meanings are correct, he will choose the wiser of courses; in this he will be “rational”; as a
rational man, he will “want” to choose this wiser course; and as a rational man he will “have to
want” to choose this wiser course. 90

In the broadest sense, the limit-problem of performance is that we are all, in a manner of
speaking, performers. 108

The first pairing (Erving Goffman and Victor Turner) are what Richard Schechner would call
"outsider" in the sense that they are professionally uninvolved in the arts and concerned with
social performance at the largely unintentional level: the second pairing (Peggy Phelan and
Schecnner) are "insiders" in the sense that they are concerned professionally with delíberate
artistic performance. 110

On its broades level, Goffman’s interest was primarily “the structure of experience individuals
have at any moment of their social lives.” And the term performance was defined, in his first
book, as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in
any way ant of the other participants.” 111
So the value of Turner's model, like Goffman's. is that it allows us to escape a certain solipsism,
or one-eyedness, by enlarging our field of reference. When Goffman says that people are like
stage performers and Turner says that social conflicts are like plays. we are applying a model
from one semantic network to a subject in another network whose characteristics we wish to
elucidate by metaphorical comparison. Metaphor is what in science is called a "top-down
strategy" or a "principle of least commitment" whereby one can, on the basis of a suspicion of
likeness, initiate a direction of thought from which regularities and irregularities wiIl display
themselves and can be sorted out. The metaphor, if it is a good one, wiIl draw out some of the
characteristics of the phenomenon but will Ieave others obscure or invisible that might well be
picked up by sti1l other metaphors seeking still different characteristics our friend abc / bcd / cde
/ def again. 113

Goffman’s typical “performer” is the single person moving in a world infested with behavioral
do’s and dont’s; Turner’s performers are usually “disturbed social groups” caught in the agon of
competing political claims. So the two stand (at least in the works I’ve discussed here) in a more
or less microcosmic/ macrocosmic relationship. 114

Theatre meant: a text performed “up there” by actors, with emphasis on the thing performed
(“the play’s the thing), paid admision, a “general” audience, in short, a timeless roar-of-the-
grease-paint aura that obscured the real nature of performance - the act of performing itself. 115

as Walter Benjamin pointed long ago, “to ask for the ‘authentic’ print of a photograph makes no
sense. So it would seem that the performance of the photograph can only occur by means of
reproduction, that photography is the quintessential art of reproduction, and that it survives only
in encounter and re-ecounter of the spectator. Performance, then, is recoverable in time, though
it is obviously never the same performance, even for the same individual.117

It is, as Phelan might say, the “interaction” that makes the performance… and an interaction is
what takes place - a performance- when spectator and work come together. 123

The truly great scientific discoveries amI experiments are artistic productions in the sense that
they are "actions at the limit of the already controlled and understood .'· They are "risks" that
sueceed in making the phenomenon appear. 128
From Acting to Performance
Essays in modernism and postmodernism
Philip Auslander

Jerzy Grotowski
Jacques Copeau
Michael Fried’s notorious essay “Art and Objecthood” (1968 [1967]),

Thereafter, I analyze Vito Acconci’s “body art” of the early 1970s as a postmodern political art
practice focusing on the body and its cultural significations. The next chapter, “Boal, Blau,
Brecht: the body,” situates Augusto Boal’s work in relation to modernist performance theory and
argues that Boal’s formulation of the “spect-actor,” an entity which combines the functions of
theatrical spectator and actor in a single body, provides a way of reconceptualizing postmodern
subjectivity without denying its fracturing, so as to recover a space for critical distance and,
hence, politics in postmodern performance. 8

in the high-stakes body performances undertaken by Orlan and Bornstein, the transformations
are surgical and permanent. 9
Peter Brook coined the term “holy theatre” to describe performance that aspires to the
communication of intangible, universal levels of experience: “the currents that rule our lives,” 13

One conception, which descends from Copeau and finds echoes in Brook’s writings, is of a
communal theatre that brings its spectators into emotional harmony with one another by
celebrating their common identity as human beings. The other “holy” theatre, defined by Artaud
and Grotowski, is a therapeutic theatre designed to accomplish spiritual renewal by unmasking
repressed psychic materials. 13

Humphry House

Brook and Hughes took such occurrences as justifications for the belief in a universal level of
consciousness. 18

This opposite belief concerning “the currents that rule our lives” is implied by Artaud’s
formulation of a Théâtre de la cruauté. 19

Artaud wrote that the theatre would be worthless “unless the true theatre were able to give us a
glimpse of a reality of which we now perceive only one aspect, but whose fulfillment occurs on
other levels” (1964: 109). 20

Artaud’s desire to have actors embody “de véritables hiéroglyphs” (1964:48), ideograms for
archetypal concepts, is similar to Copeau’s desire that his students create what Waldo Frank
called Platonic essences. 20

Artaud saw the theatre as a means to an end: the complete psychic upheaval he called la cruauté.
Le Théâtre de la cruauté is therefore more causal than symbolic; 20

The essential theatre is like the plague, not because it is conta- gious but because, like the plague,
it is the revelation, the foregrounding, the exteriorization of a latent depth of cruelty that enables
all of the perverse possibilities of the spirit to manifest themselves in an individual or a people.
21

The process is horrifying and difficult; le Théâtre de la cruauté “unknots conflicts, releases
forces, opens possibilities; and if these possibilites and forces are dark, it is not the fault of the
plague nor of the theatre, but of life itself” (1964:38). 21

Although he believed these images to be archetypal, he recognized that catharsis can be an

individual as much as a communal experience: each of us has private as well as common demons
to exorcise. 21
By being aware of the use of the body, the actor can manipulate the spectator’s affective
condition: “To know which points on the body to touch is to be able to throw the spectator into
magic trances” (1964:163). 22

In his own words, Artaud wanted his theatrical language “not to express thoughts, but to cause
thinking...” (1964:83, original emphasis). 22

The therapeutic nature of Grotowski’s Poor Theatre is emphasized in his stipulations concerning
audiences: “We are concerned with the spectator who really wishes, through confrontation with
the performance, to analyze himself” (1968:140). 24

Stanislavski states that the actor’s self is the basis of performance, but his own working out of
this idea leads him to posit that the self is produced by the very process of acting it is said to
ground. 36

Dafoe draws a distinction between these activities; his hesitation to make it categorical reflects
the Wooster Group’s multi- tracked, polysemic production style. The essential structural
principle of its work is juxtaposition, often of extremely dissimilar elements (e.g., a reading of
Our Town with a comedy routine in blackface in Route 1 & 9). The performers refer to and
practice a variety of performance modes and styles in each piece, ranging from realistic acting to
task-based collage (Point Judith), from work on familiar texts to recreations of the Wooster
Group’s own processes and experiences. The Wooster Group’s LSD (...Just the High Points...),
performed during 1984 and 1985, was, amongst other things, a performance compendium that
included all of the interests just mentioned and restated images and concerns explored in
previous pieces. (For a fuller discussion of LSD, see Chapter 6.) 40

“Art and Objecthood,” first published in Artforum in 1967.

His continued championing of the work of such artists as Larry Poons and Anthony Caro as “a
body of work that seemed to me then, and continues to do so today, the most important and
distinguished painting and sculpture of our time” (1987:55) can only seem quixotic. 52-53

Drawing their examples chiefly from the 1970s work of such conceptual performance
artists as Vito Acconci and Elizabeth Chitty, and such theatre directors as Richard
Foreman and Robert Wilson, Pontbriand and Féral propose that what they call
“performance” can be seen as deconstructing “theatre.” They suggest that performance
exists in an antagonistic relationship with theatre, emphasizing that performance
specifically deconstructs theatre’s essential features: “Performance rejects all illusion”
(Féral 1982: 171); it “presents; it does not represent” (Pontbriand 1982:155). Both claim
that performance is characterized by fragmentation and discontinuity (rather than
theatrical coherence) in narrative, in the use of the body and performance space, and in the
performance/audience relationship. Thus understood, performance deconstructs and
demystifies theatre: “Performance explores the under-side of theatre, giving the audience a
glimpse of its inside, its reverse side, its hidden face” (Féral 1982:176). 54

Fried called “presentness,” “the condition, that is, of existing in, indeed of secreting or
constituting, a continuous or perpetual present” 55

My assumption here is that the transition from modernism to postmodernism in American

experimental theatre, especially in the role of politics in that theatre, occurred in the early 1970s,
though it was anticipated in the late 1960s by, for example, Richard Foreman’s early plays and
some performance art.5 59

theatre after the 1960s as resistant rather than transgressive. 61

Joseph Chaikin’s The Presence of the Actor (1972) 62

Joseph Beuys’s performance art and Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s film Hitler, A Film From
Germany (1979) 63

Artaud (1964), “No more masterpieces”; 66

(It should be clear that the concept of noncharismatic performance I am advancing here does not
stipulate that performance must be uninteresting or unengaging. On the contrary; what is at stake
is a critique of presence in which the charismatic performance is accompanied by its own
deconstruction.) 67

What the production ultimately demonstrated was the eradication of difference amongst these
many types of messages and articulations—written and spoken, “factual” and “fictional,”
“literal,” and “metaphoric,” public and private—through the mediation of performance. 69

the most appropriate medium of expression for primal, emotional, and libidinal dimensions of
human experience. Dance is seen as an outlet for intuitive or unconscious feelings inaccessible to
verbal (intellectual) expression. Based on this model, dancers often cultivate a sanctimonious
mutism, denying what is verbal, logical and discursive in order to champion the physical and the
sensate.
(S.Foster 1986:xiv–xv) 73

Foster’s theory cannot allow for the possibility that there may be moments in dance at which
representation does not occur, for such an allowance would admit the further possibility that
dance can provide access to an originary, uncoded body and its “unspeakable” referents after
all.7 She quotes Raymond Williams’s Sociology of Culture to the effect that “formal [artistic]
innovation is a true and integral element of [social] changes themselves: an articulation, by
technical discovery, of changes in consciousness which are themselves forms of consciousness
of change” (S.Foster 1986:244, n. 1). Dance which represents “worldly events” can change the
shape of those events through innovation (e.g., reflexivity) in its own representational modes,
innovation which both results from and contributes to changes in consciousness. 78

Godard’s are, however, resolutely postmodern in that they conceive of themselves as sheer text,
as a process of production of representations that have no truth content, are in this sense, sheer
surface or superficiality. 83

The passage just cited implies, however, that a genuinely ritualising and communitarian art does
not need to be self-reflexive; reflexivity is in fact a symptom of the very impossibility of ritual or
communal art within a society which provides no institutional place for the artist. “The
modernist aesthetic demands an organic community which it cannot, however, bring into being
by itself but can only express” (Jameson 1981:114). In the absence of such a community, the
“collectivising impulse” created by Monk’s work, for example, can only be seen as a cosmetic
disguising the artist’s lack of authentic vocation in a late capitalist society. Prompted by
Jameson’s examples of societies which did provide the artist with such a vocation, we can think
back to Susan Foster’s recuperation of Renaissance court dance, a practice that runs contrary to
her democratic vision in its hierarchical aspect, yet is entirely in accord with that vision in its
aspect as communal ritual. In this light, Foster’s reading of dance’s history becomes nostalgic.
85

If, as Michel Foucault and others have argued, a part of the object of social discourse is to
discipline the body, to make it manageable, modern performance theory as a social discourse has
managed the body by robbing it of its materiality, subjecting it to the discipline of text, whether
the dramatic text or the text of archetypal psychic impulse. 91

Culturally speaking, women have wept a great deal, but once the tears are shed, there will be
endless laughter instead. Laughter that breaks out, overflows, a humor no one would expect to
find in women which is nonetheless their greatest strength because it’s a humor that sees man
much farther away than he has ever been seen.
Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” 108

The traditional female comic’s chief strategy was to render herself apparently unthreatening to
male dominance by making herself the object of her own comic derision in what is usually
referred to as “self- deprecatory” comedy. The self-deprecatory mode is the mode of both Phyllis
Diller, who entered comedy in the mid-1950s, and Joan Rivers, who entered the field in the early
1960s.119
Neither response seems satisfactory: the ecstatic celebration of the technobody is insufficiently
critical, while critiques that want to restore to the body a prelapsarian integrity are merely
nostalgic. Too often, performance practices that have sought to reclaim the body without denying
technology have succeeded only in “making the body docile for its tasks in the technological
age” (Murphie 1991:224). 127

Orlan stresses: “I am not against plastic surgery, I’m against the standard way it is used...”
the technology of cosmetic surgery could clearly be used to create and celebrate
idiosyncracy, eccentricity and uniqueness...” 131
[T]he idea is to find what I think is most deep, most elusive in me.... A more vulnerable person,
who allows herself to show that vulnerability, tenderness and timidity.... It’s not a question of
putting on a mask, but of taking one off.... I think we can bring appearance around to reality. 134

To settle for a singular gender is an act of self-denial: “it’s something we do to avoid or deny our
full self-expression” (1994: 45). 137

Performativity and Performance, ROUTLEDGE

ANDREW PARKER
EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

But in another range of usages, a text like Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition uses
"performativity" to mean an extreme of something like efficiency postmodern representation as a
fórm of capitalist efficiencyv -while. again, the deconstructive "performativity"of Paul de Man or
J.Hillis Miller seems to be char- cracterized by the díslinkage precisely of cause and effect
between the signifier and the work!.'

Like the most conventional defmition of a play,marriage is constituted as a spectacle that denies
its audicnce the ability either to look away from it or equally to intervene in it

Austin: how saying something can be doing something.

Timothy Gould - The Unhappy Performative

For Austin, philosophy contains a kind of melodramatic condensation of the sins of ordinary
thought. 22
His maps and classifications of unhappiness were meant to oppose the philosophers' fixation on
their favourite form of utterance, the statement-the linguistic entity capable of being true or (as
Austin joked) at least false. 23

Delivering us from the old fetishism of the true and the false would, by the same act, deliver us
over to what the fetish was perhaps designed to conceal: a more homely, less manageable, and
hence more uncanny region-a region in which our utterances find (or fail to fmd) their various
relations to the world and its other inhabitants. 24

An extreme version of this can be found in J. Hillis Miller's recent Tropes, Parables, He writes,
for instance:
A parable does not so much passively name something as make something happen. ... A true
performative brings something into existence that has no basis except in the words, as when I
sign a check and turn an almost worthless piece of paper into whatever value I have inscribed on
the check.' 25

“a performative "produces or transforms a situation." - Derrida, 25-26

Austin, I have suggested, shows philosophy as shadowing Creon's wish, as I said before, to
reduce the options of speech to the "acceptable" or to the previously defined forms of the
unacceptable. 40

Philosophy cannot, any more than any other form of utterance (performative or constative),
create the condition of its own reception, the happiness of its own performances. But perhaps if it
stopped trying to enforce its vision of its audience and of its subjects, it would give itself more
room for its own forms of speech-and hence for its own forms of listening.

JOSEPH ROACH

REAL MAGIC happens," says Anna Deavere Smith, "when the word hits your breath." 45

“orature”, the range of cultural forms invested in speech, gesture, song, dance, storytelling, pro-
verbs, customs, rites, and rituals. Ngugi defined orature indirectly when he said of the singer:
"He is a sweet singer when everybody joins in. The sweet songs last longer, too." 45

"What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play
to a war to a meal. The performative ... is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a polítical
intervention." 46

Richard Schechner ealls the "restoration of behavior." 46

The paradox of the restoration of behavior resides in the phenomenon of repetition itself: no
action or sequence of actions may be performed exactly the same way twice; they must be rein-
vented or recreated at each appearance. In thís improvisatory behavioral space, memory reveals
itself as ímagination 46

JOSEPH ROACH : My work on performance genealogies began when I first learned about the
Mardi Gras Indian "tribes" of New Orleans,African Americans ", who parade as Native
Americans (in gorgeous, fantastical, hand-sewn costumes) and therefore reenact at carnival time
the historical sense of the shared experience of peoples from two continents. 54

When the French naturalist Claude C. Robin visited New Orleans at the time of the sale of
Louisiana to the United States, he remarked: “I have noticed especially in the city that the
funerals of white people are only attended by a few, those of coloured people are attended by a
crowd, and mulattoes, quadroons married to white people, do not disdain attending the funeral of
a black." Such a performance event opens up, with its formal repetitions, a space for play. 59

At the outset, I identified performance as the transformation of experience through the renewal
of its cultural forms. 60

Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life

Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

SANDRA L. RICHARDS

By the term "folk" 1 mean non-middle-class or middle-class-oriented black people, toe masses of
working, underemployed, or unemployed people who do not share the aspirations of the
bourgeois,American mainstream. 69

“It me done got quiet in here. I never eould stand no silenee. I always got to have some musie
going on in my head somewhere. It keeps things balanced. Music will do that. It fills things up.
The more music you got in the world, the fuller it is. “82

Morosa consciousness invites us to imagine beyond the binary.... On the surface, morosa seems
to be binary. My research of Haitian peasant lore and ritual observance has revealed the tension
between oppositions leads to another norm of creativity- to interaction of deconstruction as it
were." 83

to speculate on the ways that absence may become

present in performance. 84

Kimberly Benston,” Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry

Negro Spirituals

LeRoi Jones. "The Revolutionary Theatre"

A pioneer of the folk play movement, Koch explained his impulses in startíng the Carolina
Playmakers in terms such as the following, "simple play" sometimes crude, but always near to
the good, strong,wind-swept soil. They are plays of the travail and the achievement of a pioneer
people" 87

Stephen Orgen

About Aristotel: He takes mimesis to mean simply the devising of tropes; he has no real concept
of imitation, since he assumes that the function of poetry is merely to tell the truth and make it
beautiful. Nevertheless, despite all the confusions and lacunae, notion that the Poetics
promulgates a view of drama as ethical rhetoric is one that persists long after the discovery and
analysis of the Greek text. Averroes in many rcspects continued to be the basis of Renaissance
views of the essay, enabling it from the outset to be easily harmonizes with Horace's Art of
Poetry. 138

Cindy Patton

Given this particular entrance of performance theory, but especially speech-act theory, into a
highly political domain, there bas been, I believe, an overemphasis on the actant-subject and a
relative lack of consideration of the stage or context or field of the performance or performative
act. There have been highly developed poststructural and postmodern accounts of these bodies-
in-performance or their performative acts, but little in the way of poststructural and postmodern
efforts to reintroduce concepts for what was once called the "social." 181

By contrast, I will describe epidemiology as performative,

as an actant within a place in which the constitution and reproduction of citational chains is
constitutive of power. 183

Epidemiology, on the other hand, is performative: by separating pathogens from the body,
epidemiology enables itself to declare "disease" from some but not all conjunctures of
body/pathogen. Epidemiology operates from an apparently simple definition: an epidemic is
more cases than expected. Declaring an epidemic on an expectation: in its perpetual movement,
pathology becomes visible against a background state of health. These migratory sites of
pathology can at any time be linked. This framework requires a vectoral imagination, since
movement is always outward from the center. Each new locale becomes a new center capable of
projecting its vectoral links to yet more periphery, which in turn become new centers. In this
sense, vectors are multidirectional: it makes no sense to speak of return. Bodies are at once
subject to and perpetrators of pathology, both "sick" and reservoirs or carriers, linkages in and
not distinct from the larger network of disease. Epidemology is thus less concerned with
detailing the diseases which may befalI the European body in a place, as it is with visualizing the
place of the body in the temporal sequence called "'epidemic" and represented by a graph. It is no
longer the body fighting disease which is heroic, but epidermiology, the "dis- ease detective,"
which alone has the power to visualize and disrupt the "natural history" of germs' vectoral
movement while in theory any body could be a vector empidemiology "dis-
covered" that only some bodies actually connected the hot spots of disease. If tropical medicine
already knew where disease was and who could fall sick, epidemiology had to describe both the
space of disease (descriptive mode) and indicate the bodies most likeIy to carry (transport/
harbor) disease (predictive mode). Bereft of a stable place of pathology, epidemology must
constantly construct and correlate populations and subpopulations in order to make epidemics
visible, hence the interest in technologies of "surveillance" (descriptive) and of “sentinel studies"
(predictive). 187

If epidemiology's risk groups produced flawed politics by making it possible for those evading
prevention messages to say ‘’I’m not one of those” the tropical model allows for an equally
disastrous disavowal with the idea that “I don't live/ go there," which not only disrupts the
address of prevention, but also once again domesticates and isolates those who are living with
HIV, people who have fought for a decade for their own right to public voice. The tropical model
removes epidemiology's ambivalence about quarantine: prevention becomes a matter of local
containment, rather than a matter of dispersing knowledge about safe sex and safe needle use. It
encourages a sense of safety through a fanatasy of emplacement, rather than encouraging
develompment of a personal philosophy of prevention. 189

While we take full advantage of the wil1dow of opportunity that this shift toward local
speciftcity rna)' afford in tcnm of funding, we must also arm oursdves for batde against a new,
equal- ly problematic discursive regime \vhich uses locality to isolate instead of educate. 194

JUDITH BUTLER

What does it mean for a

word not only to name, but also in sorne
sense to perform and, in particular, to
perform what it names? 97

According to the perlocutionary view, words are instrumental to the accomplishment of actions,
but they are not themselves the actions which they help to accomplish. This form of the
performative suggests that the words and the things done are in no sense the same. But accordíng
to his view of the illocutionary speech act, the name performs itself, and in the course of tllat
performing becomes a thing done; the pro- nouncement is the act of spcech at the same time that
it is the speaking of an act. 97-98

Lastly, I want to suggest that the court's speech carries with it its own violence,and that the very
institution that is invested “with the authority to adjudicate the problem of hate speech
recirculates and redirects that hatred in and as its own highly consequential speech, often by
coopting the very language that it seeks to adjudicate. 208

My call, as it were, is for a feminist reading of pornography that the literalization of this
imaginary scene, one which reads it instead for the incommensurabilities between gender norms
and practices that it seems compelled to repeat without resolution.
In this sense. it makes little sense to figure the visual field of pornography as a subject who
speaks and, in speaking, brings about what it names; its authority is decidedly less divine; its
power, less efficacious. It only makes sense to figure the pornographic text as the injurious act of
a if we seek to locate accountability at the prosecutable site of the subject. Otherwise our work is
more difficult for what pornography delivers is what it recites and exaggerates from the
resources of compensatory gender norms, a text of insistent and faulty imaginary relations that
will not disappear with the abolition of the offending text, the text that remains for feminist
criticism relentlessly to read. 223

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature,DONNA J. HARAWAY,

Routledge / New York
I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time 7

The degree to which the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences,
especially in those disciplines that seek to explain social groups and behaviour, must not be
underestimated. In evading the importance of dominance as a part of the theory and practice of
contemporary sciences, we bypass the crucial and difficult examination of the conlml as well as
the social function of science. 7

Women know very well that knowledge from the natural sciences has been used in the interests
of our domination and not our liberation, birth control propagandists notwithstanding. Moreover,
general exclusion from science has only made our exploitation more acute. 7

We have perversely worshipped science as a reified fetish in two complementary ways: (I) by
completely rejecting scientific and technical discipline and developing feminist social theory
totally apart from the natural sciences, and (2) by agreeing that nature' is our enemy and that
we must control our 'natural' bodies (by techniques given to us by biomedical science) at all
costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defmed by liberal (and
radical) theorists of political economy, instead of by ourselves. This cultural body politic was
clearly identified by Marx: the marketplace that remakes all things and people into commodities.
9

In Civilization and discontinuities, Freud (1962) developed a theory of the body politic that
based human social development on progressive domination of nature, particularly of human
sexual energies. 9

Brown rejected civilization (the body politic) in order to save the body; the solution was
necessitated by his root acceptance of Freudian sexual reductionism and the ensuing logic of
domination. He turned nature into a fetish worshipped by a total return to it (polymorphous
perversity). 9

Firestone (1970), in the Dialectic of Sex, In that critical sense she accepted a historical
materialism based on reproduction and lost the possibility for a feminist-socialist theory of the
body politic that would not see our personal bodies as the ultimate enemy. In that step she
prepared for the logic of the domination of technology - the total control of now alienated bodies
in a machine- determined future.10

I understand Marxist humanism to mean that the fundamental position of the human being in the
world is the dialectical relation with the surrounding world involved in the satisfaction of needs
and thus in the creation of use values. The labour process constitutes the fundamental human
condition. Through labour, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant
interaction with all that has not yet been humanized. Neither our personal bodies nor our social
bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process
called human labour. What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed
by our work. All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and our social bodies, is
made possible for us through labour. Therefore, culture does not dominate nature, nor is nature
an enemy. The dialectic must not be made into a dynamic of growing domination. 10

The biosocial sciences have not simply been sexist mirrors of our own social world. They have
also been tools in the reproduction of that world, both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in
enhancing material power. 11

First … Intrinsic to the new liberal relations of natural and social disciplines was the project of
human engineering - that is, the project of design and management of human material for
efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society. Animals played an important
role in this project. On the one hand, they were plastic raw material of knowledge, subject to
exact laboratory discipline. 11

Second …Thus this area of the natural sciences is one we need to understand thoroughly and
transform completely to produce a science that might express the social relations of liberation
without committing the vulgar Marxist mistake of deriving directly the substance of knowledge
from material conditions. We need to understand how and why animal groups have been used in
theories of the evolutionary origin of human beings, of 'mental illness', of the natural basis of
cultural co-operation and competition, of language and other forms of communication, of
technology, and especially of the origin and role of human forms of sex and the family. In shon,
we need to know the animal science of the body politic as it has been and might be.6 I believe
the result of a liberating science of animal groups would better express who the animals are as
well; we might free nature in freeing ourselves. 12

Third
He, then, designed primates as scientific objects in relation to his ideal of human progress
through human engineering.
The social-sexual life of primates was for Yerkes thoroughly intenwined with their intelligence.
13

Primate intelligence allowed sexual states to stimulate the beginnings of human concepts of
social right and privilege. The sexual reductionism hardly needs emphasis. His study linking sex
and power was typical of work in the 1930s, and hardly different from much to this day. In an
early feminist critique, Ruth Herschberger (1948) marvellously imagined the perspective of
Josie, the female chimpanzee whose psychosexual life was of such concern to Yerkes. Josie
seems not to have seen her world in terms of trading sex for 'privilege', but to Yerkes that
economic link of physiology and politics seemed to have been scientifically confirmed to lie at
the organic base of civilization. 14

To make sex a scientific problem also made it an object for medical therapy for all kinds of
sexual 'illness', most certainly including homosexuality and unhappy marriages. The biochemical
and physiological basis of the therapeutic claims immensely strengthened the legitimating power
of scientific managers over women's lives. 14

Throughout the period around the Second World War, similar studies of the authoritarian
personality in human beings abounded; true social order must rest on a balance of dominance,
interpreted as the foundation of co-operation. 17-18

The chief point is that without an organizing dominance hierarchy, social order supposedly is
seen to break down into individualistic, unproductive competition. 18

The idea of a dominance hierarchy was derived in the first instance from study of 'pecking
orders' in domestic chickens and other birds initiated by the Norwegian Thorlief
Schjelderup-Ebbe (1935) as early as '9'3, but not incorporated into American comparative
psychology in any important way until the '930s. 18

The group that loses its alpha male loses in the competitive struggle with other organized
organic societies. 18

The political principle of domination has been transformed here into the legitimating
scientific principle of dominance as a natural property with a physical-chemical base.
Manipulations, concepts, organizing principles - the entire range of tools of the science -
must be seen to be penetrated by the principle of domination. 19

In our search for an understanding of a feminist body politic, we need the discipline of the
natural and social sciences, just as we need every creative form of theory and practice.
These sciences will have liberating functions in so far as we build them on social relations
not based on domination. 19

If our e'"]Jerience is of domination, we will theorize our lives according to principles of

dominance. As we transform the foundations of our lives, we will know how to build
natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world. 19

But the sciences are collective expressions and cannot be remade individually. 19

It isn't bad to want to help, to want to work to seize history ... but to want to do it alone is less
good. 20
People like to look at animals, even to learn from them about human beings and human
society. People in the twentieth century have been no exception. We fmd the themes of
modem America reflected in detail in the bodies and lives of animals. We polish an animal
mirror to look for ourselves. 21

How can feminism, a political position about love and power, have anything to do with
science as I have described it? Feminism, I suggest, can draw from a basic insight of critical
theory. The starting point of critical theory - as we have learned it from Marx, the
Frankfurt school, and others- is that the social and economic means of human liberation
are within our grasp. Nevertheless, we continue to live out relations of domination and scarcity.
There is the possibility of overturning that order of things. The study of this contradiction may
be applied to all our knowledge, including natural science. 23

A feminist history of science, which must be a collective achievement, could exantine that
part of biosocial science in which our alleged evolutionary biology is traced and supposedly
inevitable patterns of order based on domination are legitimated. 23

Zuckerman
The traditional physiological argument was used: extreme circumstances are the best
windows to the normal because they highlight basic mechanisms which would otherwise be
obscured. 29

Again, Zuckerman's logic is elegandy simple. Some unknown ecological changes produced
selection pressure for prehumans to exploit new sources of food, to rework the age-old
unspecia1i2ed feeding patterns, and to introduce sexual division of labour as a necessary
consequence of the requirements of large-scale meat-eating. Food-sharing necessitated the
human form of the family, which for Zuckerman meant selection pressure for 'overt
monogamy' and conceptual recognition of significant social relations (ownership of women)
even when no one was around to enforce them. The passivity of females in such major
transformations was an unexamined assumption. So developed marriage and the hunting
band of males, with all the startling consequences for the brain and its products of speech
and culture. 29-30

At first glance, the only comparisons of Thelma Rowell with Zuckerman must be in
contrast. Though she praised Zuckerman for his ground- breaking work on the baboon
menstrual cycle and refrained from very severe criticism of him in her historical paper on
the dominance concept, her whole work seems to have been in opposition to his ideas and
his methods. 30-31
She is known for her care in dividing cage space for captive monkeys to permit more
naturalistic behaviour, and for excellent field studies, rather than for physiological
arguments about provoked extreme behaviour as the window to the normal. Rather than
emphasizing primate universals, Rowell's papers are permeated by particularism, by
counsels to notice complexity, by insistence on variability in a manner reminiscent of early
proponents of the culture concept and cultural particularism. 31

She gave two major lines of approach: (I) presenting all putative dominance behaviours as
learned responses easily accounted for by current theories in animal psychology; and (2)
removing the basis for considering dominance as a trait or adaptive complex subject to
selection pressures. That is, so-called dominance behaviours do not. seem to relate to
reproductive success. In addition to amusing points about the slippery nature of concepts
like 'latent dominance', which enter arguments to fill gaps in observation, Rowell asserts
that conditions of observation introduce the detemtinants in which one should expect social
animals to learn responses called dominance. Hierarchy for Rowell is primarily an artefact of
methods of observation. Reinforcing this position is the discovery that different measures of
dominance do not correlate highly with each other, and hierarchies worked out by different
measures do not reveal the same social structure. Thus it is hard to see what observed
behaviours related to dominance have to do with evolution, which requires a genetic basis
for selection. In Rowell's words, 'the function of dominance becomes a non-question' (1974,
p. 151; italics altered). 32

'Modem society' itself seems given by some sort of technological imperative laid over our
limiting biological heritage. Primate studies are motivated by, and in tum legitimate, the
management needs of a stressed society. The animals model our limitations (adaptive
breakdowns) and our innovations (tool use). 33

Evolutionary theory here joins a sociology of systems and a psychology of personality and
emotion in modern versions of a pleasure calculus connected to the organic, motivational
base of learning theory. 34

It is so very obvious that monkeys enjoy being together that we take it for granted. But
pleasure like every other phenomenon of life is subject to, and the result of, evolutionary
pressure - we enjoy a thing because our ancestors survived better and left more viable
offspring than their relations who did not enjoy (and so seek) comparable stimuli 34

Washburn and Hamburg (1968)

They saw aggression as a fundamental adaptation or functional complex common to the entire
primate order, including human beings. 34-35
After all, human males do not have the so-called fighting anatomy of many primate males -
the dagger-like canines, associated threat gestures so appropriate for ethological analysis,
great difference m male and female body size, or eXtra Structures such as a mane to
enhance one's threatening aspect. 36

Washburn's fundamental innovation in physical anthropology was evident in the

publication of his widely reprinted papers, 'The new physical anthropology' (1951 a) and
'The analysis of primate evolution with particular reference to man' (195Ib). 37

Instead of serting up scales of evolution based on brain enlargement, he analysed regions of

the body involved in adaptive transfonnations related to locomotion, eating, and similar
functions. In sum, 'The anatomy of life, of integrated functions, does not know the artificial
boundaries which still govern the dissection of a corpse' (195Ia, p. 303).
Washburn was part of a larger revolution in physical anthropology accompanied by the
discovery of new fossils, dating techniques, experimental possibilities, and more recently,
molecular taxonomy. One of the revolution's central objects was the small-brained South
African human-ape, Australo- pithems. 37

quences were decidedly novel. 'But the use of tools brings in a set of factors which
progressively modifies the evolutionary picture. It is particularly the task of the
anthropologist to assess the way the development of culture affected physical evolution' 38

Washburn's emphasis on the importance of behaviour made his interest in the

psychological consequences of evolution- ary adaptation natural. In that paper, 'The
evolution of human behavior', Washburn and Avis (1958) developed the consequences of
the hunting adaptation, including enlarged curiosity and mobility, pleasure in the hunt and
kill, and new ideas about our relation to other animals. Perhaps most important, 'Hunting
not only necessitated new activities and new kinds of cooperation but changed the role of
the adult male in the group ... The very same actions which caused man to be feared by
other animals led to more cooperation, food sharing, and economic interdependence within
the group' (pp. 433-4). The human way of life had begun. 38

Washburn's science changed the rules of the game to require argument from the conditions
of production. 39

Tanner and Zihlman bring us face to face with fundamental questions that have barely
been phrased, much less answered. How should we theorize our experience of the past and
of 'nature' in new ways to build adequate concepts for scientific practice and social
transformation? This question stands in a complicated relation with the internal craft rules
for working within the natural sciences.
Tanner and Zihlman begin by announcing the goal of understanding
human nature in terms of processes 'which shaped our physical, emotional,
and cognitive characteristics' (1976, p. 585). They note the obvious fact that the hunting
thesis has largely ignored the behaviour and social activity of one of the two sexes, and is
therefore deficient by ordinary criteria
of evolutionary functionalism. Behaviour does not fossilize for either sex, so the problem is
one of rational reconstruction, of choosing hypotheses. 39-40

We emphasize the connections among savanna living, technology, diet, social organization,
and selective processes to account for the transition from a primate ancestor to the
emergent human species. (Tanner and Zihlman, '976, p. 586) 40

The auIhors add to Ihe traditional genetic parameters of the synthetic Iheory (drift,
migration, and so on), the
sociobiological genetic concepts of inclusive fitness, kin selection, sexual
selection, and parental investment. Understanding changes in gene frequencies of
populations from selection pressures operating on individuals remains the goal. They note
lots of tool use by chimpanzees, wiIh a sex difference in the behaviour. Females make and
use tools more often, although the males seem to hunt more readily. Rigid dominance
hierarchies do not occur, although the concepts of high ranks and influence seem useful.
The social structure is flexible, but not random. Social continuity seems to flow through
continuing associations of females, their young, and associates.
The transitional population to hominids is imagined to have moved into the savannah, a
new adaptive zone. 'A new way oflife is initiated by a change in behavior; the anatomical
changes follow' (Tanner and Zihlman, '976, p. 586). The new behaviour was greatly
enlarged dietary choice accompanied by tool use. 40

Digging sticks, containers for food, and above all, carrying devices for babies were
extremely likely early technological innovations related to the new diet and sharing habits.
Knowledge of a wide range of plants and animals, as well as their seasons and habits,
became important. 40-41

The flexible chimp social structure probably became even' more opportunistic, allowing
better understanding of the basis for human cultural diversity. Like Rowell, Tanner and
Zihlman take every opportunity to emphasize human possibility and variety. Gathering of
plants and animals was unlikely to maintain much selection pressure for an aggressive
biology. Cognitive processes, on the other hand, were greatly elaborated in the new
productive mode. 41

In other words, evolutionary reconstructions condition understanding of

contemporary events and future possibilities. Tanner and Zihlman, in their interpretation
of the tool-using adaptation, avoid telling a tale of obsolescence of the human body caught
in a hunting past. The open future rests on a new past. 41

The purpose of the sciences

of function is to produce both understanding of meaning and predictive means of control.
42

In OUf time, natural science defines the human being's

place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the
community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history
and self-formation. 43

This fundamental change in life science did not occur in a historical vacuum; it
accompanied changes in the nature and technology of power, within a continuing dynamic
of capitalist reproduction. This chapter sketches those changes in an effort to investigate
the historical connection between the content of science and its social context. The larger
question infonning this critique is how to develop a socialist-feminist life science.I45

He built a complex evolutionary picture of the relation of sex and mind, raw material and
engineering, instinct and rational control, that was appropriate to a genuinely usable
capitalist science.
But by the end of his career around 1940, Yerkes' science was already outmoded. It was
being replaced by a different engineering perspective, based not on physiology, but on the
physical sciences' analysis ofinformation and energy in statistical assemblages! The
physiology of sexual organisms gave way to biochemistry, structural analysis, and
molecular genetics of information machines: integrons, replicators, self-assembling
biological subsystems such as viruses and cell organelles and populations - the new books o
f nature to be read by mathematics. I t is not an accident that modem genetics is pursued as
a linguistic science, with attention to signs, punctu- ation, syntax, semiotics, machine read-
out, directional information flow, codons, transcription, and so on aacob, 1974; Watson,
1976). The social goal ofthe new life science was clearly statistical control ofthe mass
through sophisticated communications systems. Similarly, the damping and control of
variation, prediction of large-scale pattern, and development of optimiza- tion techniques
in every kind of system became a basic strategy of social institutions. Further, everything
has become a system. The search has been for evolutionary stable strategies for maximizing
profit. In life science, sociobiology is a mature fruit of this approach; it is genuinely a new
synthesis that makes many distinctions between natural and social science outmoded.5 46

Human engineering sought to construct a control hierarchy, modelled on the individual

organism with the nervous system on top. This organismic model facilitated the conception
of society as a harmonious, balanced whole with proper distribution of function. The
interrelations of nervous and
reproductive systems, the two main integrative mechanisms of the organism, provided a
microcosm of life, including social life (superorganism). The principal scientific goal was a
biological theory of co-operation .on management hierarchies. What had to be managed
were orgamc hfe, instinct, sex. At the top of the organism-pyramid was mind, permitting
altruism to mitigate the excesses of competition. Psychobiology, as sociobiol-
ogy later, was faced with rationalizing altruism in a competitive world -
without threatening the basic structure of domination. 47

Engineering meant rational placement and modification of human raw material- in the
common interest oforganism, family, culture, society, and industry. 48

Having defined intelligence as problem-solving behaviour, Yerkes relied on the

construction of testing apparatus for comparing learning strategies of different species and
individuals within species. 48

Yerkes is well known for helping devise the intelligence tests for conscripts; these test
results were frequendy used for immigration restriction and other racist purposes during
and after the war. It is less well known that Yerkes desigoed his tests under the auspices of
the army surgeon general and conceived the work as part of the medical management of
society (Kevles, 1968; Ann Arbor Science for the People, 1977, pp. 21-57; Cravens, 1978,
pp. 80-5, 181-8). 49

Second, the sex instinct was perceived to

underlie the whole pyramid of life and human sciences and to be the key to understanding
culture and personality. 50

Research centred on the idea of evolution, and aU but ignored the idea of populations.
Animal behaviour was not a genetic science in Yerkes' and his contemporaries' hands. Or
rather, the comparative psycho- logists used the word genetic always in the sense of the
genesis of individual capacities. 50

People associated with the primate laboratories at Yale maintained two organizing ideas
rooted in organismic physiology. The first was domination, which included brain region
dominance, actions between individuals, dominance as a personality trait related to
leadership, and dominance hierarchies as social structure. Dominance was perceived as
inherent to individual organisms; it was probably inheritable, just like eye colour or IQ,
The second idea was co-operation - from homoeostatic mechanisms at all levels, to
deliberate modification of domin- ance in the interests of higher organization, to everyday
rules for running the laboratory. Co-operation and dominance were closely connected on
an organic level as forms of integration. 51-52

Pieces of banana were presented one at a time in a series of ten through a chute in the cage.
Along with other information, the observer recorded which animal of the pair would take
the piece. Results were correlated with sexual status of the females in terms of dominance-
subordination and response by 'right or privilege'. Right or privilege meant that in the
period of maximum genital swelling of the female, that is, when the female was on heat, the
ordinarily dominant male granted her the privilege of taking the banana, although
dominance itself was not seen to reverse. 52

Dominance as a drive was not sex specific, in Yerkes' opinion. It was the
organism's basic hunger for social status. 'Assuming that dominance is hereditary and that
inheritance is independent ofsex, men and women might be expected to become creative
leaders with approximately equal frequency' (Yerkes, '939, pp. 133-4). 53

With respect to the division of labour in the family, which was the model for the division of
labour in all of society, the logic of naturalization provided a cornerstone of historical
explanation based on reproduction. The dynamic was management, not repression. 53

In the context of discussing differentiated techniques of social m control adopted by males

and females, Yerkes described biologically deter- b mined differences in drive expression.
The existence ofchimpanzee differ- i ences in 'techniques of social control' suggested that
human modes were c also psychobiologically legitimated and inevitable. f
In a word, the masculine behavior is predominantly self-distracting; the feminine,
primarily favor-currying and priority-seeking . . . T o the observer the male seems often to
be trying hard to blot out awareness of his subordination; the female, by contrast, to be
hopefully trying to induce the male to give place to her at the chute ... As for the females,
wiles, trickery, or deceitful cunning, which are conspicuous by their absence in the male
list, are favorite resources. But even more so are sexual allure and varied forms
ofsolicitation ... That the female is, chameleon-like, a creature of multiple personality, is
clear from our observations. (Yerkes, '943, p. 83)
Yerkes based these 'observations' on the experimental sociology of the food chute test. He
did not leave the lesson for the limits of cultural formation of personality, and therefore
ofpossible social change, to the imagination: 54

This opinion should be evaluated in light of Yerkes' extraordinary belief in I human

malleability and perfectibility through engineering. 'Personality differences' should be
managed, not foolishly denied. 54

The possibility of prescription of social role on rational grounds was at stake. If

drives and personality could be measured early, proper treatroem could be initiated.
Yerkes was cautious, but hopeful. 55

It is significant that the culture concept depended on personality in the anthropology o f the
1930s. W e have moved with Y erkes from instinct, through personality, to culture, to
human engineering. 55

Yerkes and his liberal peers advocated studying traits of the body, mind, spirit, and
character in order to fit 'the person' perfectly into the proper place in industry. Equality
clearly did not mean organic sameness; therefore it must mean that 'in the United States of
America, within limits set by age, sex, and race, persons are equal under the law and may
claim as their right as citizens like opportunities for human service and responsibility'
(Yerkes,
1922, p. 58). 56

Although the person should be the object of scientific management - an essential structure
of domination in the science of co-operation - the ideology ofself-expression was also
intrinsic to Yerkes' exposition. The harmony of self and social management hinged on
capitalist doctrines of personality. Satisfaction of basic instincts, themselves known through
science, was the eSsence of self-expression in this model. Science, not class conflict, could
provide for further human adaptive evolution. 57

In rationalizing the market exchange of marriage and the productive machine ofindustry,
comparative psychobiology took its place among the life and human sciences theorizing
nature and humanity according to the logic of capitalist patriarchy. 57

After the war, the explosive development of electronics industries and communications
tech- nology was increasingly tied to strategies of social and military planning to devise and
manage stable systems organized around several axes of
variation.19 Knowledge about range of variation and interaction effects among classes of
variables replaced concern for individual. states. The computer, a communications
machine, both effected and symbolized new strategies of control. 58

Nature is structured as a series of interlocking cybernetic systems, which are theorized as

communications problems. Nature has been systematically constituted in tertns of the
capitalist machine and market. Let us look first at the market.
The market is best approached in tertns of the history of the concept of natural selection.
59

Similarly, as Marx noted, bourgeois political economists focused on equal and competitive
exchange in the market, while obscuring the relations of domination in production. 59
That noumenal object is the gene, called by Richard Dawkins the 'replicator', within the
gene pool. Sociobiology analyses all behaviour in terms of the ultimate level of explanation,
the genetic market place.
Bodies and societies are only the replicators' strategies for maximizing their own
reproductive profit. 60

The claim has been made that sociobiology establishes the ultimate equality of males and
females by showing that they compete equally - if by different strategies - in the only game
that counts, amassing genetic profit. 61

The genes must make stable mediating devices; that is, they must produce machines
embodying evolution- ary stable strategies, just as capital requires capitalist institutions.
Without mechanisms for transmission and replication, the genes are like hoarded money.
The market demands a technology of production consistent with own imperatives. Here we
leave the realm of competition and exchange and enter the factories of life. What kind of
mediating machines do the genes inform? Naturally, cybernetic systems. 62

Populations are measured in terms of boundaries of gene flow over time; genes are
materializations of information. Sociobiology studies societies in terms of zones of
communication and exchange of information (Wilson, 1971, p. 224 ff; '975, ch. 1).
Individuals are systems common to sociobiolo- gy and other areas of life science.
Individuals also are studied as part of structured flows of information and energy,
interacting with other indi- viduals; higher levels of order (societies, populations) result. 62

What the genes really make are behaving machines.

Genes are like programs for chess-playing computers; that is, genes build brains, effector
organs, and sensory channels. Brains are processing devices with logical programs. Terms
like 'imagination' (all mentalistic language) refer to forms of simulation made possible by
advanced brains. The task of brains is the prediction of interlocking system contingencies,
including the environment, and control of rate of motion. 62

According to Wilson (1975, p. 201) a task of his science is to construct 'zoosemiotics'; that
is, the study of general properties of communication." Basic to that task is an analysis of
modes of
communication, which necessitates attention to sensory channels, whether auditory, tactile,
acoustical, or chemical.
It is therefore legitimate to analyze advantages and disadvantages of the several sensory
modalities as though they were competing in an open marketplace for the privilege of
carrying messages. Put another, more familiar way, we can reasonably hypothesize that
species evolve toward the mix of sensory cues that maximizes either energetic or
informational
efficiency, or both. (Wilson, '975, p. 23 1)
It is in this context that we should consider one of Wilson's most important research
contributions to sociobiology: a study of insect chemical com- munication mediated by
pheromones. 63

The contrast with Yerkes' organismic psychobiology culminating in the person is evident.
For a sociobiologist, dominance is not a trait, nor even an individual organismic
predisposition, but a system propeny. The type of engineering intervention appropriate to
sociobiology is systems analysis and design, not clinical diagnosis based on an analogy to
physiology and scientific medicine. But both forms of engineering argue for a special role
for the scientific expen in designing history (systems) on the human level.
The point of systems design is optimization.
Crucial to system optimization are the mass effects of many variables, not perfection of the
individual worker ant. 64

Nature is, abuve all, profligate . . . [Its schemes] are the brainchild o fa deranged manic-
depressive with limitless capital. ExtrtllJagance. Nature will try anything OIlCe. T7zat is
what the fonn o f the insea says. No fom. is too gnusome, no bel.tllJior too grotesque.
Ifyou're dealing with organic compollnds, then let them combine. Ifit works, ifit quickens,
set it clacking in the grass; there salways room for one more; you ain't so handsome
yourself T71is is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 67

In deep similarity, feminists taking respons- ibility for modern origin stories - that is, for
biology - may try to get the story right, to clean up shoddy science about evolution and
brains and hormones, to show how biology really comes out right with no conflict between
reason and authority. 72

Indeed, Barash's concern for lineages is his central rhetorical strategy. He calls on the
authority of the father and names it scientific knowledge. 73

Barash's message is the technology of power. 74

We have no language at present that does nol reflect a Cartesian nature/nurture dichotomy
for discussing sex differ- ences. It is difficult to resist the urge to ask, 'But what, undernealh
il all,
the differences between men and women.' Whal we musl begi" 10 grve vOIce to as
scientists and feminislS is thaI there is no such lhing, or place, as ,,,,demealh il all. Literally,
empirically, physiologically, anatomically, neurologically . . . the only accurate locus for
research about us who speak to each other is the changing, moving, complex web ofour
interactions in light of the language, power structures, natural environments
and external), and beliefs that weave it in time. (Hubbard and Lowe, 1979, p. II6) 76

Genes and Gender concludes that such research is now impossible - it simply cannot
measure up to standards of scientific knowledge.
The authors in Genes and Gender try to persuade researchers to accept new standards,
indeed, to abandon their field, in a way analogous to a physicist's telling biologists that
anything they cannot quantifY does not qualifY as the matter of science. It remains a
question whether natural selection and evolutionary biology itself would not have to
abandon the field in the face of enforcement of that standard. What leads the authors in
Genes and Gender to reach their nihilistic conclusion? 77

What becomes very clear, however, is that feminists have now entered the debates on the
nature and power of scientific knowledge with authority:
we do have something to say. The only remaining problem is what and here we are.
speaking in many voices. One voice for beginning again is by the epIlogue of WOllletl Look
at Biology:
The man-nature antithesis was invented by men. Our job is to reinvent a that. will realize
(in the literal sense of making real) the unity ofhumankind WIth nature and will try to
understand its workings from the inside ... Science is a human construct that came about
under a particular set of historical conditions when men's domination of nature
seemed a positive and worthy goal. The conditions have changed and we know now that the
path we are travelling is more likely to destroy nature than to explain or improve it.
Women have recognized more often than men that we are part of nature and that its fate is
in human hands that have not cared for it well. We must now act on that knowledge.
(Hubbard
et al., 1979, p. 209) 80

During the '920S, in the hands of psychobiologists, comparative psychologists, and

reproductive and neural physiologists, primates in laboratories figured prominently in
debates about human mental function and sexual organiza- tion. Marriage counselling,
immigration policy, and the testing industry all are directly indebted to primates and
primatologists, who in Robert Yerkes' words were 'servants of science'. Primates seemed
models of natural co-operation unobscured by language and culture. During the '930s, in
early field work on wild primates, the sexual physiology of natural co- operation (in the
fonns of dominance of males over females and of troop demographic structure) emerged in
arguments about human social thera- pelltiis for social disorder - like labour strikes and
divorce. Primate models of nuclear families and of fathering in the suburbs, as well as of
the doleful results of absent mothers, appeared in public debates about US social problems
throughout the 1950S and 1960s. Primate models for human depression have been avidly
sought, and a great deal of technical ingenuity has gone into reliably producing psychoses
in monkeys. Population policy and questions about population regulation drew on primate
studies, as did psychiatry (even proposed telemetric control) ofstressed, perhaps black male
human primates in riotous cities in the '960s. The pressing question of 'man's' naturally co-
operative or warlike nature was argued in symposia and classrooms throughout the
Vietnam war, with constant debts to developing new theories of human evolution based on
recent fossils from South and East Africa, new field studies of living primates, and the
anthropology of modem gatherer-hunters. Primatologists could be found on most sides of
most debates, including the 'side' of not wanting to be part of any explicit political attitude.
84-85

Phenomena such as aggression, competition, and dominance structures were seen primarily
as mechanisms of social co-operation, as axes of ordered group life, as prerequisites of
organization. And of course, the man-the- hunter hypothesis was pre-eminendy about male
ways o£life as the motors of the human past and future. Hunting was a male innovation
and speciality, the story insisted. And what was not hunting had always been. Hunting was
the principle of change; the rest was a base line or a support system.s 86

Washburn was one of perhaps a dozen key actors in developments rooted in large historical
determinations like war, new technologies for international travel and tropical disease
control, modem medical research institutionalization, and international conservation
organ- ization in decolonialized but contested neo-imperialist world orders.6 87

Adrienne Zihlman spoke on range and behaviour; she would do her doctorate on
bipedalism within the framework of the hunting hypothesis. 91

Washburn summarized the talks of the session in a brief, pointed talk on 'The Hunting
Way of Life'.IO The lessons for the discipline of physical anthropology would have been
hard to miss. And whatever meanings individual students attached to their own work at the
time of their graduate training, it seems very likely that in the 1960s the public meanings of
presentations from the University of California, Berkeley, framed by Washburn's
interpretations - and sometimes more active direction - included: (I) the primacy of the
baboon model for a comparative functional understanding of hominid evolution; (2) the
crucial role of the social group (and a much lesser role of sexual bonds) as the key
behavioural adaptation of primates; and (3) the central drama of a male subsistence
innovation _ hunting - in the human origin story, which included bipedalism, tools,
language, and social co-operation. Again, male dominance hierarchies were a key
mechanism of this promising co-operation. 91

DeVore literally saw a male-centred baboon troop structure, containing a core of allied
dominant males immensely attractive to females and children, with other males on the
periphery when the troop was stationary or following behind as special guards when the
troop seemed threatened by danger. 95

The logical link to medical-psychiatric therapeutics of social groups should be clear: social
disorder implies a breakdown of central adaptational mechan- isms. Stressed males would
engage in inappropriate (excessive or deficient) dominance behaviours - at the expense of
troop organization and even survival. 95

Although females and infants were very visible to Jay, she did not see something which
other observers elsewhere began to report in dramatic terms: males killing infants after
they moved into a troop, ousting the previous resident male or males. 97

Social life was a market where invesnnents were made and tested in the only currency that
counts: genetic increase. 97

Finally, to connect reproduction and production has been the key theoretical desideratum
of both natural and political economy for 200 years. 102

But no class of these stories can be seen as innocent, free of detennination by historically
specific social relations and daily practice in producing and reproducing daily life. Surely
scientific stories are not innocent in that sense. It is equally true that no class of tales can be
free of rules for narrating a proper story within a particular genre, in this case the
discourse of life science. DemystifYing those rules seems important to me. Nature is
constructed, constituted historically, not discovered naked in a fossil bed or a tropical
forest. Nature is contested, and women have enthusiastically entered the fray. Some women
have the
social authority to author scientific stories.106

To ignore, to fail to engage in the

social process of making science, and to attend only to use and abuse of the results of
scientific work is irresponsible. I believe it is even less responsible in present historical
conditions to pursue anti-scientific tales about nature that idealize women, nurturing, or
some other entity argued to be free of male war-tainted pollution. Scientific stories have too
much power as public myth to effect meanings in our lives. Besides, scientific stories are
interest- ing.
My moral is that feminists across the cultural field of differences should contest to tell
stories and to set the historical conditions for imagining plots. It should be clear that the
nature of feminism is no less at issue than langur social habits. 107

A few years later a daughter, Adrienne Zihlman, took Lindberg's element and wove it into
a story about the physiological conditions for evolution of the human way of life - a way of
life that depended on greater female control of her own sexuality, in the context of
gathering-and-sharing subsistence innovations and altered reproductive practices that had
the effect of selecting males who knew how to co-operate with stable female- centred social
groups basic to human evolution. 16 I like that new story; I also suggest that it changed the
rules ofwhat can count in scientific debate about …107

Complexity, heterogeneity, specific positioning, and power-charged difference are not the
same thing as liberal pluralism. Experience is a semiosis, an embodying of meanings (de
Lauretis, 1984, pp. 158-86). The politics ofdifference that feminists need to articulate must
be rooted in a politics of experience that searches for specificity , h e t e r o g e n e i t y , a n
d c o n n e c t i o n through stmggle, n o t t h r o u g h psychologistic, liberal appeals to each
her own endless difference. Feminism is collective; and difference is political, that is, about
power, accountability, and hope. Experience, like difference, is about contradictory and
necessary connection. 109

Situated knowledges are particularly powerful tools to produce maps of consciousness for
people who have been inscribed within the marked categories of race and sex that have
been so exuberantly produced in the histories of masculinist, racist, and colonialist
dominations. Situated knowledges are always marked knowledges; they are re-markings,
reorientat- ings, of the great maps that globalized the heterogeneous body of the world in
the history of masculinist capitalism and colonialism. 111

Noting this tradition does not invalidate its use; it locates its use and insists on its partiality
and accountability. The difference is important. Binaries, rather suspect for the feminists I
know, can tum out to be nice little tools from time to time. 111

'Women's experience' does not pre-exist as a kind of prior resource, ready simply to be
appropriated into one or another description. What may count as 'women's experience' is
structured within multiple and often inharmo- nious agendas. 'Experience', like
'consciousness" is an intentional construc- tion, an artefact of the first importance.
Experience may also be re- constructed, re-membered, re-articulated. One powerful means
to do so is the reading and re-reading of fiction in such a way as to create the effect of
having access to another's life and consciousness, whether that other is an individual or a
collective person with the lifetime called history. These readings exist in a field of
resonating readings, in which each version adds tones and shapes to the others, in both
cacophonous and consonant waves. 113

Feminist discourse and anti-colonial discourse are engaged in this very subtle and delicate
effort to
build connections and affinities, and not to produce one's own or another's experience as a
resource for a closed narrative. These are difficult issues, and 'we' fail frequently. It is easy
to find feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial discourses reproducing others and selves as
resources for closed narratives, not knowing how to build affinities, knowing instead how
to build oppositions. But 'our' writing is also full of hope that we will learn how to
structure affinities instead of identities. 113

Readings may function as technologies for constructing what may count as women's
experience and for mapping connections and separations among women and the social
movements which they build and in which they participate in local/global worlds. 114

Readings must be engaged and produced; they do not flow naturally from the text. The
most straightforward readings of any text are also situated arguments about fields
ofmeanings and fields ofpower. Any reading is also a guide to possible maps
ofconsciousness, coalition, and action. Perhaps these points are especially true when fiction
appears to offer the problematic truths of personal autobiography, collective history,
and/or cautionary allegory. 114

Adopting a perspective that bell hooks in the United States named intrinsic to feminist
movement, in an interview in 1979 Emecheta's account of her writing explicitly refused to
restrict her attention to women:
The main themes of my novels are African society and family: the historical, social, and
political life in Africa as seen by a woman through events. I always try to show that the
African male is oppressed and he too oppresses the African women ... I have not committed
myself to the cause of African women only, I write about Africa as a whole. (Bruner,
1983, p. 49) 116

…from the perspectives of a Euro-American women's

studies teacher in a largely white state university in the United States and first delivered in
a conference co-constructing the critical study of colonial discourse and feminist theory.
117

But I wanted to stay with affinities that refused to resolve into identities or searches for a
true self. My reading naturalized precisely the moments of ambiguity, the exile status and
the dilemma of a 'been-to' for whom the time of origins and returns is inaccessible.
Contradiction held in tension with the crafting ofaccountability
was my image of the hoped-for unity of women across the holocaust of
imperialism, racism, and masculinist supremacy. 121

The modern English and German words, 'gender' and 'Geschlecht', adhere closely to
concepts of sex, sexuality, sexual difference, generation, engendering, and so on, while the
French and Spanish seem not to carry those meanings as readily. Words close to 'gender'
are implicated in
concepts of kinship, race, biological taxonomy, language, and nationality.
The substantive 'Geschlecht' carries the meanings of sex, stock, race, and
family, while the adjectival form 'geschlechtlich' means in English transla- tion both sexual
and generic. 'Gender' is at the heart of constructions and classifications of systems of
difference. 130

Despite important differences, all the modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in
Simone de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born a woman' (de Beauvoir, 1949; 1952, p.
249) and in
post-Second World War social conditions that have enabled constructions of women as a
collective historical subject-in-process. 131

Despite their insistence on the historical variability of family forms and the importance of
the question of the subordination of women, Marx and Engels could not historicize sex
and gender from a base of natural heterosexuality.131

The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller's work (1968, 1976) discussed and generalized the
findings of the UCLA projecl. Stoller (1964) introduced the term 'gender identity' to the
International Psychoanalytic Congress at Stockholm in '963. He formulated the concept of
gender identity within the framework of the biology/culture distinction, such that sex was
related to biology (hormones, genes, nervous system, morphology) and gender was related
to culture (psychology, sociology). The product of culture's working of biology was the
core, achieved, gendered person - a man or a woman. Beginning in the I950s, the
psychoendocrin- ologist, John Money, ultimately from the institutional base of the Johns
Hopkins Medical School's Gender Identity Clinic (established 1965), with his colleague,
Anke Ehrhardt, developed and popularized the interactionist version of the gender identity
paradigm, in which the functionalist mix of biological and social causations made room for
a myriad of 'sex/gender differences' research and therapeutic programmes, including
surgery, coun- selling, pedagogy, social services, and so on. Money and Ehrhardt's (1972)
Mall alld WOlllall, Boy alld Girl became a widely used college and university textbook. 133

Judith Butler
A concept ofa coherent inner self, achieved (cultural) or innate (biological), is a regulatory
fiction that is unnecessary - indeed, inhibitory - for feminist projects of producing and
affirming complex agency and responsibility.
Strathern (1988, pp. 311-39) went to great pains to show both the ethnocentric quality of
the self-evident Western assertion that 'women make babies' and the inferential character
of all vision. She showed the productionist core of the beliefthat women make babies (and
its pair, that man makes himself), which is intrinsic to Western fonnulations of sex and
gender. Strathern argued that Hagen men and women do not exist in permanent states as
subjects and objects within Aristotelian, Hegelian, Marxist, or Freudian frames. Hagen
agency has a different dynamic and geometry. For Westerners, it is a central consequence
of concepts of gender difference that a person may be turned by another person into an
object and robbed of her or his status as subject. The proper state for a Western person is
to have ownership of the self, to have and hold a core identity as if it were a possession.
That possession may be made from various raw materials over time, that is, it may be a
cultural production, or one may be born with it. Gender identity is such a possession. Not
to have property in the self is not to be a subject, and so not to have agency. Agency follows
different pathways for the Hagen, who as persons 'are composed of multiple gendered
parts, or multiple gendered persons, who are interacting with one another as donors and
recipients in maintaining the flow of elements through the body' (Douglas, 1989, p. 17).
Sexist domination between persons can and does systematically occur, but it cannot be
traced or addressed by the same analytical moves that would be appropriate for many
Western social fields of meaning (Strathern, 1988, pp. 334-9). Butler could - cautiously -
use Strathern's ethnographic arguments to illustrate one way to disperse the coherence of
gender without losing the power of agency. 135-136

Sex/gender differences discourse exploded in US sociological and psychological literature in

the 1970S and 80S.
Set up within the epistemological binary framework of nature/culture and sex! gender,
many feminists (including socialist and Marxist feminists) appropri- ated the sex/gender
distinction and the interactionist paradigm to argue for
the primacy of culture-gender over biology-sex in a panoply of debates in Europe and the
United States. These debates have ranged from genetic differences in mathematics ability
of boys and girls, the presence and significance of sex differences in neural organization,
the relevance of animal research to human behaviour, the causes of male dominance in the
organization of scientific research, sexist structures and use patterns in language,
sociobiology debates, struggles over the meanings of sex chromo- somal abnormalities, to
the similarities of racism and sexism. By the mid-1980s, a growing suspicion of the category
of gender and the binarism sex/gender entered the feminist literature in these debates. 136-
137

Rubin examined the 'domestication of women', in which human females were the raw
materials for the social production ofwomen, through the exchange systems ofkinship
controlled by men in the institution ofhuman culture. She defined the sex-gender system as
the system of social relations that transformed biological sexuality into products of human
activity and in which the resulting historically specific sexual needs are met.
Rubin viewed the sexual division of labour and the psychological construction of desire
(especially the oedipal formation) as the foundations of a system of production of human
beings vesting men with rights in women which they do not have in themselves. To survive
materially where men and women cannot perfonn the other's work and to satisfY deep
structures of desire in the sex/gender system in which men exchange women,
heterosexuality is obligatory. Obligatory heterosex- uality is therefore central to the
oppression of women. 137

The key struggle is for the destruction of the social system of heterosexuality, because 'sex'
is the naturalized political category that founds society as heterosexual. All the social
sciences based on the category of 'sex' (most of them) must be overthrown. In this view,
lesbians are not 'women' because they are outside the political economy of heterosexuality.
Lesbian society destroys women as a natural group (Wittig, Ig81).
Thus, theorized in three different frames, withdrawal from marriage was central to
Rubin's, Rich's, and Wittig's political visions in the 1970S and early 80S. 138

There have been many uses and criticisms of Rubin's sex-gender system. In an article at the
centre of much Euro-American Marxist and socialist- feminist debate, Hartmann (1981)
insisted that patriarchy was not simply an ideology, as Juliet Mitchell seemed to argue in
her seminal 'Women: the Longest Revolution' (1966) and its expansion in Women's Estate
(1971), but a material system that could be defined 'as a set of social relations between men,
which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create
interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women'
(Hartmann, 198I, p. 14). 139

Iris Young (1981)

Young
Such an analysis does not posit that all women have a common, unified situation; but it
makes the historically differentiated positions of women central. If capitalism and
patriarchy are a single system, called capitalist patriarchy, then the struggle against class
and gender oppressions must be unified. The struggle is the obligation of men and women,
although autonomous women's organization would remain a practical necessity. This
theory is a good example of strongly rationalist, modernist approaches, for which the
'postmodern' moves of the disaggrega- tion of metaphors of single systems in favour of
complex open fields of criss-crossing plays of domination, privilege, and difference
appeared very threatening. Young's 1981 work was also a good example of the power of
modernist approaches in specific circumstances to provide political direc- tion.
Nancy Hartsock (1983a,b) 140
Sandra Harding (1983)
Jeffrey Escoffier (1985) argued for a need to theorize the emergence and linnitations of new
forms of political subjectivity, in order to develop a committed, positioned politics without
metaphysical identity closures. 141

MacKinnon's
MacKinnon saw the construction of woman as the material and ideological construction of
the object of another's desire. Thus women are not sinnply alienated from the product of
their labour; in so far as they exist as 'woman', that is to say, sex objects, they are not even
potentially historical subjects. 'For women, there is no distinction between objectification
and alienation because women have not authored objectifications, we have been them'
(1982, pp. 253-4). The epistemological and political consequences of this position are far
reaching and have been extremely controversial. For MacKinnon, the production of
women is the production of a very material illusion, 'woman'. Unpacking this material
illusion, which is women's lived reality, requires a politics of consciousness-raising, the
specific form of feminist politics in MacKinnon's frame. 'Sexuality determines gender', and
'women's sexuality is its use, just as our femaleness is its alterity' (p. 243). 141

In an analysis of the gendering of violence sympathetic to MacKinnon's, but drawing on

different theoretical and political resources, Teresa de Lauretis's (1984, 1985) approaches
to representation led her to view gender as the unexamined tragic flaw of modern and
postrnodern theories of culture, whose faultline is the heterosexual contract. De Lauretis
defined gender as the social construction of 'woman' and 'man' and the semiotic
production of subjectivity; gender has to do with 'the history, practices, and imbrication of
meaning and experience'; that is, with the 'mutually constitu- tive effects in semiosis of the
outer world of social reality with the inner world of subjectivity' (1984, pp. 158-86). De
Lauretis drew on Charles Peirce's theories of semiosis to develop an approach to
'experience', one of the most problematic notions in modern feminism, that takes account
both of experience's intimate embodiment and its mediation through signitying practices.
Experience is never im-mediately accessible. Her efforts have been particularly helpful in
understanding and contesting inscriptions of gender in cinema and other areas where the
idea that gender is an embodied semiotic difference is crucial and empowering. 142

Chodorow adopted the concept of the sex-gender system in her study of the social
organization of parenting, which produced women more capable of non-hostile
relationality than men, but which also perpetuated the subordinate position of women
through their production as people who are structured for mothering in patriarchy. 142

Although criticized as an essentializ- ing of woman-as-relational, Chodorow's feminist

object relations theory has been immensely influential, having been adapted to explore a
wide range of social phenomena. 142

Gilligan
Chodorow's early work was deVeloped in the context of a related series of
sociological and anthropological papers theorizing a key role for the public/private division
in the subordination of women (Rosaldo and Lam- phere, 1974). In that collection, Rosaldo
argued the universal salience of the Untitation of women to the domestic realm, while
power was vested in the space men inhabit, called public. Sherry Ortner connected that
approach to her structuralist analysis of the proposition that women are to nature as men
are to culture. 143

The universalizing power of the sex-gender system and the analytical split between public
and private were also sharply criticized politically, especially by women of colour, as part
of the ethnocentric and imperializing tendencies of European and Euro-American
feminisms. The category of gender obscured or subordinated all the other 'others'. Efforts
to use Western or 'white' concepts of gender to characterize a 'Third World Woman' often
resulted in reproducing orientalist, racist, and colonialist discourse (Mohan- ty, 1984;
Amos el ai., 1984). 144

These theories of the social positioning ofwomen ground and organize 'generic' feminist
theory, in which concepts like 'the house of difference' (Lorde), 'oppositional consciousness'
(Sandoval), 'womanism' (Walker), 'shuttle from center to margin' (Spivak), 'Third World
feminism' (Moraga and Smith), 'el mundo zurdo' (Anzaldua and Moraga), 'la mestiza'
(Anzaldua), 'racially-structured patriarchal capitalism' (Bhavnani and Coul- son, 1986),
and 'inappropriate/d other' (Trinh, 1986-7, 1989) structure the field of feminist discourse,
as it decodes what counts as a 'woman' within as well as outside 'feminism'. Complexly
related figures have emerged also in feminist writing by 'white' women: 'sex-political
classes' (Sofoulis, 1987); 'cyborg' (Haraway, 1985 and this voL pp. 149-81); the female
subject of
feminism (de Lauretis, 1987).
In the early 1980s, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was established
in New York
144

Carby
MacKinnon
Free women in US white patriarchy were exchanged in a system that oppressed them, but
white women ililleriled black women and men. As Hurtado (1989, p. 841) noted, in the
nineteenth century prominent white feminists were //lamed to white men, while black
feminists were owned by white men. In a racist patriarchy, white men's 'need' for racially
pure offspring positioned free and unfree women in incompatible, asymmetrical symbolic
and social spaces. 145

Unfree men and women inherited their condition from their mother, who in tum
specifically did not control their children. They had no name in the sense theorized by Levi-
Strauss or Lacan. Slave mothers could not transmit a name; they could not be wives; they
were outside the system of marriage exchange. 146
This little difference is part of the reason that 'reproductive rights' for women of colour in
the US prominendy hinge on comprehensive control of children - for example, their
freedom from destruction through lynching, imprisonment, infant mortality, forced
pregnancy, coercive sterilization, inadequate housing, racist education, or drug addiction
(Hurtado, 1989, p. 853). For white women the concept of property in the self, the ownership
of one's own body, in relation to reproductive freedom has more readily focused on the
field of events around conception, pregnancy, abortion, and birth, because the system of
white patriarchy turned on the control of legitimate children and the consequent
constitution of white females as woman. 146

The positionings of African-American women are not the same as those of other women of
colour; each condition of oppression requires specific analysis that refuses the separations
but insists on the non-identities of race, sex, and class. These matters make starkly clear
why an adequate feminist theory of gender must simultaneously be a theory of racial
difference in specific historical conditions of production and reproduction. 146

While contributing fundamentally to the breakup of any master subject location, the
politics of 'difference' emerging from this and other complex reconstructings of concepts of
social subjectivity and their associated writing practices is deeply opposed to levelling
relativisms. Non-feminist theory in the human sciences has tended to identifY the breakup
of 'coherent' or masterful subjectivity as the 'death of the subject'. 147

The point involves the commitment to transformative social change, the moment of hope
embedded in feminist theories of gender and other emergent discourses about the breakup
of masterful subjectivity and the emergence of inappropriate/d others (Trinh, '986-7, 1989).
The multiple academic and other institutional roots of the literal (written) category
'gender', feminist and otherwise, sketched in this entry have been part of the race-
hierarchical system of relations that obscures the publica- tions by women of colour
because of their origin, language, genre - in short, 'marginality'J 'alterity', and 'difference'
as seen from the 'unmarked' posi- tions of hegemonic and imperializing ('white') theory.
But 'alterity' and 'difference' are precisely what 'gender' is 'grammatically' about, a fact
that constitutes feminism as a politics defined by its fields of contestation and repeated
refusals ofmaster theories. 'Gender' was developed as a category to explore what counts as
a 'woman', to problematize the previously taken-for- granted. 147

The refusal to become or to remain a 'gendered' man or a woman, then, is

an eminently political insistence on emerging from the nightmare of the all-too-real,
imaginary narrative of sex and race. 148

Phallogocentrism was the egg ovulated by the

master subject, the brooding hen to the permanent chickens of history. But into the nest
with that literal-minded egg has been placed the gerro of a phoenix that will speak in all the
tongues of a world turned upside down. 148

Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger
wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together
because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is
also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured
within socialist-feminism. 149

Modem medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each
conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the
history of
sexuality. 150

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality
and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's
biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. 150

In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant
capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as
resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the
reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border
war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction,
and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries
and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-
feminist culture and theory in a postmodemist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian
tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis,
but maybe also a world without end. 150

the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied
in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand
for our survival. 150

Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour
and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of
which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of
woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in
the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its
teleology as star wars. 151
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is
oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the
polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a
revolution ofsocial relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked;
the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The
rela- tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical
domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster,
the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is,
through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole,
a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic
family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden
of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why
I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the
manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member
the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural
feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with
cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal
capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly
unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. 151

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a
clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.
152

The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is
transgressed. 152

They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to
himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were
otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have
made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body,
self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to
organisms and machines. Our
machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. 152

The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a
new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. 153-154

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous

possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.
154
From Olle-DimensiollalMall (Marcuse, 1964) to 17.. Death o[Nalllre
(Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the
necessary domination of technics and recalled us. to an imagined organic body to integrate
our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist
world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute. 154

From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities
in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid
of permanendy partial identities and contradictory standpoints. 154

Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible

historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and
capitalism. 155

Chela Sandoval
This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said about other possible
posttnodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradictory locations
and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and
pluralisms. 155-156

Sandoval argues that 'women ofcolour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does
not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolution- ary subjects ofprevious Marxisms and
feminisms which had not faced the
consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization. 156

The rituals of poetry, music, and certain

forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the
US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and
Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of
appropriation, incorpora- tion, and taxonomic identification. 157

White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and
screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category 'woman'. That consciousness
changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a
fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural
matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence
on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. 157

Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure.
The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is
dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination
rules in practice. Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to
overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary
for changing the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes maO" .' labour IS an
ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and
so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.
In faithful fIliation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself with the
basic analytic strategies ofMarxism. The main achievement ofboth Marxist feminists and
socialist feminists was to expand the category of labour to accommodate what (some)
women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view
of labour under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women's labour in the household and
women's activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense),
entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of
women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of'labour'.
Marxist/socialist-feminism does not 'natur- alize' unity; it is a possible achievement based
on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the
ontological structure oflabour or ofits analogue, women's activity.ll The inheritance of
Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The
contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the
daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them. 158

And MacKinnon's theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist
revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.
MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt- ical strategy from
Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and
its generative relationship, men's constitu- tion and appropriation ofwomen sexually. 159

Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-
knowledge of a self-who-is-not. 159

However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not
exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to
sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be
alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product. 159

I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground
women's unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western
revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian
doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their
unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-
colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through
the device of the 'essential' non-existence of women is not reassuring. 159

Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major,
devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political
taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was nO structural room for race (or for
much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social
group women as a unified or totalizable whole. 160

In
appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groups like youth.
Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of
knowledge and as historical actors, 'race' did not always exist, 'class' has a historical
genesis, and 'homosexuals' are quite junior. I 160

Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems o f domination.
'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference. 161

. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the

following chart of transitions from the comfortable old
hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of
domination: 161

For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human
beings will be developed in the languages ofpopulation control and maximization of goal
achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms
of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component
or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation
are probabilistic, statistical. 163

One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and
practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including cruciaOy the
systems of
myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. 163

Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our
bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide.
Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as
frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be
viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool
and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical
anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool
mutually constitute each other. 164

Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of
coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality
for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. 164

It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the
science-based multinationals in the export- processing sectors, particularly in electronics.
The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption,
and production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's lives have been
structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities
include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, dis- tance from extended kin
or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood ofloneliness and extreme
economic vulnerability as they age. 166

Gordon intends 'homework economi to name a restructuring ofwork that broadly has the
characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work
is being redefmed as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or
women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled,
reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers;
subjected to time arrangements on and ofT the paid job that make a mockery ofa limited
work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and
reducible to sex. 166

The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life'
for everyone.
This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military estab- lishment at the
cultural and economic expense ofmost people, but especially of women. Technologies like
video games and highly miniaturized televi- sions seem crucial to production of modern
forms of 'private life'. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual
competition and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced
here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi
escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized;
and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the
technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange - and incidentally enable
tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world's
largest single industries. 168

There is much now being done, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example,
the efforts to develop forms of coUec,tive strugg1e for women in paid work, like SEIU's
District 925,* should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly tied to
technical restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working classes. These
efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organiza-
tion, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white
male industrial unions. 172

The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of
perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense,
dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we
can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment
of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions,
made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a
feminist science. 173

…French feminists like Luce lrigaray and Monique Wittig, for all their differences, know
how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of
embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery offragmentation and reconstitution
ofbodies.2'
American radical feminists like Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adri- enne Rich have
profoundly affected our political imaginations - and perhaps restricted too much what we
allow as a friendly body and political language.'5 They insist on the organic, opposing it to
the technological. 174

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time
wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power
to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to
mark the world that marked them as other.
The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and
displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories,
cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been
colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The
phallogocentric origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal
technologies - technologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics - that
have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C31. Feminist cyborg
stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and
control. 175

Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by

the phallogocentric Family of Man. 175
Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness
imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy
of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in
the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics - rebirth without
flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off,
but all agree they have less selfbood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to
Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. 177

So, the further I get with the description of the radical social construction- ist programme
and a particular version of postrnodernism, coupled to the acid tools ofcritical discourse in
the human sciences, the more nervous I get. Like all neuroses, mine is rooted in the
problem of metaphor, that is, the problem of the relation of bodies and language. For
example, the force field imagery of moves in the fully textualized and coded world is the
matrix for many arguments about socially negotiated reality for the postrnodern subject.
This world-as-code is, just for starters, a high-tech military field, a kind of automated
academic battlefield, where blips of light called players disintegrate (what a metaphorl)
each other in order to stay in the knowledge and power game. Technoscience and science
fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality - war.5 It shouldn't take decades of
feminist theory to sense the enemy here. Nancy Hartsock (1983b) got all this crystal clear in
her concept of abstract masculinity. 185-186

Humanistic Marxism was polluted at the source by its structuring ontological theory of the
domination of nature in the self- construction of man and by its closely related impotence
to historicize anything women did that didn't qualifY for a wage. 186

So, I think my problem and 'our' problem is how to have simultaneously an account of
radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical
practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-
nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially
shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abund-
ance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. 187

All components of the desire are paradoxical and danger- ous, and their combination is
both contradictory and necessary. Feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that
promises transcendence, a story that
loses track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something,
and unlimited instrumental power. We don't want a theory of innocent powers to represent
the world, where language and bodies both fall into the bliss of organic symbiosis. We also
don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but
we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to
translate knowledges among very different - and power-differentiated - communities. We
need the power of modem critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in
order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a
chance for a future. 187

I would like to proceed by placing metaphorical reliance on a much maligned sensory

system in fentinist discourse: vision. Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions.
188

'The choice is the universe - or nothing' (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). 189

But of course that view ofinfinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. 189

The 'eyes' made available in modem technological sciences shatter any idea ofpassive
vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are
active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways
of life. 190

'Passionate detachment' (Kuhn, 1982) requires more than acknowledged and self-critical
partiality. We are also bound to seek
perspective from those points ofview, which can never be known in advance which promise
something quite extraordinary, that is, knowledge potent fo; constructing worlds less
organized by axes of domination. In such a viewpoint, the unmarked category would really
disappear _ quite a difference from simply repeating a disappearing act. The imaginary
and the rational- the visionary and objective vision - hover close together. I 192

One cannot 'be' either a cell or molecule _ or a woman colonized person, labourer, and so
on - if one intends to see and see
these positions critically. 'Being' is much more problematic and contingent.
Also, one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that
movement. Vision is always a question of the power to see - and perhaps of the violence
implicit in our visualizing practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted? These points
also apply to testimony from the position of 'oneself'. We are not immediately present to
ourselves.
Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology linking meanings and bodies. Self-
identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of positioning. The boys in the
human sciences have called this doubt about self-presence the 'death of the subject', that
single ordering point ofwill and
consciousness. That judgement seems bizarre to me. I prefer to call this generative doubt
the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable
from the vantage point of the cyclopian, self-satiated eye of the master subject. The
Western eye has fundamentally
been a wandering eye, a travelling lens. These peregrinations have often
been violent and insistent on mirrors for a conquering self - but not always.
Western feminists also inherit some skill in learning to participate in revisualizing worlds
turned upside down in earth-transforming challenges to the views of the masters. All is not
to be done from scratch. 192

The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate position- ings and be
accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic
imaginings that change history.9 Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist
epistemolOgies of scientific knowledge. 'Splitting' in this context should be about
heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously necessary and incapable of being
squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. 193

There is no way to 'be' simultaneously in all, or wholly in any, of the privileged

(subjugated) positions structured by gender, race, nation, and class. And that is a short list
of critical positions. The search for such a 'full' and total position is the search for the
fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history, sometimes appearing in feminist theory as
the essentialized Third World Woman (Mohanty, 1984). 193

Only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked,
disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again. 193

Positioning is, therefore, the key prac, tice grounding knowledge organized around the
imagery ofvision, as so much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is organized.
Positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices. 193

So location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure, finality, or, to
borrow from Althusser, feminist objectivity resists 'simplification in the last instance'. 196

Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for some unsettling
possibilities, including a sense of the world's independent sense of humour. Such a sense of
humour is not comfortable for humanists and others committed to the world as resource.
199

Feminist objectivity makes room for surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledge
production; we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up non-
innocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization
technologies. No wonder science fiction has been such a rich writing practice in recent
feminist theory. I like to see feminist theory as a reinvented coyote discourse obligated to its
enabling sources in many kinds of heterogeneous accounts of the world. 199
When female 'sex' has been so thoroughly re-theorized and revisualized that it emerges as
practically indistinguishable from 'mind', something basic has happened to the categor- ies
ofbiology. The biological female peopling current biological behavioural accounts has
almost no passive properties left. She is structuring and active in every respect; the 'body'
is an agent, not a resource. 199-200

Are biological bodies 'produced' or 'generated' in the same strong senSe as poems? From
the early stirrings of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, many poets and biologists
have believed that poetry and orgsnisms are siblings. Fra"ketlslei" may be read as a
meditation on this proposition. I continue to believe in this potent proposition, but in a
posttnodern and not a Romantic manner of belief. 200

Objectivity is not about dis-engagement, but about mutual and usually unequal
structuring, about taking risks in a world where 'we' are perman- endy mortal, that is, not
in 'final' control. We have, finally, no clear and distinct ideas. The various contending
biological bodies emerge at the intersection of biological research and writing, medical and
other business practices, and technology, such as the visualization technologies enlisted as
metaphors in this chapter. 201

Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofeminism, turn on revisioning the
world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse. 201

That is, the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the
boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and
the pathological. 204

The immune system is both an iconic mythic object in high-technology culture and a
subject of research and clinical practice of the fIrst importance. 205

But Golub's and Gershon's intended and explicit text is not about space invaders and the
immune system as a Star Wars prototype. Their theme is the love of complexity and the
intimate natural bodily technologies for generating the harmonies of organic life. 205

Genesis is a serious joke, when the body is theorized as a coded text whose secrets yield
only to the proper reading conventions, and when the laboratory seems best characterized
as a vast assemblage of technological and organic inscription devices. 206

The joke of single masterly control of organismic harmony in the symphonic system
responsible for the integrity of 'self' has become a kind of postmodern pastiche of multiple
centres and peripheries, where the immune music that the page suggests would surely
sound like nursery school space music. All the actors that used to be on the stage-set for the
unambiguous and coherent biopolitical subject are still present, but their harmonies are
definitely a bit problematic. 207

extraordinarily close tie of language and technology could hardly be

overstressed in postmodernism. The 'construct' is at the centre of attention; making,
reading, writing, and meaning seem to be very close to the same thing. This near-identity
between technology, body, and semiosis suggests a particular edge to the mutually
constitutive relations of political economy, symbol, and science that 'inform' contemporary
research trends in medical anthropology. 208

It took the political-epistemological terrain of postmodernism to be able to insist on a co-

text to de Beauvoir's: one is not born an organism.
Organisms are made; they are constructs of a world-changing kind. The constructions of
an organism's boundaries, the job of the discourses of immunology, are particularly potent
mediators ofthe experiences ofsickness and death for industrial and post-industrial people.
208

Sex, sexuality, and

reproduction are theorized in terms of local investment strategies; the body ceases to be a
stable spatial map of normalized functions and instead emerges as a highly mobile field of
strategic differences. The biomedical- biotechnical body is a semiotic system, a complex
meaning-producing field, for which the discourse of immunology, that is, the central
biomedical discourse on recognition/misrecognition, has become a high-stakes practice in
many senses. 211

Disease is a subspecies of infonnation malfunction or communications pathology; disease is

a process of misrecognition or transgression of the boundaries of a strategic assemblage
called self. 212

'Degrees of freedom' becomes a very powerful metaphor for politics. Human beings, like
any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic
modes of operation are probabilistic. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves;
any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code,
can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. In particular, there is no
ground for ontologically opposing the organic, the technical, and the textual' But neither is
there any ground for opposing the mythical to the organic, textual, and technical. Their
convergences are more important than their residual oppositions. The privileged pathology
affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress - communications breakdown. In
the
body stress is theorized to operate by 'depressing' the immune system. Bodies have become
cyborgs - cybernetic organisms - compounds of hybrid techno-organic embodiment and
textuality (Haraway, 1985 [this vol. pp. 149-8 I]). The cyborg is text, machine, body, and
metaphor - all theorized and engaged in practice in terms of communications. 212

Immune system discourse is about constraint and possibility for engaging in a world of full
of 'difference', replete with non-self. Winograd and Flores' approach contains a way to
contest for notions of pathology, or 'breakdown', without militarizing the terrain of the
body. 214

There are two major cell lineages to the system. The first is the lymphocytes, which include
the several types of T cells (helper, suppressor, killer, and variations of all these) and the B
cells (each type of which can produce only one sort of the vast array of potential circulating
antibodies). T and B cells have particular specifrcities capable of recognizing almost any
molecular array o f the right size that can ever exist, no matter how clever industrial
chemistry gets. This specificity is enabled by a baroque
somatic mutation mechanism, clonal selection, and a polygenic receptor or
marker system. The second immune cell lineage is the mononuclearphagocyl' syslem,
including the multi-talented macrophages, which, in addition to their other recognition
skills and connections, also appear to share receptors and some hormonal peptide products
with neural cells. Besides the cellular compartment, the immune system comprises a vast
array of circulating acellular products, such as antibodies, lymphokines, and complement
components. These molecules mediate communication among components of the immune
system, but also between the immune system and the nervous and endocrine systems, thus
linking the body's multiple control and
sites and functions. The genetics of the immune system
With their high rates of somatic mutation and gene product splicings and rearrangings to
make finished surface receptors and antibodies, makes a
of the notion of a constant genome even within 'one' body. The hIerarchical body of old has
given way to a network-body of truly amazing complexity and specificity. The immune
system is everywhere and nowhere. Its specificities are indefinite if not infinite, and they
arise randomly; yet
these extraordinary variations are the critical means of maintaining indi- vidual bodily
coherence. 217-218

Jerne's basic idea was that any antibody molecule must be able to act functionally as both
antibody to some antigen and as antigen for the production of an antibody to itself, albeit at
another region of 'itself'. 218

Dawkins (1976, 1982) has been among the most radical disrupters of cyborg biological
holism, and in that sense he is most deeply infonned by a
postmodern consciousness, in which the logic of the permeability among the textual, the
technic, and the biotic and ofthe deep theorization ofall possible texts and bodies as
strategic assemblages has made the notions of 'organism' or 'individual' extremely
problematic. He ignores the mythic, but it pervades his texts. 'Organism' and 'individual'
have not disappeared; rather, they have been fully denaturalized. That is, they are
ontologically contingent con- structs from the point ofview of the biologist, not just in the
loose ravings of a cultural critic or feminist historian of science. 220

Immunity can also be conceived in terms of shared specificities; of the semi-permeable self
able to engage with others (human and non-human, inner and outer), but always with finite
consequences; of situated possibil- ities and impossibilities of individuation and
identification; and of partial fusions and dangers. The problematic multiplicities
ofpostmodern selves, so potently figured alld repressed in the lumpy discourses
ofinImunology, must be brought into other emerging Western and multi-cultural
discourses on health, sickness, individuality, humanity, and death. 225

The Oankali believe humans to be fatally, but reparably, flawed by their genetic nature as
simultaneously intelligent and hierarchical. Instead, the aliens live in the postrnodern
geometries ofvast webs and nerworks, in which the nodal points of individuals are still
intensely important. 228

But the Oankali want more from human- ity; they want a full trade, which will require the
intimacies of sexual mingling and embodied pregnancy in a shared colonial venture in, of
all places, the Amazon valley. Human individuality will be challenged by more than the
Oankali communication technology that translates other beings into
themselves as signs, images, and memories. Pregnancy raises the tricky question ofconsent,
property in the self, and the humans' love ofthemselves as the sacred image, the sign of the
same. The Oankali intend to return to earth as trading parmers with humanity's remnants.
In difference is the irretrievable loss of the illusion of the one. 228

Again, Zuckerman's logic is elegandy simple. Some unknown ecological changes produced
selection pressure for prehumans to exploit new sources of food, to rework the age-old
unspecia1i2ed feeding patterns, and to introduce sexual division of labour as a necessary conse-
quence of the requirements of large-scale meat-eating. Food-sharing necessitated the human
form of the family, which for Zuckerman meant selection pressure for 'overt monogamy' and
conceptual recognition of significant social relations (ownership of women) even when no one
was

Engineering meant rational placement and modification of human raw material- in the common
interest of organism, family, culture, society, and industry.

Second, the sex instinct was perceived to

underlie the whole pyramid of life and human sciences and to be the key to understanding culture
and personality.

Dominance was perceived as inherent to individual organisms; it was probably inheritable,

just like eye colour or IQ, The second idea was co-operation - from homoeostatic mechanisms at
all levels, to deliberate modification of dominance in the interests of higher organization, to
everyday rules for running the laboratory. Co-operation and dominance were closely connected
on an organic level as forms of integration.

It is significant that the culture concept depended on personality in the anthropology o f the
1930s. W e have moved with Y erkes from instinct, through personality, to culture, to human
engineering.

Yerkes and his liberal peers advocated studying traits of the body, mind, spirit, and character in
order to fit 'the person' perfectly into the proper place in industry. Equality clearly did not mean
organic sameness; therefore it must mean that 'in the United States of America, within limits set
by age, sex, and race, persons are equal under the law and may claim as their right as citizens
like opportunities for human service and responsibility' (Yerkes,
1922, p. 58).
After the war, the explosive development of electronics industries and communications
technology was increasingly tied to strategies of social and military planning to devise and
manage stable systems organized around several axes of
variation.19 Knowledge about range of variation and interaction effects among classes of
variables replaced concern for individual. states. The computer, a communications machine, both
effected and symbolized new strategies of control.

Nature is structured as a series of interlocking cybernetic systems, which are theorized as

communications problems. Nature has been systematically constituted in tertns of the capitalist
machine and market. Let us look first at the market.
The market is best approached in tertns of the history of the concept of natural selection.
That noumenal object is the gene, called by Richard Dawkins the 'replicator', within the gene
pool. Sociobiology analyses all behaviour in terms of the ultimate level of explanation, the
genetic market place.
Bodies and societies are only the replicators' strategies for maximizing their own reproductive
profit.

The genes must make stable mediating devices; that is, they must produce machines embodying
evolution- ary stable strategies, just as capital requires capitalist institutions. Without
mechanisms for transmission and replication, the genes are like hoarded money. The market
demands a technology of production consistent with own imperatives. Here we leave the realm
of competition and exchange and enter the factories of life. What kind of mediating machines do
the genes inform? Naturally, cybernetic systems.

Genes are like programs for chess-playing computers; that is, genes build brains, effector
organs, and sensory channels. Brains are processing devices with logical programs. Terms
like 'imagination' (all mentalistic language) refer to forms of simulation made possible by
advanced brains. The task of brains is the prediction of interlocking system contingencies,
including the environment, and control of rate of motion. The system goal is maximization of
genetic profit, necessitating the structuring of specific forms of control. Speed and capacity of
processing are the basic parameters of the brain as control de,;ce.
Wilson (1975, ch. 7) calls social behaviour a traclting device for changes in the environment.

According to Wilson (1975, p. 201) a task of his science is to construct 'zoosemiotics'; that
is, the study of general properties of communication." Basic to that task is an analysis of modes
of
communication, which necessitates attention to sensory channels, whether auditory, tactile,
acoustical, or chemical.
It is therefore legitimate to analyze advantages and disadvantages of the several sensory
modalities as though they were competing in an open marketplace for the privilege of carrying
messages. Put another, more familiar way, we can reasonably hypothesize that species evolve
toward the mix of sensory cues that maximizes either energetic or informational
efficiency, or both. (Wilson, '975, p. 23 1)
It is in this context that we should consider one of Wilson's most important research
contributions to sociobiology: a study of insect chemical com- munication mediated by
pheromones.

Indeed, Barash's concern for lineages is his central rhetorical strategy. He calls on the authority
of the father and names it scientific knowledge. 1979

On the Barash offers a doctrine of necessary biological determinism of all the chief forms
domination which are especially driven by the motors of
ruthless compennon and male dominance. In the beginning was the gene. And to live was to
mUltiply.

Barash's message is the technology of power.

We have no language at present that does nol reflect a Cartesian nature/nurture dichotomy for
discussing sex differ- ences. It is difficult to resist the urge to ask, 'But what, undernealh il all,
the differences between men and women.' Whal we musl begi" 10 grve vOIce to as scientists and
feminislS is thaI there is no such lhing, or place, as ,,,,demealh il all. Literally, empirically,
physiologically, anatomically, neurologically . . . the only accurate locus for research about us
who speak to each other is the changing, moving, complex web ofour interactions in light of the
language, power structures, natural environments
and external), and beliefs that weave it in time. (Hubbard and Lowe, 1979, p. II6)

The authors in Genes and Gender try to persuade researchers to accept new standards, indeed, to
abandon their field, in a way analogous to a physicist's telling biologists that anything they
cannot quantifY does not qualifY as the matter of science. It remains a question whether natural
selection and evolutionary biology itself would not have to abandon the field in the face of
enforcement of that standard. What leads the authors in Genes and Gender to reach their
nihilistic conclusion?

What becomes very clear, however, is that feminists have now entered the debates on the nature
and power of scientific knowledge with authority:
we do have something to say. The only remaining problem is what and here we are. speaking in
many voices. One voice for beginning again is by the epIlogue of WOllletl Look at Biology:
The man-nature antithesis was invented by men. Our job is to reinvent a that. will realize (in the
literal sense of making real) the unity ofhumankind WIth nature and will try to understand its
workings from the inside ... Science is a human construct that came about under a particular
set of historical conditions when men's domination of nature
seemed a positive and worthy goal. The conditions have changed and we know now that the path
we are travelling is more likely to destroy nature than to explain or improve it. Women have
recognized more often than men that we are part of nature and that its fate is in human hands that
have not cared for it well. We must now act on that knowledge. (Hubbard
et al., 1979, p. 209)
During the '920S, in the hands of psychobiologists, comparative psychologists, and reproductive
and neural physiologists, primates in laboratories figured prominently in debates about human
mental function and sexual organiza- tion. Marriage counselling, immigration policy, and the
testing industry all are directly indebted to primates and primatologists, who in Robert Yerkes'
words were 'servants of science'. Primates seemed models of natural co-operation unobscured by
language and culture. During the '930s, in early field work on wild primates, the sexual
physiology of natural co- operation (in the fonns of dominance of males over females and of
troop demographic structure) emerged in arguments about human social thera- pelltiis for social
disorder - like labour strikes and divorce. Primate models of nuclear families and of fathering in
the suburbs, as well as of the doleful results of absent mothers, appeared in public debates about
US social problems throughout the 1950S and 1960s. Primate models for human depression have
been avidly sought, and a great deal of technical ingenuity has gone into reliably producing
psychoses in monkeys. Population policy and questions about population regulation drew on
primate studies, as did psychiatry (even proposed telemetric control) of stressed, perhaps black
male human primates in riotous cities in the '960s. The pressing question of 'man's' naturally co-
operative or warlike nature was argued in symposia and classrooms throughout the Vietnam war,
with constant debts to developing new theories of human evolution based on recent fossils from
South and East Africa, new field studies of living primates, and the anthropology of modem
gatherer-hunters. Primatologists could be found on most sides of most debates, including the
'side' of not wanting to be part of any explicit political attitude.

Phenomena such as aggression, competition, and dominance structures were seen primarily as
mechanisms of social co-operation, as axes of ordered group life, as prerequisites of
organization. And of course, the man-the- hunter hypothesis was pre-eminendy about male ways
o£life as the motors of the human past and future. Hunting was a male innovation and speciality,
the story insisted. And what was not hunting had always been. Hunting was the principle of
change; the rest was a base line or a support system.s

The logical link to medical-psychiatric therapeutics of social groups should be clear: social
disorder implies a breakdown of central adaptational mechan- isms. Stressed males would
engage in inappropriate (excessive or deficient) dominance behaviours - at the expense of troop
organization and even survival.

Social life was a market where invesnnents were made and tested in the only currency that
counts: genetic increase.

Finally, to connect reproduction and production has been the key theoretical desideratum of both
natural and political economy for 200 years.

But no class of these stories can be seen as innocent, free of detennination by historically specific
social relations and daily practice in producing and reproducing daily life. Surely scientific
stories are not innocent in that sense. It is equally true that no class of tales can be free of rules
for narrating a proper story within a particular genre, in this case the discourse of life science.
DemystifYing those rules seems important to me. Nature is constructed, constituted historically,
not discovered naked in a fossil bed or a tropical forest. Nature is contested, and women have
enthusiastically entered the fray. Some women have the
social authority to author scientific stories.
Complexity, heterogeneity, specific positioning, and power-charged difference are not the same
thing as liberal pluralism. Experience is a semiosis, an embodying of meanings (de Lauretis,
1984, pp. 158-86). The politics ofdifference that feminists need to articulate must be rooted in a
politics of experience that searches for specificity , h e t e r o g e n e i t y , a n d c o n n e c t i o n
through stmggle, n o t t h r o u g h psychologistic, liberal appeals to each her own endless
difference. Feminism is collective; and difference is political, that is, about power,
accountability, and hope. Experience, like difference, is about contradictory and necessary
connection.

Noting this tradition does not invalidate its use; it locates its use and insists on its partiality and
accountability. The difference is important. Binaries, rather suspect for the feminists I know,
can tum out to be nice little tools from time to time.

'Women's experience' does not pre-exist as a kind of prior resource, ready simply to be
appropriated into one or another description. What may count as 'women's experience' is
structured within multiple and often inharmo- nious agendas. 'Experience', like
'consciousness" is an intentional construc- tion, an artefact of the first importance. Experience
may also be re- constructed, re-membered, re-articulated. One powerful means to do so is the
reading and re-reading of fiction in such a way as to create the effect of having access to
another's life and consciousness, whether that other is an individual or a collective person with
the lifetime called history. These readings exist in a field of resonating readings, in which each
version adds tones and shapes to the others, in both cacophonous and consonant waves.

Readings may function as technologies for constructing what may count as women's experience
and for mapping connections and separations among women and the social movements
which they build and in which they participate in local/global worlds.

in an interview in 1979 Emecheta's account of her writing explicitly refused to restrict her
attention to women:
The main themes of my novels are African society and family: the historical, social, and political
life in Africa as seen by a woman through events. I always try to show that the African male is
oppressed and he too oppresses the African women ... I have not committed myself to the cause
of African women only, I write about Africa as a whole. (Bruner,
1983, p. 49)

The third reading was

my own, developed from the perspectives of a Euro-American women's
studies teacher in a largely white state university in the United States and first delivered in a
conference co-constructing the critical study of colonial discourse and feminist theory.

My reading valorized her heterogeneous statuses as exile, Nigerian, lbo, Irish-British feminist,
black woman, writer canonized in the African Writers Series, …

The modern English and German words, 'gender' and 'Geschlecht', adhere closely to concepts of
sex, sexuality, sexual difference, generation, engendering, and so on, while the French and
Spanish seem not to carry those meanings as readily. Words close to 'gender' are implicated in
concepts of kinship, race, biological taxonomy, language, and nationality.
The substantive 'Geschlecht' carries the meanings of sex, stock, race, and
family, while the adjectival form 'geschlechtlich' means in English transla- tion both sexual and
generic. 'Gender' is at the heart of constructions and classifications of systems of difference.

Despite important differences, all the modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in Simone
de Beauvoir's claim that 'one is not born a woman' (de Beauvoir, 1949; 1952, p. 249) and in
post-Second World War social conditions that have enabled constructions of women as a
collective historical subject-in-process.

Despite their insistence on the historical variability of family forms and the importance of the
question of the subordination of women, Marx and Engels could not historicize sex
and gender from a base of natural heterosexuality.
The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller's work (1968, 1976) discussed and generalized the findings of
the UCLA projecl. Stoller (1964) introduced the term 'gender identity' to the International
Psychoanalytic Congress at Stockholm in '963. He formulated the concept of gender identity
within the framework of the biology/culture distinction, such that sex was related to biology
(hormones, genes, nervous system, morphology) and gender was related to culture
(psychology, sociology). The product of culture's working of biology was the core, achieved,
gendered person - a man or a woman. Beginning in the I950s, the psychoendocrin- ologist,
John Money, ultimately from the institutional base of the Johns Hopkins Medical School's
Gender Identity Clinic (established 1965), with his colleague, Anke Ehrhardt, developed and
popularized the interactionist version of the gender identity paradigm, in which the functionalist
mix of biological and social causations made room for a myriad of 'sex/gender differences'
research and therapeutic programmes, including surgery, coun- selling, pedagogy, social
services, and so on. Money and Ehrhardt's (1972)
Mall alld WOlllall, Boy alld Girl became a widely used college and university textbook.

Judith Butler (1989)

The task is to 'disqualifY' the analytic categories,like sex or nature, that lead to univocity. This
move would expose the illusion of an interior organizing gender core and produce a field of race
and gender difference open to resignification.
These debates have ranged from genetic differences in mathematics ability of boys and girls, the
presence and significance of sex differences in neural organization, the relevance of animal
research to human behaviour, the causes of male dominance in the organization of
scientific research, sexist structures and use patterns in language, sociobiology debates,
struggles over the meanings of sex chromo- somal abnormalities, to the similarities of racism and
sexism. By the mid-1980s, a growing suspicion of the category of gender and the binarism
sex/gender entered the feminist literature in these debates.

Rubin examined the 'domestication of women', in which human females were the raw
materials for the social production ofwomen, through the exchange systems ofkinship controlled
by men in the institution ofhuman culture. She defined the sex-gender system as the system of
social relations that transformed biological sexuality into products of human activity and in
which the resulting historically specific sexual needs are met.

Adrienne Rich (lg80) also theorized compulsory heterosexuality to be at the root of the
oppression of women.

Monique Wirtig (1981) developed an independent argument that also foregrounded the centrality
of obligatory heterosexuality in the oppression of women.

Young's 1981 work was also a good example of the power of modernist approaches in specific
circumstances to provide political direc- tion.

Nancy Hartsock (1983a,b) also concentrated on the categories that Marxism had been unable to
historicize: (1) women's sensuous labour in the making of human beings through child-bearing
and raising;

Sandra Harding (1983) took account of the feminist theoretical flowering as a reflection of a
heightening of lived contradictions in the sex-gender system, such that fundamental change can
now be struggled for.

Jeffrey Escoffier (1985) argued for a need to theorize the emergence and linnitations of new
forms of political subjectivity, in order to develop a committed, positioned politics without
metaphysical identity closures.

Haraway's (1985) 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' (see this volume, pp. 149-8,) developed similar
arguments in order to explore Marxist-feminist politics addressed to women's positionings in
multi-national science- and technology-mediated social, cultural, and technical systems.
Chodorow adopted the concept of the sex-gender system in her study of the social organization
of parenting, which produced women more capable of non-hostile relationality than men, but
which also perpetuated the subordinate position of women through their production as people
who are structured for mothering in patriarchy.

In that collection, Rosaldo argued the universal salience of the Untitation of women to the
domestic realm, while power was vested in the space men inhabit, called public. Sherry Ortner
connected that approach to her structuralist analysis of the proposition that women are to
nature as men are to culture.

Free women in US white patriarchy were exchanged in a system that oppressed them, but white
women ililleriled black women and men. As Hurtado (1989, p. 841) noted, in the nineteenth
century prominent white feminists were //lamed to white men, while black feminists were owned
by white men. In a racist patriarchy, white men's 'need' for racially pure offspring
positioned free and unfree women in incompatible, asymmetrical symbolic and social spaces.

The refusal to become or to remain a 'gendered' man or a woman, then, is

an eminently political insistence on emerging from the nightmare of the all-too-real, imaginary
narrative of sex and race.

Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of

oppression, and so of possibility.

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as
an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics
is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodemist, non-

naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is
perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.

the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in
non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our
survival.

Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of
individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference
must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg
skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its
illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.
No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological
polis based partly on a revolution ofsocial relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and
culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by
the other. The rela- tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and
hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's
monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that
is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a
city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family,
this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it
is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if
cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name
the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of
holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but
without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But
illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are
inessential.

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-
sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.

The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is
transgressed.

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities
which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.

Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and
that no construction is whole.

I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground
women's unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary
subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If
my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal,
unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice,
MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' non-
existence of women is not reassuring.

Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems o f domination.
'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference.
Representation
Bourgeois novel, realism
Organism
Depth, integrity
Heat
Biology as clinical practice Physiology
Small group
Perfection
Eugenics
Decadence, Magic MOllntai11 Hygiene
Microbiology, tuberculosis Organic division of labour Functional specialization Reproduction
Organic sex role specialization
Biological determinism Community ecology Racial chain of being
Simulation
Science fiction, postrnodernism Biotic component
Surface, boundary
Noise
Biology as inscription Communications engineering Subsystem
Optimization
Population Control
Obsolescence, Future Siwek
Stress Management
Immunology, AIDS
Ergonomics / cybernetics of labour Modular construction
Replication
Optimal genetic strategies Evolutionary inertia, constraints Ecosystem
Neo-imperialism, United Nations
humanism
A Cyborg Manifesto 161
One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice
addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including cruciaOy the systems of
myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and
reassembled, postrnodern collective and personal self.

Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding
and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us.
Biology here is a kind of cryptography.

But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power,
that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action (Latour, 1984).
It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the
science-based multinationals in the export- processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The
picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumption, and
production. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's lives have been structured around
employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual
monogamy, negotiating childcare, dis- tance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional
community, a high likelihood ofloneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age.

Work is being redefmed as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or
women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled,
reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected
to time arrangements on and ofT the paid job that make a mockery ofa limited work day; leading
an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.

The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for
everyone.
This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military estab- lishment at the cultural
and economic expense ofmost people, but especially of women. Technologies like video games
and highly miniaturized televi- sions seem crucial to production of modern forms of 'private life'.
The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual competition and extraterrestrial
warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced
here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi
escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized;
and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the
technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange - and incidentally enable
tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world's largest
single industries.

There is much now being done, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the
efforts to develop forms of coUec,tive strugg1e for women in paid work, like SEIU's District
925,* should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly tied to technical
restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts also are
providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organiza- tion, involving
community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial
unions.

The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of
perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one.

American radical feminists like Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adri- enne Rich have
profoundly affected our political imaginations - and perhaps restricted too much what we allow
as a friendly body and political language.'5 They insist on the organic, opposing it to the
technological.

High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who is made in the relation between human and machine.
It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices.

Anne McCaffrey's pre-feminist Tlte Sltip Wlto Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a
cyborg, hybrid of girl's brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely
handicapped child.

Students facing Joanna Russ for the first time, students who have learned to take modernist
writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of The
Adventures ofAlyx or Tlte Female Man, where characters refuse the reader's search for innocent
wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics.

James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was regarded as particularly manly until her 'true'
gender was revealed, tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like
alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing.

John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad
goddess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device on whose surface an extraordinary
array ofpost-cyborg symbioses are spawned.

In a fiction where no character is 'simply' human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a
genetically altered diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she
longs to explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her kinship with
the divers and cetaceans.

A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and
so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for
granted.

One is too few, and two is only one possibility. The machine is not an it to be animated,
worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our
embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; the,y do not dominate or threaten us.
We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a timel, female
embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean
skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten- sions. Only by being out ofplace could we take
intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all,
appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, someumes
aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has
profound historical breadth and depth.

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our
bodies and our tools to ourselves.

Jeanette Winterson, “Scris pe trup”, Ed. Humanitas

“Vorbeam cu Louise despre Elgin.

-S-a născut evreu ortodox, mi-a zis. Se simte în egală măsură exploatat și superior. 37

Adulterul e ceva foarte banal. Nu are scuza rarității sale și totuși, la nivel individual, e văzut iar
și iar, ca un OZN. 45

Am vrut să mă ascund în spatele elefantului din plexiglas, să-i sar în față și să-i zic: “Hai să luăm
masa în oraș”.
Mă apucă destul de des asemenea impulsuri romantice. Mă folosesc de ele ca să scap de situațiile
reale. 64

Asocierea moleculara e o provocare majora pentru biochimiști. Există multe căi de a combina
moleculele, însă doar câteva dintre juxtapuneri le apropie suficient de mult încât acestea să poată
fuziona. La nivel molecular, succesul poate însemna să descoperi ce structură simetrică și ce
element chimic se vor uni într-o formă asemănătoare, să spunem, cu cea a unei proteine din
celula unei tumori. Dacă te aventurezi într-o asemenea întreprindere, care nu este altceva decât
un puzzle de mare risc, e posibil să găsești o cale de a vindeca un carcinom. Dar moleculele și
oamenii nu sunt decât o aprte a exstentului, într-un univers al posibilităților. Ne atingem unul pe
altul, ne unim și ne despărțim, suntem separați de câmpuri de forță pe care nu le înțelegem.Poate
că da, refugiul meu aici, alături de Louise, vindecă o inimă distrusă. Pe de altă parte, însă, el
poate fi și un experiment dezastruos. 72

Nu era genul D.H. Lawrence; nimeni nu putea s-o aibă pe Louise cu inevitabilitate animală. Ca
s-o ai pe Louise, trebuia să-i captezi întreaga ființă. Mintea, inima, sufletul și trupul nu puteau fi
prezente decât ca perechi gemene.

Să te așezi la casa ta, cu picioarele sub masă. E o fată bună, e un băiat bun. Clișeele sunt cele
care fac atâta rău. 83

Mulțumirea e latura pozitivă a resemnării. 90

Interesul acordat problemei timpului crește pentru că, trâind din ce în ce mai artificial, am vrea să
păcălim natura să-și schimbe rimturile pentru noi. Cei care lucrează noaptea și cei care au
aventuri dese sunt, în mod categoric, victime ale încăpățânatelor lor ceasornice circadiene. Un
cuvânt greu în propoziție apoi hormonii, factorii sociali și cei de mediu. Iar din acest melanj se
desprinde încet lumina. 94

Mi-ai pus în față un tărâm nemărginit de asocieri. 96

-Când te-am văzut prima oară, acum doi ani, m-am gândit că ești cea mai atrăgătoare ființă,
bărbat sau femeie, pe care am văzut-o vreodată. 99

Scris pe trup e un cod secret vizibil doar într-o anumită lumină; acolo sunt acumulările de-o
viață. În anumite locuri, palimpsestul este atât de adânc gravat, că literele par a fi de braille. Îmi
place să-mi țin corpul strâns în sine, ferit de ochi iscoditori. Niciodată n-am dezvăluit prea mult,
n-am spus toată povestea. Nu știam că Louise are mâini care pot citi. M-a tradus, recreându-mă
în propria carte. 105

În fiecare zi, îi inspirăm pe cei care nu mai sunt.

Care sunt însușirile organismelor vii? La școală, la biologie, mi s-a spus că ar fi următoarele:
excreția, creșterea, iritabilitatea, locomoția, reproducerea, nutriția și respirația. Nu mi se pare o
listă prea plină de viață. Dacă doar atâta înseamnă să fii un organism viu, prefer să fiu unul mort.
Cum rămâne cu cealaltă trăsătura dominantă a tuturor organismelor umane vii, și anume dorința
de a fi iubit? Nu, nu intră la capitolul Reproducere. Nu am nici cea mai mică dorință de a mă
reproduce, și tot tânjesc după dragoste. (…) Nu vreau să mă reproduc, vreau să fac ceva cu totul
și cu totul nou. Să mă lupt cu ajutorul cuvintelor, însă mi-a pierit orice dorință de luptă. 127

Așa cum arșii ajung să suporte un anumit nivel de durere, în același fel, cei distruși emoțional
constată că suferința e un punct de altitudine de la care se pot observa, din când în când. 186

Mă înspăimântă gândul acestei nebunii care pune stâpânire pe mine, întotdeauna mi-am ieșit ușor
din fire, totul începe cu un zvâcnet în tâmplă, apoi răbufnesc brusc, un acces pe care-l recunosc,
dar nu-l pot controla. Îmi pot controla răbufnirile. Mi le controlasem ani de zile până o
întâlnisem pe Louise. 206

Am decăzut prea tare pentru a lua hotărâri, iar lucrul ăsta aduce cu el o anume libertate
superficială. 218

William Carlos Williams The Modern Poem

Frost, Stevens, Stafford, Berryman, Merwin.

 Franz Wright, Philip Schultz, James Tate.
“If equal affection cannot be/ Let the more loving one be me“ auden

XYZ
e poemul in care se simte auden cel mai tare

-A crying in the night- the poem

-limitless imagination beyond structure
-looseness of the line proclaimed by whitman
-discipline is an absolute necessity for the artist
-brilliant, accurate measure and then take the jump from pure mathematic and habit to a
exhilaration
-measure of infinite possibilities

That is why I started to write Paterson: a man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas
but in things.

"That's why all that fine talk of yours about woman's need to "sail free in her own element" as a
poet, becomes nothing but empty rhetoric in the light of your behaviour towards me. No woman
will ever be able to do that, completely, until she is able first to "sail free in her own element" in
living itself-which means in her relationships with men even before she can do so in her
relationships with other women. The members of any underprivileged class distrust and hate the
"outsider", who is one of them, arid women therefore- women in general-will never be content
with their lot until the· light seeps down to them, not from one of their own,- but from the eyes of
changed male attitudes toward them-so that in the mean- time, the problems and the awareness-
of a woman like myself are looked upon even more unsympathetically by other women than
hymen.
And that, my dear doctor, is another reason why I needed.of you a very different kind of
friendship from the one you offered me. I still don't know of course the specific thing that caused
the cooling of your friendliness toward me. But I do now that if you were going to bother
with .me at all, there were only two things for you to have considered: (I) that I was, as I still am,
a woman dying of loneliness- yes, really dying of it almost in the same way that people die
slowly of cancer or consumption or any other such disease (and with all my efficiency in the
practical world continually undermined by that loneliness); and (2) that I needed desperately, and
still do, some ways and means of leading a writer's life either by securing some son of writer's
job (or any job having to do with my cultural interests) or else through some kind of literary
journalism such as the book reviews-because only in .. work and jobs of that kind, can I turn into
assets what are liabilities for me in jobs of a different kind.

Those were the two problems of mine that you continually and almost deliberately in background
of your to help me. And yet they were, and remain, much greater than whether • or not I get my
poetry published. I didn't need the publication of my poetry with your name lent to it, in order to
go on writing poetry, half as much as I needed your friendship in other ways (the very ways you
ignored) in order to write it. I couldn't, for that reason, have brought the kind of responsiveness
and appreciation that you expected of me (not with any real honesty) to the kindof help from you
which I needed so much less than the kind you withheld. " 87-88 tot!!!

The province of the poem is the world. When the sun rises, it rises in the poem and when it sets
darkness comes down and the poemis dark • 99

It is summer! stinking summer

Escape from it-but not by running
away. Not by "composition., Embrace the
foulness
-the being taut, balanced between eternities 103

bedraggled
unfaltering
swill
smoulder
guffaws
begrime

But it is true, they fear

it more than death, beauty is feared
more than death, more than they fear death'
Beautiful thing
-and marry only to destroy, in private, in
their privacy only to destroy' to hide
(in marriage)
that they may destroy and not be perceived
in it-the destroying
106

What end but love, that stares death in the eye? 106

The writing should be a relief,

relief from the conditions
which as we advance become--a fire,
a destroying fire. 111

So that
to write, nine tenths of the problem is to live. They see
.
to it, not by intellection but
by sub-intellection (to want to be
blind as a pretext for
- saying, W e're so proud of you! 113

Chortling at flames
sucked in, a multiformity of laughter, a
flaming gravity surpassing the sobriety of
flames, a chastity of annihilation. 117

(we die in silence, we

enjoy silence, hiding our joy even from·each other
keeping
a joy in the flame which we dare
not acknowledge) 121

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may
destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for
all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a
black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a con-
sequence.
Only one answer: write,carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive. 129

Who of us thinks so fast to switch the category of our loves and hatreds?
133

. How to begin to find a shape-to begm to begin again, · ·turning the inside out ·: to find one
phrase that will
lie married beside another for delight • ?
140

swoon
booze
thwarts
forthwith
wielding
brow
bidder

All that I have done has a program, consciously or not, running on from phase to.phase, from the
beginnings of emotional breakdown,
·to momentary raindrops from the clouds become corporeal, to a renewal of human objectivity
which I take to he ultimately 'identical with no ideas but ·in things. But this last development I
have yet to tum into poetic reality. 174

Dissonance
(if you are interested),
leads to discovery
176

no woman iS virtuous
who does not give herself to her lover -forthwith 229

There's nothing about the technique of writing. It can't be learned, you'll say, by a fool. But any
young man with a mind bursting to get out, to get down on a page even a clean sentence -gets
courage from an older man who stands ready to help him- to talk to.
231

and who bids higher

than a lover?
238

The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,· ·

a choice among the measures
the measured dance "unless the scent of a rose ·
startle us anew"
239

acum ca am innebunit toti nu te mai speriem?

suntem toti pe latura pasiva a dujmaniei

Jeanette Winterson, “The Passion”, Penguin Books

copper
beak

“I go to confession but there’s no fervour there. Do it from the heart or not at all.
We’re a like warm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we
long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our
children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us.
7

dig a pit
shrimping
assuage
haughty
thawed

The thought of fighting excited us. No one wants to be killed but the hardship, the long hours,
the cold, the orders were things we would have endured anyway on the farms or in our towns.
We were not free men. He made sense of our dullness.

“I don’t care about the facts, Domino, i care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to
remember that. 29

When I started working for Napoleon directly I thought he spoke in aphorisms, he never said a
sentence like you or I would, it was put like a great thought. 30

She (mother) looked at me. “I’m not so greedy as I get older, Henry. I take what there is and I’ve
stopped asking questions about where it comes from. It gives me pleasure to think of them. It
gives me pleasure to think of them. It gives me pleasure to love them. That’s all.32

chalice

They say every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could
we ever get up off our knees? how could we ever recover from the wonder of it? 43

You play. It’s the playing that’s irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things you
love, what you risk reveals what you value. 43

We walked the miles back to the camp, meeting a band of soldiers carrying one who’d thrown
himself into the sea as a New Year gesture. He wasn’t dead, but he was too cold to speak. They
were taking him to a brothel to get warm. Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any
other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture. 45
With faith, all things are possible. 49

waistcoat
eely
ill-omened

For myself, if I am to die, I would like to do it alone, far from the world. I would like to lie on
the warm stone in May until my strength is gone, then drop gently into the canal. Such things are
still possible in Venice. 58

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury then gathered up
only at the last moment.
You see, I am no stranger to love. 59

I am pragmatic about love and have taken my pleasure with both men and women, but I have
never needed a guard for my heart. My heart is a reliable organ. 50

Our ancestors. Our belonging. The future is foretold form the past and the future is only possible
because of the past. … There is no sense in forgetting and every sense in dreaming. …
Somewhere between fear and sex passions is.
Passion is not si much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to
put up sail and rest my oars? 62

…God doesn’t want to confess, he wants to challenge him, but for a while I went into our
churches because they were built from the heart.Hearts full of longings that these old stones still
cry with their ecstasy. 63

“this wild love”

My flabby friend, who has decided I’m a woman, has asked me to marry him. 63

wolfhound

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the
whole just so, and then without warning you find floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another
place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? 68

(travellers) We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp
and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil
passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. 68
Every game threatens a wild card. The unpredictable, the out of control. Even with a steady hand
and a crystal ball we couldn’t rule the world the way we wanted. 71

It is because she will retusn that I take pleasure in being alone?

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly when the
beloved is not there. 73

gnaw

What a wonder, joining yourself to God, putting your wits against him, knowing that you win
and lose simultaneously. 73

…man cannot exist without passion. 74

In between fear and sex, passion is. 76

magpie
cobbles

The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?
84
We gamble with the hope of winning, but it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.
89

You see, I like passion, I like to be among the desperate. 90

prying

We were naked and not ashamed.

And we were happy. 95

She did not press me to do so, she had often said that as she got older she took what she could of
life but expected little. 96

codpiece
enamelled
scorching

They didn’t give me enough time to collect my heart, only my luggage, but I’m grateful to them
for that; this is no place for a heart. 99
Bonaparte always claimed he knew what what was good for a people, knew how to improve,
how to educate. He did; he improved wherever he went, but he always forgot that even simple
people want the freedom to make their own mistakes. 103

ransacked
flimsy
icicle

‘How will I find your heart? This house is six storeys.’

‘Listen for it beating and look in unlikely places. If there’s danger, you’ll hear me cry like a
seagull over the water and you must hurry back.’119

harpsichord
beak

He hates for hate’s sake. 139

“I’m only still when I’m unhappy.” 141

Bonaparte, who was egalitarian about lunacy at least… 141

When I met her I felt she was my destiny and that feeling has not altered, even though it remains
invisible. Though I have taken myself to the wastes of the world and loved again, I cannot truly
say that I ever left her. 144

Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one
who will always make you angry, the one you can’t be logical about. It may be that you are
settled in another place, it may be that you are happy, but the one who took your heart wields
final power. 145

What Am i Interested in?

Passion. Obsession.

I habe known both and i know the dividing line is as thin and cruel as a Venetian knife. 153

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations
but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one
moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its
desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They dont’t say that through the flesh we are set
free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.
…
Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is
true, but i know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun.
154

I like to know that live will outlive me, that’s a happiness Bonaparte never understood. 156

He doesn’t understand I want the freedom to make my own mistakes. 157

Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles, MEDIAWORK

The MIT Press
Cambridge and London

One term put forward to describe these complex relationships is MEDIAL ECOLOGY. The
phrase suggests that the relationships between different media are as diverse and complex as
those between different organisms coexisting with- in the same ecotome, including mimicry,
deception, cooperation, competi- tion, parasitism, and hyperparasitism. 5

An electronic work by Talan Memmott entitled Lexia to Perplexia;

Tom Phillips called A Humument
Mark Danielewski’s print novel House of Leaves.
Greg Egan’s brilliant novel Permutation City
Techno- fabulist Hans Moravec proposes in Mind Children: The Future of Robotic
Intelligence
Johanna Drucker’s Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography
Emmett William’s The VoyAge.
Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover
Karen Chance’s Parallax
Spine by Joan Lyons and Paul Zimmerman
Maurizio Nannucci’s Universum
Fred A. Hillbruner
Edwin Schlossberg’s wordswordswords
Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home

Although there are auto-biographical elements in the persona who will be written in these
narrative chapters, no one should confuse her with me. To mark that crucial difference, she needs
a name related to mine but not the same. I will call her—Kaye. 10

…the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic
components) mean. 25
A print encyclopedia qualifies as a hypertext because it has multiple reading paths, a system of
cross-references that serve as linking mechanisms, and chunked text in entries separated
typographically from one another. These hypertextual characteristics of the encyclopedia form
the basis for Milorad Pavic ́’s brilliant print work Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel.
Other examples of print hypertexts include Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, which
includes audio tapes to document a richly imagined science fiction world; Paul Zimmerman’s
artist’s book High Tension, which creates a multiplicity of reading paths through an unusual
physical form that allows the reader to fold diagonally cut leaves to obtain different
combinations of text and image; and Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” a short story that
pushes toward hypertext by juxtaposing contradictory and nonsequential events suggesting many
simultaneously existing time lines and narrative unfoldings. 26

As hypertext theory developed during the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, theorists such as
George Landow, Jay Bolter, Michael Joyce, and others emphasized the importance of the link,
which tended to loom larger than hypertext’s other characteristics. This orientation was
consistent with first-generation electronic hypertexts such as Joyce’s Afternoon, a story, an
almost exclusively verbal work that employs Storyspace software to link one screen of text (or
LEXIA) with another through “hot words” the reader can activate by clicking. Although this
structure departs from print in providing multiple reading paths, it preserves the basic print
convention of moving through a text by going from one page/screen to another. 27

As the technology changed, and especially as the Web grew in size, scope, and functionality,
writers began to move away from the Storyspace interface to explore the rich diversity of
interfaces available in such commercial software packages as Flash, Shockwave, and
Dreamweaver and also XTML, VRML, DIRECTX, and other web-oriented languages. A new
breed of SECOND-GENERATION ELECTRONIC LITERATURE began to appear that
looked very different from its predecessors, experimenting with ways to incorporate narrative
with sound, motion, animation, and other software functionalities. Riding on the crest of these
developments, Espen Aarseth’s pioneering Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature
argued for a perspective fundamentally computational in nature. To this end he proposed the
category CYBERTEXT and defined it to include a wide variety of texts that used combinatorial
strategies, including print works such as Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards, electronic
fictions like Afternoon, a story, computer games, and even the I Ching. He gave substance to the
idea by developing a typology of semiotic variables, including in addition to links such concepts
as perspective, access, determinability, transience, dynamics, and user function. 27

Hypertext connotes an emphasis on links, a brand of criticism derived from traditional literary
approaches, and a polemic that seeks to convince the literary community of the value and
importance of electronic hypertext for pedagogy, criticism, and theory. Cybertext connotes a
functional and semiotic approach that emphasizes a computational perspective, a polemic that
wants, as Stuart Moulthrop put it (echoing James Joyce), to “kill the literary priest,” and an
emphasis on computer games as paradigmatic examples of ERGODIC texts, which Aarseth
defines as those literary systems that require “nontrivial effort” to allow the user to traverse
them. 26

In his influential essay “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes uncannily anticipated electronic
hypertext by associating text with dis- persion, multiple authorship, and RHIZOMATIC
structure. In positioning text against work, Barthes was among those who initiated semiotic and
performative approaches to discourse, arguably one of the most important developments in
literary studies in the last century. 30

On the other side of the screen, many print texts are now imitating electronic hypertexts. These
range from John Barth’s Coming Soon! and Don DeLillo’s Underworld to Bolter and
Grusin’s Remediation, which self-consciously pushes toward hypertext through arrows that
serve as visual indications of hypertextual links. 30

Understanding literature as the interplay between form, content, and medium, MSA insists that
texts must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those EMBODIMENTS
interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhetorical, and literary practices to create the effects we call
literature. 31

With significant exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a
speaking mind. MSA aims to electrify the neocortex of literary criticism into recognizing that
strands traditionally emphasizing materiality (such as criticism on the illuminated manuscript, on
writers such as William Blake and Emily Dickinson, where embodiment is everything, and on
the rich tradition of artists’ books) are not exceptions but instances of MSA. Like all literature,
technotext has a body (or rather many bodies), and the rich connections between its material
properties and its con- tent create it as a literary work in the full sense of the term. 32

Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic
strategies. For this reason, materiality cannot be specified in advance, as if it preexisted the
specificity of the work. An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilizes
its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the
interpretive strategies she develops—strategies that include physical manipulations as well as
conceptual frameworks. In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay
between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this
physicality to create meaning. 33

The text that heralded the transition to second-generation electronic literature for Kaye was
Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. It presented itself as a rewriting of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein in which the female monster, dismembered by a nauseated Victor in Mary’s classic
tale, is reassembled and made into the text’s main narrator. Written in a later version of the
Storyspace software that Joyce used for Afternoon, Patchwork Girl engaged the tool in
significantly different ways. 37
….important innovation, it drew connections between the electronic text and the female
monster’s fragmented body. 38

Navigation was envisioned as taking place not only between lexias but between images and
words, and more profoundly between the text and the computer producing it. 38

Where was the narrator’s consciousness during the gaps, the microseconds that separated one
screen from another? Did it dissolve into the noise of the machine, decomposed back into ones
and zeros?
The speculation sent chills down Kaye’s spine. It was her first glimpse into how significantly
literature might change if the literary body was not a book but a computer. She could name
dozens of print texts that played with connections between the book and a narrator’s body,
from Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth- century masterpiece Tristram Shandy, to Italo
Calvino’s contemporary print hypertext novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. 38

By focusing on the words alone, she had missed the point. Now she was able to evaluate Califia
in a different way, from an integrated perspective in which all components became
SIGNIFYING PRACTICES. From this viewpoint, she could see not only that it was a ground-
breaking work but also that the materiality of the text was integral to its project of connecting
word with world. 41

Medium and work were entwined in a complex relation that functioned as a multilayered
metaphor for the relation of the world’s materiality to the space of simulation. 42

As ARTIFICIAL LIFE researchers have argued, simulation does not necessarily mean that
the processes running in a computer are artificial. The processes can be as “natural” as
anything in the real world; they are artificial only in the sense that they run in an artificial
medium. 48

In Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, the artificiality of the environment is foregrounded to

suggest that subjects are themselves simulations operating according to the dynamics and
protocols of the medium through which they are constituted. 49

Metastrophe” sets forth several “minifestos” proclaiming that the future of human life lies
in “communification,” a coinage combining commodification with communication. 49

She believed that both print and electronic works needed to be taken more seriously as physical
artifacts. The biliographers and textual studies scholars were way out in front on this score,
developing modes of criticism fully attentive to the book’s material properties. 65
It suddenly struck her that Vannevar Bush was wrong, or at least not entirely right. In his 1945
article “As We May Think,” about which we have already heard, Bush argued that his
hypertextual machine called the Memex was superior because it worked the way the mind works,
through association. Kaye was not sure the claim was correct. Certainly she sometimes caught
herself thinking through association, but logical ordering and linear sequencing were also
imporant. Now she was able to clarify her objections. What Bush’s formulation neglects, she
thought, is the feedback loop from materiality to mind. Obviously artifacts spring from thought,
but thought also emerges from interactions with artifacts. Someone starts to make a technical
object—a book, say—but in selecting the paper and choosing the cover design, new thoughts
come as the materials are handled. Insights are stimulated through touching, seeing, manually
fitting parts together, and playing with the materials, that declined to come when the object was
merely an abstract proposition. Such breakthroughs appear frequently in science and are almost
the norm in creating technological artifacts. They also pepper art history; she thought of Jackson
Pollock laying his canvas on the floor, flinging paint on it, and seeing in this action a new
potential for making art. 75

!! When the MINDBODY is focused on a problem and alert for clues, the material world
gives of its bounty unstintingly. Thinking makes shaping, shaping makes thinking, new
ideas arrive and are instantiated in more shaping. 75

To create A Humument, he took an obscure Victorian novel by William Mallock entitled A

Human Document, bought by chance because it met his criterion of costing no more than three
pence, and “treated” it by covering over the pages with images that left only a few of the original
words visible. 78

Because the noise of reality cannot be so easily tamed, scientific theories always exist in tension
with experimental data. Deviation from theoretically predicted results is the mark of the real, the
inscription of interacting complexities that may rarely or never be completely eliminated. The
point of experimental practice is to reduce this noise as much as possible. Reduction is good,
proliferation is bad. Theory in literature has related meanings but different cumulative effects.
Here theory serves as an interpretive framework through which particular instances of literary
texts can be read. Like scientific experiments, texts may rarely or never be completely explained
by a given theory; there will always be elements that resist incorporation into a theoretical
matrix. Unlike scientific theory, however, the more predictive power a literary theory seems to
have, in which it yields readings that can be known in advance once the theory is specified, the
less valu- able it becomes. At this point literary scholars tend to feel the theory has become
reductive in a bad sense, because it represses the text’s power to generate new meanings and so
to renew itself. Here reduction is bad, proliferation good.
104
Kaye’s laboratory experiences, her first disciplined encounter with materiality, no doubt
predisposed her to realize that books are more than encoded voices; they are also physical
artifacts whose material properties offer potent resources for creating meaning. 104-105

In the broadest sense, artistic practice can be understood as the craft- ing of materiality so as to
produce human-intelligible meanings, while at the same time transforming the meaning of terms
like “human” and “intelligible”. A critical practice that ignores materiality, or that reduces it to a
narrow range of engagements, cuts itself off from the exuberant possibilities of all the
unpredictible things that happen when we as embodied creatures interact with the rich
physicality of the world. Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal
constructions, Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their
materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other. 107

Mark Danielewski House of Leaves. !!!

Evacuating the ORIGINARY SUBJECT, House of Leaves situates itself within the postmodern
landscape but recovers an intensity of character and narrative through the processes of
remediation themselves. 128

Ocheanul întors, Radu Petrescu,Ed. Cartea Românească

Teama de a fi uitat? A, ipocritule. Știi prea bine că ți-ai și vârât un deget în eternitate. 5

Nu lucrurile însele ale acestui loc, ci culoarea și forma pe care ele le trimit prin aer până la mine
(…) 6

Între oameni care îți cer lucruri contradictorii, dar egal de amenințători, scăparea e să poți
face din nimicuri care nu supără pe nimeni o geometrie de aer, un cântec pentru urechea
expertă (adică liniștită) a norilor. 9

(…) Ideile care jur că singure există dintre câte pretind că există. 15

Uneori visez că undeva în aer, la înălțimi incalculabile, printre stelele înghețate, o mare fantomă
a mea trăiește exact ca mine, cel de pe pământ, aceleași evenimente, nu însă întotdeauna
sincronic și de aceea uneori existențele noastre interferează. Ar trebui să scriu deci nu
coincidențe, ci interferențe, 15

Nu știu alții cum sânt alții, dar eu citind o frază din Madame Bovary de pildă, sau din Rabelais,
văd fraza ca un voal străveziu, colorat magnific și delicat, pe care două mâini îl întorc în toate
felurile, făcând să-i strălucească apele și culorile, arătându-i moliciunile sau câte o neașteptată
asperitate amenințătoare și, dincolo de țesătura lui de esență translucidă, apărând nu bustul sau
genunchii celui care îl ține, ci viscolele de ceață ale golului. 17

Căci oamenii sunt antrenați în viață ca într-un tunel iremediabil, cu sângele și carnea lor, fiecare
gest, fiecare gând e o ardere, un efort, și încă un efort înăbușit, - și iată artistul reproducând
aceste mișcări în câteva linii, ca și jucându-se, și demonstrând astfel, implicit, neantul lor. Toate
operele veritabile parodiază, orice artist este implicit un umorist - fiind vorba însă de un umor în
care urechile delicate aud un foșnet sinistru. 18

Ciudat cât de prost scriam acum patru ani, acum trei, anul trecut! Ciudat și faptul că pe cât
scriam de prost, pe atât vorbeam mai mult și aveam mai mulți amici: când voi realiza
cartea desăvârșită o să fiu cu desăvârșire singur? 28

Sânt idei dincolo de caiet, știu, dar netrase anatomiile lor aeriene, atât de mobile și de delicate, în
pagină se transformă în niște cadavre ce satelizează în jurul nostru, împuțind aerul și otrăvindu-l.
47

Gospodăriile românești, atât de deschide, de neapărate! 57

(…) visez la o mulțime de scriitori, Rimbaud, Lafarogue și alții, cărora o secundă am dorința de a
le mulțumi, emoționat, pentru toate micile perfecționări ale sensibilității mele. 62

Mici disperări ca acum opt ani. De unde vin această nevoie de finalitate în noi? De ce fiecare pas
face o umbră de melancolie pe flori, oameni pietre ziduri? De ce atașamentele acestea stupide?
75

Gândurile, lăsate un moment în libertate, fără control, se întunecă și se încurcă. 78

Toată lumea, furioasă la culme. Dar desigur că e doar o părere a mea, căci toți s-au purtat foarte
prietenos cu mine tot timpul, foarte îngăduitori cu ce va fi greșit un profesor în primul lui an de
învățământ (….) (80)

Scrisul de azi mă nemulțumește. În afară de călătoria în tren, a ieșit greoi, aproape ilizibil.
Ca și tonul meu vital. 82

Prin cuvântul artă înțeleg astăzi ceva incomparabil mai adânc ca acum opt ani - și
incomparabil mai simplu. Este încă pentru mine o primejdie evocarea operelor unora, mă înșel
încă dureros asupra cadenței proprii, dar, prin fum, înaintez sigur, de la sine. 82

(…) problema e să exploatez această uscăciune, să o aduc la demnitatea artei. 83

Lucrurile, oamenii, împrejurările, printr-o mică deplasare a noastră față de ele în spațiu ori timp,
se răstoarnă, se amestecă, intră în compoziții deosebite, atât de deosebite, încât de fiecare dată
puternică rămânde senzația de inedit, de miracol. 85

Gust moartea când am încheiat pagini de care sunt mulțumit, când ritmurile care trebuiau
exprimate s-au exprimat. 86

Deocamdată scriu continuu, cu răceala unui asasin. Deocamdată nu ma interesează o

reușită, ci învățarea unui ritm. 86

realitatea nouă - a Ideilor 87

Poate că toate concluziile la care am ajuns până acum sunt false și ceea ce denumim viață nu e
decât nemișcata eternitate pe care, ca să o putem suporta, o părăsim spre a visa spre mișcare - în
artă. Viața, mișcarea, poate că sunt invenții ale artiștilor. 91

N-am să încetez niciodată să înregistrez mișcările aerului și ale oamenilor, să mă încânt de felul
în care decurg unele din altele, se desfac și se refac în alte chipuri și înțelesuri. 92

o carte trebuie să fie astfel scrisă încât ritmul compoziției să se poată urmări ca al inimii, și
ritmul acesta să fie esențialmente muzical, chiar dacă celelalte elemente, cuvintele să zicem, nu
prezintă această calitate. 98

Mă preocupă compoziția, frazele le-am lăsat să se facă singure, nu ele au importanță.99

(…) singur mea grijă trebuie să rămână scrisul. 102

A învăța să înțelegem lumea. A trăi în voința noastră de a învăța. (…) Notez pe marginea cărții
că doar fanaticii sunt rezonabili. 105

O arhitectură de idei este o cantitate de mișcare concentrată. Opera de artă nu este deci bine
numită printr-un substantiv, ar trebui un verb. 108

Cum ai putea crede că, parte a universului infinit, ești altfel decât infinit, innumerabil? 109

Oricare ar fi ușa pe unde romancierul este chemat să pătrundă în cartea sa, personaj, intrigă,
atmosferă, etc., aecasta trebuie să aibă asupra lui o apreciabilă putere de fascinație. Cu cât
fascinația este mai intensă, cu atât probabilitatea ca el să se angajeze în aventura scrierii este mai
mare. Fascinația înseamnă mister, o prezență copleșitoare prin aceea că, ascunsă, cu neputință de
numit, manifestă un sens dens și înalt. 111
nu e vorba de parodierea literaturii, ci a vieții. 113

Romanul francez din sec. al XVIII-lea, moralist, a ospostaziat trăsătura care-l interesa, în
personajul libertinului. 114

(…) o carte reactualizând toate epocile artistice, toate stilurile care au precedat-o, având în plus,
bineînțeles, timbrul specific momentului la care se scrie cartea. 114

Se poate prea bine ca un mare artist să nu fie conemporan cu un mare critic, dar e mai rar
să nu fie contemporan nici cu un public luminat. 118

Niciodată niciun critic nu s-a socotit un neînțeles: criticul nu este poet. 119

Puterea de a gândi, de a visa și de a înfăptui creează lucruri eterne, apoi această putere se duce, la
fel de misterios cum a venit, și în locul ei rămâne doar un fel de biată facultate de a gusta și de a
se uimi de cele înfăptuite, dar nici aceasta decât uneori, cel mai ades înstăpânindu-se recea, neta
indiferență pentru orice. 120

Dar sistemul entuziasmului pentru realizări trebuie să înceteze, e mai periculos! 123

(…) nu pot face deosebire între viață și literatură, aceste două lucururi sunt identice de la un
mom dat, când am devenit interior lumii și m-am instalat astfel între Idei. 125

Poziția lui Goncourt, care a inventat și termenul “noul roman”, are însă și alt înțeles/ 137

Încep să cred că toată viața mi-aș putea-o petrece într-un sat, ocupat numai cu scrisul. 139

“inimă tandră și neliniștită” 139

Singurul lucru pe lume care merită seriozitate este opera. 143

Încă n-am învățat să ne suportam pe noi înșine? 145

A face pentru roman ce a făcut Cezanne pentru pictură, cu riscul de a nu avea în următorii o sută
de ani nici un cititor. 165

Să admitem că artist este cel care debutează mereu. 171

Adevărul e că scriu la întămplare cu o minină grijă doar pentru a fi clar și cât mai puțin
plictisitor. 171
(…) niciodată nu voi fi capabil de disciplină. 175

Persoana întâi este mai restictivă decât a treia, admite mai puțină intimitate. Cu persoana a treia
poți spune, într-adevăr , orice. 172

Orice om e contradictoriu dacă nu intuim mobilul actelor lui, sensul vieții sale. Oamenii cei mai
inteligenți pe care i-am cunoscut au rămas, într-un fel sau altul, lângă mine. Ceea ce probează.
176

A scrie înseamnă să-ți pui urechea pe pieptul imaginilor, să le asculți spusele, să le accepți și
înțelepciunea și absurditatea.
Nu moravurile mă interesează, ci pasiunile. Pasiuniule, adică fixația. În ciuda aparențelor, orice
pasiune este torpoare și soare, paralizie. 176

În ce mă privește, am băgat de seamă că stările pe care le încerc sunt duale, imposibil să încerc o
adevărată durere, o adevărata bucurie, pentru că ce mi se întâmplă acum, de fapt mi se întâmplă
în eternitate și capătă un sunet complex. 183

Să înțelegem prin suflet personajul nostru de aer, umanitatea noastră. 182

Frazele lui limpezi, drepte, îmi fac bine, iată o prietenie. 191

“Știam că sunt pasiunea lui rămasă din adolescență, cum rămâne puțin ilogică și copilăroasă
mintea bolnavilor după meningită.” 194

Portretul este dogmatic. Lasă-l pentru visele cititorului. 200

Romancier este nu cel care cunoaște bine viața, ci acela care o inventează cum trebuie.
Experiența personală e prea costisitoare pentru a fi recomandabilă după o anumită vârstă. 200

“fete cântând” 201

Opera de artă veritabilă e până la un punct incoerență, contradicție, oboseală - a căror substanță
însă e vie, impresionantă pentru că participă și ele la arhitectura generală, pentru că și ele fac
parte din rimtica artistului, marcându-i limita de jos. 229

“gingășie singuratică” 230

Aerul, pulverizat, nu mai vernisează lucrurile acoperindu-le cu armura lucioasă care le izolează
în spațiu, dându-le specifica materialitate, ci le înfășoară într-o difuziune instabilă de atomi
pâlâietori, care le răpește autonomia și soliditatea. 232
E dealtmiteri în univers o continuă schimbare de calități, un schimb a cârui substanță e egalitatea
și a cărui expresie e paradoxul. 233

Nu știu dacă aduc un folos prin ce scriu eu și, sincer, vbind, nu mă interesează asta.(…) N-am
crezut niciodată că pagina e o fereastră pe care o deschid spre ceva strâin ei, ea mi-a fost
totdeauna de ajuns. 237

(…)idea de a da preemineță viații asupra creației mi se părea ridiculă când vine din partea unui
scriitor, ridiculă și prin agresivitatea ei implicită și, fără, îndoială, naivă. 244

Nu știu ce vreau, știu doar că sânt - și sânt pentru că în fiecare clipă vreau să fiu. Ce mi-aș putea
dori mai mult decât să continui de a fi, sau de a avea puterea să aștept a fi, deși sunt, oarecum, în
vid, situația nu e rea. 249

(…) momentul scrisului și cel al unei largi fericiri e coincidență (265)

“infinitul devenirii” 280

Mă interesează ce se întâmplă când două personaje se găsesc față în față. Ce se întâmplă cu

fiecare în parte și cu amândouă împreună, ca în chimie. 301

Spectacol penibil al lumii acesteia, dacă îl privesc uitând că în el însuși văd frumusețea lumii -
dramatismul, mișcarea. 307

Spre timpanul care ascultă, nu trimitem cuvinte, ci sunete. 316

“transumanare”

Dac-aș fi bogat aș ține pe lângă mine câțiva dintre elevii mei, până ar împlini vărsta de 25 de ani.
331

Nu știu dacă Matei va simți în el infinitul, dar va trebui să fie infinit. 341

Luptă înseamnă punere în prezență, raport. Raportul uman cel mai adânc, de unde ființa este
vizibilă în toate direcțiile, până acolo unde orice vizibilitate, pentru noi, încetează, este dragostea,
în înțelesul total, neredusă la caz. Numai din perspectiva ei pot face un personaj al cărui corp
fizic și spiritual să fie universul. 346

“școală” exclusivă
Un suflet pur, de liniștită vitalitate în alegrețea descoperirii unui tărâm unde întălnirile esențiale
sunt nu numai posibile, ci curente și firești, fiind vorba însă de un firesc poetic, transfigurat (…)
360

“vâjâit de zmee” 363

Rosi Braidotti, “Postumanul”, Hecate, 2016

De asemenea, animalele sunt vândute drept comodități exotice și reprezintă al treilea cel mai
mare comerț ilegal din lumea de azi, după droguri și armament, dar înaintea traficului cu femei.
16

Noile tehnologii ale morții acționează într-un climat social dominat de economia politică a
nostalgiei și de paranoia, pe de o parte, și de euforie și exaltare, pe de altă parte. 18

Considerată mai degrabă un hobby personal decât un domeniu de cercetare profesionist,

umanioarele, cred eu, se află într-un real pericol de dispariție din programa universitară
europeană a sec. XXI. 19

S-ar putea spune că interesul meu pentru postuman pleacă de la o îngrijorare prea umană cu
privire la tipul de cunoaștere și valorile intelectuale pe care le producem azi ca societate. 19

De asemenea, acest simț al responsabilității exprimă un anume tipar de gândire, care îmi este
aproape de suflet și de minte, din moment ce provin dintr-o generație care avea un vis. (…) este
visul de a produce cunoaștere relevantă din punct de vedere social și racordată la principiile
fundamentale de justiție socială, respect pentru diversitate și decența umană, respingerea falselor
universalisme, afirmarea pozitivității diferenței, principiile libertății academice, antirasism,
deschidere către ceilalți și convivialitate. 20

Într-un fel, interesul meu pentru postuman este direct proporțional cu sentimentul frustrării
față de resursele și limitele umane, prea umane, care determină nivelurile personale și
colective de creativitate. 21

(…) majoritatea autorilor pe care Michel Foucault i-a evidențiat ca fiind vestitorii erei filosofice
a postmodernității critice (Marx, Freud, Darwin) sunt aceiași autori pe care naziștii i-au
condamnat și ars pe rug în anii 1930. 29

Luce Irigaray 1993, Cixous, Braidotti

Frantz Fanon
trad feminista radicală a celui de-al doilea val american: Audre Lorde (1984), Alice Walker
(1984), Adrienne Rich (1987)
Mary Daly (1973 - lucrări), Schussler Fiorenza (1983)

Hardt și Negri (2000, 2004) sau școala italiană a lui Lazzarato (2004) și Virno (2004) au
tendința de a evita știința și tehnologia și de a nu le trata cu profunzimea și sofisticarea pe
care le dedică analizei subiectivității. 61

Isaac Asimov (1942), legile pt roboți : (1) Robotul nu are voie să pricinuiască vreun rău unei
ființe umane sau, prin neintervenție, să permită ca unei ființe umane să i se facă rău. (2) Robotul
trebuie să se supună ordinelor date de către o ființă umană atât timp cât ele nu intră în
contradicție cu Legea 1. (3) Robotul trebuie să-și protejeze propria existență atât timp cât acest
lucru nu intră în contradicție cu legea 1 sau 2. (p.62)

Din moment ce devin mult mai deștepte și mai răspândite, mașinile autonome sunt nevoite să ia
decizii de viață și de moarte și, astfel, să-și asume un soi de agențialitate. 63

(…) nu este timp pentru dorințe nostalgice față de trecutul umanist, ci mai degrabă pentru
experimente anticipative cu noi forme de subiectivitate. 64

Aime Cesaire (1955)

Avtar Brah (1996)

Vandana Shiva 1997
Patricia Hill Collins
Drucilla Cornell
Edouard Glissant
Homi Bhabha
Edward Said - teoreticieni postcoloniali, postumanism cosmopolitan contextualizat

Paul Gilroy(2000)

mobilitate diasporică și interconectări transculturale (67)

Subiecții europeni contemporani ai cunoașterii trebuie să îndeplinească obligația etică de a fi

responsabili pentru istoria lor trecută și pentru umbra lungă pe care o aruncă aceasta asupra
politicii din prezent. (Morin, Passerini, Balibar, Bauman) (73)

Seyla Benhabib, în opera ei splendidă despre cosmopolitanismul alternativ (2007), discută

problematica Europei ca loc de tranformare. 74

Grupul din jurul lui Althusser a inițiat debaterea la mijlocul anilor 1960; studiul de pionierat a lui
Deleuze despre Spinoza datează din 1968 (în engleză în 1990); analiza despre Hegel și Spinoza a
lui Macherey a apărut în 1979 (în engleză în 2011); opera lui Negri asupra imaginației la Spinoza
e publicată în 1981 (în engleză în 1991). 78

“mașinile sunt atât de vii, pe când oamenii sunt atât de inerți.” (Donna Haraway) (81)

Cu ajutorul unei taxonomii ironice în stilul lui Borges, Deleuze a clasificat animalele în 3
grupuri: cele cu care ne uităm împreună la televizor, cele pe care le mâncăm și cele de care ne
este frică. 94
—> Relația oedipală dintre oameni și animale este inegală și condiționată de atitudinea umană
dominantă și structural masculină de a lua de-a gata accesul liber la corpul celorlalți și
consumarea acestui corp, inclusiv al animalelor. Ca mod de relație, această legătura este, așadar,
nevrotică prin faptul că e saturată cu proiecții, tabuuri și fantezii. 94

Deși Chakrabarty nu ia calea postantropocentrismului, ajunge la aceeașă concluzie ca și mine:

problema perspectivelor centrate pe planetă și pe schimbarea poziției oamenilor de la simpli
agentți biologici la agenți geologici solicită reconfigurări atât ale subiectivității, cât și ale
comunității. 113

Scopul teoriei critice este de a deranja opinia comună (doxa), nu de a o confirma. Această
abordare a fost receptată cu multă ostilitate în spațiul academic, însă eu o consider un gest
generos și deliberat de asumare a riscului și, în consecință, o declarație în favoarea libertății
academice. 118

feministe-spinoziste: Moira Gatens și Genevieve Lloyd (120)

Cadrul conceptual de referință pe care l-am adoptat pentru metoda de-familiarizării este
monismul. Aceasta implică fluxuri deschise, inter-relaționale, multi-sexuate și situate dincolo de
ideea de specii, de devenire prin interacțiuni cu ceilalți numeroși. Un subiect postuman astfel
constituit excede atât granițele antropocentrismului, cât limitele umanismului compensatoriu,
obținând o dimensiune planetară. 120

(…) modalitățile vizuale de reprezentare au fost înlocuite de modalitățile senzorial-neuronale ale

simulării. Cum spunea și Patricia Clough, am devenit corpuri “biomediate”. (121)

Astfel, cyborgii se referă nu doar la corpurile încântătoare ale piloților de avioane de luptă de
înaltă tehnologie, ale atleților sau vedetelor de cinema, ci și la masele anonime ale proletariatului
digital post plătit care alimentează economia globală bazată pe tehnologie, fără ca ei înșiși să o
acceseze vreodată (Braidotii, 2006). 122

Vitalitatea mașinică nu are prea multă legătură cu determinismul, cu un obiectiv predefinit sau
cu o finalitate, ci mai degrabă cu definirea și transformarea. Asta introduce un proces pe care
Deleuze și Guattari îl numesc “devenire-mașină”, inspirat din “mașinile celibatare” ale
suprarealiștilor, însemnând o relație jucăușă și predispusă spre plăcere cu tehnologia care nu
se bazează pe funcționalism. 123
eco-sofia

“postumanism post-antropocentric”

“o înstrainare radicală față de noțiuni precum raționalitate morală, identitate unitară, conștiință
transcedentală sau valori morale înnăscute și universale”. 125

Humbeto Maturana
Francisco Varela

În analiza despre “mutațiile existențiale colective” care se petrec la acest moment, Guattari se
referă la distincția lui Varela între sistemele autopoietice (autorganizatoare) și sistemele
alopoietice. Guattari trece dincolo de distincția propusa de Varela, extinzând principiul
autopoiezei (care, pentru Varela, este rezervat organismelor biologice) pentru a acoperi și
mașinile sau ceilalții tehnologici. Un alt nume pentru subiectivitate, potrivit lui Guattari, este
subiectivitarea autopoietică, sau construcția, și se referă atât la organismele vii și oameni ca
sisteme autoorganizatoare, cât și la materia anorganică și mașini. 126

(…) crearea unei metastabilități, care este condiția individuației. 127

(…) efectele postantropocentriste oportuniste ale economiei globale creează un cosmopolitanism

negativ sau un sentiment de conexiune pan-umană reactivă prin introducerea noțiunii de “Viață
ca surplus” și de vulnerabilitate umană comună. 129

Katherine Hayles
Balsamo
Claire Colebrook
Patricia MacCormack

relaționalitate radicală 137

“tendință spre melancolie a Stândii progresiste”(Derrida, Butler, Gilroy, 2005)

Postantropocentrismul critic crează noi perspective care merg dincolo de panică și doliu și
produc o platformă mult mai realizabilă. 139

“activitatea de a gândi trebuie să fie experimentală și chiar transgresivă prin combinarea

criticii cu creativitatea.”139
Inumanul: conversații despre timp, Lyotard 145

Ceva s-a schimbat fundamental pornind de la fantezia modernistă a eroticizării interacțiunii de

tip uman-tehnologic până la dezvrăjirea postmodernistă sau cel puțin distanța ironică față de
obiectul tehnologic. A intrat în acțiune o economie politică diferită a afectelor; o sensibilitate
mult mai rece a intrat în sistemul nostru, pavând drumul spre postuman. Zygmunt Bauman
(2000, 2005) s-a numărat printre primii care au comentat această abordare crudă și mai rece. 147

(…) metafizica finitudinii este o modalitate mioapă de interogare a limitelor a ceea ce

numim “viață”. 162

Legătura cu colonialismul este explicită: decolonizarea a creat statele-națiuni, ale căror popoare,
cândva subjugate, acum sunt libere să circule global. Aceste popoare constituie cea mai mare
parte din imigranții, refugiații și solicitanții de azil nedoriți care sunt reținuți și închiși de-ea
lungul lumii dezvoltate. Printr-o întorsătură nu lipsită de forță ironică, migrația globală este
percepută ca un pericol specific în Europa pentru că periclitează principala infrastructură socială
europeană: statul bunăstării. Gama crescândă de arme de război și tehnici de ucidere ridică
întrebări grave cu privire la statutul morții ca obiect de analiză politică contemporană. 170

“Politica devenirii” (19990 a lui WIlliamConnolly susține o idee similară: împotriva distrugerii
necropolitice trebuie să dezvoltăm “un etos al angajamentului” cu condițiile sociale și politice
date - incuzând ororile timpurilor noastre - pentru a produce contra-efecte, adică transformări și
consecințe neașteptate. (…) Etica afirmativă se bazează pe practica de a construi pozitivități,
generând astfel noi relații și condiții sociale, fără vătămare și durere. Produce activ energie prin
transformarea încărcăturii negative a acestor experiențe, chiar și în cadrul relațiilor intime bazate
pe dialectica dominației (Benjamin, 1988). 172

Reprezintă o provocare constantă pentru noi să ne ridicăm la înălțimea situației, să fim “vrednici
de timpurile noastre” și în același timp să le ținem piept și, astfel, să practicăm amor fati în mod
afirmativ. (…) Nu-i de mirare că mulți dintre noi, după cum constata George Eliot, întorc sptele
vuietului energiei cosmice. 174

Perspectiva mea vitalistă asupra morții este că ceea ce ne eliberează în viață e inumanul din
noi.178

Dincolo de plăcere și de durere, viața este un proes al devenirii, de întindere a limitelor de

rezistență. 178

Viața este dorință care urmărește în esență să se autoexprime și, în consecință, se bazează
pe energie entropică: își atinge scopul, apoi piere, precum somonul care înoată în amonte
pentru a procrea, ca apoi să moară. Dorința de a muri poate fi văzută, așadar, ca
echivalent și ca altă expresie a dorinței de a trăi în mod intens. 179

(…) ceea ce noi oamenii ne dorim profund este nu atât de mult să dispărem, cât mai degrabă să o
facem în spațiul vieții noastre și în felul nostru. (….) Este ca și cum fiecare dintre noi vrea să
moară în propria manieră. 179

Urmărind un fel de seducție întru nemurire, viața etică e viața ca suicid virtual. Viața ca
suicid virtual e viața ca o creație constantă. Viața trăită ca să întrerupi ciclurile repetițiilor
inerte care te intoroduc în banalitate. Ca nu cumva să ne amăgim cu pretexte narcisiste,
trebuie să cultivăm rezistență, imortalitate în timp, adică moarte în viață. 180

Dizolvă moartea în transformări procesuale în perpetua schimbare și, astfel, dezintegrează eul, cu
al său capital de narcisism, paranoia și negativitate. 183

Afirmarea, nu nostalgia, este calea de urmat: nu idealizarea metadiscursului filosofic, ci misiunea

mult mai pragmatică de autotransformare prin experimentare smerită. 198

Uniunea Europeană este dominată la momentul actual de o agendă de dreapta a economiei

neoliberale, pe de o parte, și de agende sociale și culturale xenofobe și populiste, pe de altă parte.
(…) univ. ca instituție și în special disciplinele umaniste se află sub atac. Ele sunt acuzate de a fi
neproductive, narcisiste și învechite în abordarea lor și, de asemenea, că nu sunt racordate la
cultura științei și tehnologiei contemporane. 201

p.204! epistemologia feminină și studiile despre știință

!interdisciplinaritate

Cumva, disciplinele umaniste au o relație diferită cu complexitatea față de aceea pe care o au

științele naturale și ale vieții. 206

(…) una dintre cele mai eficiente strategii dezvoltate de cercetători din disciplinele
umaniste contemporane este de fapt teoretizarea prin intermediul și cu ajutorul științei.
208

“noua teorie a științei” : Ansell Pearson, Massumi, De Landa, Barad, Grosz, Colebrook,
Bennett, Clough, Protvi, Braidotti

(…)Dacă obeictul clasic de cercetare al umanității a fost umanul, decurge că obiectul potrivit de
cercetare al condiției postumane este postumanul însuși. 210
“zoonoza” (Rudolf Virchow 1821-1902) : nu ar trebui să existe linii despărțitoare între medicina
umană și cea animală. 212

“Inițiativa pentru O Singură Sănătate” subliniază varietatea de boli comune care-i leagă pe
oameni de animale. 213

(…) criteriile majore pentru teoria postumană (…): acuratețe cartografică, cu corolarul
responsabilității etice, transdisciplinaritate, importanța combinării criticii cu figurațiile creatoare,
principiul nonliniarității, puterile memoriei și ale imaginației și strategia de-familiarizării. (….) o
cartografie este o citire a prezentului bazatâ pe teorie și informată politic.
Cartografiile urmăresc responsabilitatea epistemică și etică prin descoperirea locațiilor de putere
care ne structurează poziția subiectivală. 215

O figurație este expresia reprezentărilor alternative ale subiectului ca entitate nonunitară

dinamică; este dramatizarea proceselor de devenire. 216

Zigzagarea/ nonliniaritatea 216

“să rememorezi și să suporți încărcăturile afective ale textelor ca evenimente” 218

Eliberată de liniaritatea cronologică și de forța gravitațională logocentrică, memoria, în felul ei

nomadic postuman, reprezintă reinventarea activă a sinelui care este discontinuu în mod jovial,
cu totul diferit de faptul că a fi în mod lamentabil consistent. Amintirile au nevoie de imaginație
pentru a facilita actualizarea posibilităților virtuale în subiect, care se redefinește ca o uniatate
relațională transversală cu o memorie vitalistă și multidirecțională. Memoria lucrează în termeni
de transpoziții nomadice (…) 220

Epistemicul și eticul merg mână în mână în peisajul complicat al celui de-al treilea mileniu.
Avem nevoie de creativitate conceptuală și curaj intelectual pentru a face față situației, din
moment ce nu există cale de întoarcere. 233

de la universitate la “multi-versitate” 233

După porturi navale și aeroporturi, porturile de internet vor fi portaluri de navigare în

orașele mileniului III.237

!cercetare independentă, pedagogie constructivă și gândire critică

“intelectuali”= “furnizor de conținut” (Anderson)

“brokeri de idei” 238
“o etică de experimentare a intensităților”

“o forță mai vizionară sau energie profetică, calități care nu sunt nici în mod special la modă în
cercurile academice, nici prea prețuite din punct de vedere științific în aceste vremuri de căutare
forțată a “excelenței” globalizate. 249

Ce se întâmplă când conștiința este incapabilă de a găsi un remediu pentru boala sa obscură,
aecastă viață, această zoe, o forță impersonală care ne mișcă fără a ne cere permisiunea să facă
asta? Zoe este o forță inumană care se întinde dincolo de viață, spre noi forme vitaliste de
abordare a morții ca eveniment impersonal. 252

“fără concesii, nici față de panica morală, nici față de melancolie” 252

Michel Serres, “Modelul lui Hermes”, Ed. Universității de Vest, Timișoara 2003

-filosofie a relației

Pierre Hassner

(…) Leibniz făcea o împărțire a lumii în care nu exista acest dispreț față de non-civilizație. El
considera că există tot atâta civilizație în a treia Europă despre care vorbiți voi și în propria lui
Europă. 16

Auzeam partidul comunist prin glasul profesorilor de la Ecole Normale condamnând calculul
probabilității, fizica cuantică, ecuațiile lui Heisenberg și chiar l-am auzit pe profesorul meu de
filosofie luând la un moment dat poziție în scandalul medicilor sovietici într-o manieră complet
antiștiințifică. 19

Multe din textele afișate în timpul mișcării ’68 erau o emanare a curentului suprarealist, pur și
simplu. 20

Or, să nu uităm că civilizația agricolă a fost comună întregii umanități încă din neolitic. Și
nimeni nu spune la începutul mileniului trei că evenimentul cel mai important al sec. XX este
tocmai dispariția agriculturii ca model cultural vital în toate țările pe care le numim occidentale.
21

Adevărata diferență între științele umane și cele exacte este că, așa cum arătam mai devreme,
primele se folosesc de condiții necesare pentru ca cele din urmă să se folosească de condiții
suficiente. Condițiile suficiente sunt marca, indicele realului, pe când condițiile necesare pe care
le acumulezi fără încetare definesc o libertate totală. Degeaba acumulez condiții necesare pt viață
și opera mea; le pot nega sau inversa oricând. Aceasta este libertatea mea. De fapt, condițiile
necesare se află în același timp de partea libertății și de partea convenției. Dar cum toți lucrați cu
științele umaniste, toți credeți că lumea se suprapune acestei legi. Răspuns: nu. 30

Aș spune că, astăzi, ne lipsește de fapt filosofia pentru că unul din proiectele inconștiente și
ireductibile ale umanității moderne este știința. Atâta vreme cât filosofii vor rămâne departe
de știință, nu-și vor face datoria. 32

Gafa eniormă a lui Hedegger a fost că nu a știut să citească Logosul și totuși, a vorbit enorm de
mult despre el. El nu-și dă seama că Logos la greci înseamnă a/b=c/d și că Logosul este
interesant nu atât ca și cuvânt rostit, ci ca și cuvânt evaluat și golit de sens prin proporție.
Invenția abstractului se datorează faptului că a și b au sensuri diferite, iar a/b are un al treilea
sens independent de primele două. Relația dintre ele este chiar Logosul. Cuvântul Logos este
folosit de greci cu sensul de “analogie”, analogia.33-34

Or, zeul comerțului este Hermes. Zeul comunicării este Hermes. Zeul traducătorilor este
Hermes. Zeul care a inventat limbajul este Hermes. Zeul hoților este Hermes. Hermes, în greacă,
este angelos, mesagerul. Iar angelos nu este altceva decât îngerul. În consecință, trăiam într-o
epocă în care nu mai era Prometeu zeul absolut - zeul marxiștilor, al gânditorilor de stânga și al
revoluționarilor secolului al XIX-lea, zeul care dăduse omului focul pentru a produce unelte. Îi
spuneam maestrului meu, Althusser, că s-a sfârșit cu Prometeu, că astăzi comunicarea este miza.
36

Într-un fel, cultura noastră este șarmul. Dar nu poți vorbi așa unui student american sau german.
Deci, trebuie de fiecare dată să te adaptezi unui tip cultural dat. 42-43

Ce este o relație in asstracto? Eu cred că relația precede ființa, că este mult mai importantă decât
ființa, că fiecare relație presupune o patologie și că simbolul acestei patologii este parazitul.
Cartea despre paraziți a fost scrisă în urmă cu douâzeci de ani dar cred și acum când mă
interesează foarte mult biologia că nu ne putem raporta decât cu mare greutate la problema
originii vieții fără să luăm în considerare operatorul parazitar. Acesta este chiar mai important
decât credeam când am început cartea. 43

De exemplu, din zece molecule indispensabile pentru digesta noastră, nouă sunt urmașele
microbilor care i-au ucis pe strămoșii voștri în anumite condiții. Strămoșii voștri au murit, dar
domnul și doamna au rezistat pentru că au găsit o cale pentru a păstra parazitul și pentru a
supraviețui în același timp. Iar parazitul a primit o funcție în organismul lor. Toate simbiozele
sunt, de fapt, parazitisme reușite. 45

Este probabil ca și spermatozoidul să fie invaziv în raport cu ovulul, deci să fie un parazit și, o
dată ce embrionul se dezvoltă în uterul matern, mama în consideră un simbiot o anumită perioadă
pentru ca apoi să-l elimine ca pe un parazit. Și atunci, întreaga educație a unui copil constră în a-l
aduce din stare parazitară în stare simbiotică. Pentru că trăiește în pântecele mamei, suge la
pieptul ei, deci este în tot acest parazitar față de aceasta. 46

Ai posibilitatea să alegi, dar în cazul parazitului, după ce ai citit Tartuffe, vei putea să te ferești
ca și cum ai fi trăit experiența personal sau vei putea să ignori lecția și să cazi în capcană. Da,
există o alegere dar nu cred că o filosofie a libertății de-a alege ar putea fi interesantă aici. 48

Dacă vreți să vorbim despre rău nu există decât unul singur. Violența. Toată problema
răului poate fi rezolvată rezolvând problema violenței. (…) Stiți, suntem animaul cel mai
violent. Singurul, în afara șobolanului, care își omoară seamănul. 49

Orice situație comunicațională este un careu; comunicarea se joacă în patru: cei doi subiecți,
diavolul și cel care facilitează contractul, simbiotul. Simbioza este condiția dialogului nostru. El
poate avea ca scop căsătoria, o afacere, o călătorie împreună etc. Luptăm împotriva zgomotului
care ne-ar împiedica să ne înțelegem, dar avem cu noi un înger; îl avem pe Hermes. Dacă primul
este parazitar, acesta este Hermes. Și aici se află, dacă vreți, sfârșitul simbolului. 52

Cum a ajuns homo habilis să producă prima formă? Și așa am descoperit că există un raport
secret între producerea unei forme și prima constatare a morții. Dintr-o dată, cartea mea despre
arta statuară a devenit o meditație asupra morții. Mi se pare că primul obiect pe care îl
descoperim - în sens antropologic, originar, aproape metafizic - este cadavrul. Animalele nu au
aproape deloc simțul morții, noi, dimpotrivă…62

Acest stop-cadru vrea să spună: “El este ultimul condamnat la moarte din istorie.” Este vorba de
maortea morții. Reprezentarea lui Isus pe cruce este moartea morții. Și moartea morții se
cheamă înviere. Creștinismul este, deci, religia care ucide moartea și întoarce spatele definitiv
întregii antichități. 65

Corpul dvs. nu e tăcut. La începutul lumii a fost zgomotul, apoi, pentru a-l acoperi, a început
muzica. Obiectul emană zgomot, zgomotul naște muzică, iar limbajul este doar al patrulea sau al
cincilea etaj în această construcție genetică. Realismul zgomotului mă desparte complet de
abordările celorlalți, care mi se par arbitrare. 73

Așadar nu sunt deloc heideggerian. Nu pot din motive existențiale și filosofice. Și apoi, ființa nu
ne privește. Noi nu suntem pur și simplu. Suntem structuri modale. Ce este omul? Cele patru
categorii ale modalității: definim un care în care avem necesarul, posibilul, contingentul și
imposibilul. Suntem ființe contingente în raport cu necesitatea și posibilitatea. Dacă vreau să
construiesc casa omului - în sens heideggerian dacă doriți - aceasta se înalță pe patru moduri, pe
patru piloni: necesitatea, posibilul, imposibilul și contingentul. 79
informația
Primul este sensul dat de Aristotel: forma, impunerea unei forme, in-format. Al doilea sens este
cel uzual: deschid televizorul pentru a afla informații. Este sensul mediatic, dacă vreți. Al treilea
sens este cel dat de teoria informației: ce este informația? Negentropie. Acesta este singurul sens
științific: informația este ceea ce se opune prăbușirii în dezordine. Negentropie este să
construiești o casă. Cea de-a treia definiție este cea mai apropiată de prima, doar că Aristotel nu a
prevăzut - firește - și sensul de ordine-dezordine. 82

Suntem tot timpul pe punctul de a intra în bifurcație, într-un evantai de posibilități. 82

Ce este artistul, marele gânditor? Este omul care se află la limita zgomotului. Cel care
produce un sunet foarte fin la vioară - ascultați-l. Dacă produce un sunet mediu, e în regulă. Dar
dacă produce un sunet cu adevărat original, dacă ar fi doar cu o jumătate de milimetru mai la
dreapta ar fi zgomot. Artistul adevărat este cel care riscă zgomotul. La fel și gânditorul. 83

Esența omului este nesupunerea. 84

(ce este nebunia?) Nu știm încă. 84

ethos traduce exact mores din latină (92)

(…) de la inventarea geneticii, nu mai știm ce înseamnă înnăscut. 93

Suntem îmbrăcați pentru a ne ascunde defectele. 98

Or, odată cu apariția sulfamidelor în 1945, nu mai avem nici tuberculoză nici sifilis. Bolile
infecțioase regresează în așa măsură încât nu mai lasă urme pe corp. Asta se întâmplă cel târziu
în anii ’60-’70. 99

(…) ultimii fizicieni care vorbesc despre materie au scris în jurul anului 1880. Vorbesc
despre atomi, despre molecule etc. 106

Global vorbind, homonitatea pare să evolueze de la modelul sedentar, instalat prin

revoluția agrară din neolitic, către modelul nomad ce se arată dominant astăzi. De la închis
la deschis, de la habitat la pasaj, de la cămin la rătăcire. La fel și gânditorul, la fel și
gândul. 118

Venim din lucruri înainte de a ne naște din cuvânt, iesiți din piatră inertă și tumulară, stelă ori
inscripție ce oprește trecătorul în fața obstacolului funerar. 121
Cine nu mai are nimic trăiește în locul în care se învecinează viața și moartea, unde începe ființa.
129

Marile cuceriri nu vin niciodată de la o armată agresivă, ci de la turma celor excluși de către
frații lor feroce. 131

Nu se moare decât dintr-un exces de iubire a locului. Nu se scrie decât din exces de iubire.
Semnătura vine de dincolo de mormânt. 135

Întâile îndatoriri ale celui care transportă: eclipsarea, eschivarea, dispariția sau retragerea. 140

Bourbaki

(…) când ai studiat în detaliu istoria religiilor, aceea a științelor ți se pare că o mimează sau o
repetă! 153

Să reluăm cazul lui Gilles Deleuze, care a fost cu adevărat și fără glumă scos din joc: cel mai
frumos elogiu pe care i-l pot aduce este că gândirea filosofică l-a făcut într-adevăr fericit. Senin
în adâncime. Și încă o dată exemplar. 159

Dumezil (amenințat cu scandaluri din partea colegior întreaga viață)

Lumea - în sens geologic - e, înainte de toate (la urma urmei) vulcanică, călătoria extraordinară
spre punctul sublim este un itinerar spre un crater, pornind de la un crater sau trecând pe lângă un
crater : vedeți Meșterul Antifer, Vulcanul de aur, Servadac. 186

Lanquedem e condamnat la călătorie, la rătăcire. 187

În general, ce este aceea o Călăorie extraordinară? 191

A amuza,a preda, a iniția. 192

(în Contractul Natural) am descoperit (…) faptul că filozofia cea mai tradițională, cel puțin în
Occident, își ia ca scop ultim, chiar dacă ce mai adesea fără să o știe sau să o spună, descoperirea
unui loc terț, dificil de decelat, schimbător, fără îndoială în fiecare epocă, și din care pot fi
deduse, în același timp și conjugate, rațiunea științifică și rațiunea juridică, legile lumii fizice și
legile politice ale colectivităților umane, regulile Naturii și regulile Contractelor; de aceea, în
limbile de referință, termenii care desemnează aceste principii sunt aceiași în cele două cazuri.
Este adevărat că pentru Platon, pentru Aristotel, pentru Lucrețiu și Toma d’Aquino, în Evul
Mediu, la Spinoza și Hobbes, în epoca clasică, la Kant, Hegel și mulți alții, mai apropiați în timp
de noi. Profesorii mei păreau să ignore această stare de lucruri și contemporanii i-au urmat în
această direcție, crezând că pot practica filosofia fără a cunoaște științele și dreptul.
În căutarea acestui loc terț, Contractul Natural tratează filozofia cunoașterii și a acțiunii (…)
199

De la Nagasaki și Hiroșima, ar fi trebuit deja să ne schimbăm filozofia. 203

(…) stăpânirii lumii trebuie să îi succeadă, astăzi, stăpânirea stăpânirii. 207

Primul subiect cunoscut este subiectul de drept. Astfel, Contractul Natural tratează aproape în
excusivitate această problemă: cine are dreptul de a deveni subiect de drept? Dacă istoria arată
ceva, întreaga istorie a dreptului arată universalizarea progresivă a dreptului devenind subiect de
drept: scavii în trecut au devenit subiect de drept, urmați de copii și femei, mai recent, iar
întârzierea acestei decizii ar trebui și umple de rușine întreaga umanitate.

Subiectul ia totul și nu dă nimic, în timp ce obiectul dă totul și nu primește nimic. Cunoașterea,

grațioasă cum e , poate, astfel, să fie dublată de acțiuni nu mai puțin gratuite. Raportul activ sau
tehnicist față de lume nu face decât să o exploateze și nimic mai mult. 217

Secolul al XX-lea a construit obiecte-lume globale, dar gândirea sa nu a depășit mijloacele

filozofiei vechi, locale. Amintiți-vă, de pildă, cum abordează acest secol puterea: Hegel îl
consfințește Stâpân pe cel care se apropie mai mult de moarte și Sclav pe cel care se ține cât mai
departe de ea. 220

Faptul că rețeaua devine astăzi cea mai bună dintre tehnicile noastre arată că forma sa devine cel
mai bun dintre conceptele noastre. Dar rețeaua nu este oare un ansamblu de contracte? 222

distincție între principiul resposabilității și principiul precauției. Reamintesc că acest principiu al

precauției trebuie să fie aplicat ori de câte ori știința nu are niciun răspuns asupra unei probleme
date. 225

Viața este mai degrabă un dezechilibru evitat decât un echilibru în raport cu mediul.
Noțiunea de echilibru este aproape peste tot abandonată de științele despre viață. De altfel,
unul dintre ultimii laureați ai premiului Nobel a obținut acest premiu pentru că a inventat
o termodinamică în afara echilibrului. 226

(…) lăsați copiii fără nici o educație și cu siguranță veți vedea că societatea va avea mult de
suferit. (…) Pe de altă parte, am fost întotdeauna convins că artiștii au fost cei mai înaintați
în ceea ce privește cunoașterea, că ideile științifice ajung întotdeauna mai târziu față de
ideile artistice cu aceeași temă, că intuițiile artistice precedă descoperirile științei. 228
Altădată nu puteam direcționa evoluția decât observând fenotipul, adică organismul; astăzi
putem acea acces la genotip. Și, deci, la limită am putea spune că nu va mai exista hazard.(…)
Noi suntem cei care naștem natura. Dar încă nu cunoaștem această natură. (…) după părerea
mea, am intrat într-o nouă epocă a responsabilității. 239

Nocive în științe și în filozofie, aproape toate cuvintele tehnice nu au alt scop decât separarea
intoleranțelor acelui domeniu de exclușii de care nu se preocupă, pentru a-și păstra o oarecare
putere, dacă aceștia participă la conersație. 243

Dialectica se reduce la eterna reîntoarcere și eterna reîntoarcere a războaielor ne aduce în lume.

Ceea ce numim istorie de mai multe secole ajunge la acest punct de acumulare, la această
frontieră, la această schimbare globală. 250

Omul este un stoc, cel mai puternic și conectat la natură. El este o ființă-pretutindeni. Și, de
asemenea, legată. 258

Astfel, prințul, vechiul păstor de animale, va trebui să devină pilor sau cibernetician, fizician în
orice caz. 259

“Ego-ul” lui “cogito” are aceeași putere și aceeași cauzalitate sau influență la distanță ca această
aripă fremătătoare a lepidopterului; stridulației elitrelor unui greier care țârâie îi este echivalentă
gândirea. 259

Ar mai trebui demonstrat faptul că rațiunea noastră violentează lumea? Nu va resimți ea încă mai
mult nevoia vitală de frumusețe? Frumusețea reclamă pacea; pacea presupune un nou contract.
268

MICHEL SERRES with BRUNO LATOUR Conversations on Science,

Culture, and Time, University of Michigan 1995

In a certain sense it was already structuralism-well defined in mathematics-which l sought

to redefine in philosophy, long before it came into fashion in the humanities a good decade
later. 10

MS AlI things considered, l was formed by three revolutions.

First, the mathematical transformation from infinitesimal calculus or geometry to algebraic
and topological structures; that was my
first school-the bifurcation of the two mathematics, from which we emerged with a whole
new way of thinking. The second was in the world of physics. l had learned classical physics,
and suddenly here was quantum mechanics, but especially information theory, from which
we emerged with a completely new world. 12

One of my friends had lent me, in 1959, Brillouin's Science and Information Theory, which
had just been published. From it l understood that Brillouin was a veritable philosopher of
physics-an authentic physics and a philosophy at the same time, somewhat like thermodynamics,
from which, in fact, it sprang. 12

Third revolution came later, from having known Jacques Monod and from having had him as a
friend for a long time-a wonderful friend, who taught me contemporary biochemistry. l was very
close to him, since he asked me to read his manuscript of Chance and Necessity. That was my
third school, from which l emerged with a changed Iife. But that was much later. To give you an
idea of how much later-at the very end of the 1960s my professors of philosophy were still
attacking Monod, and for un- sound ideological reasons. 13

Thus, 1 developed the habit, which you may find strange, of learning philosophy elsewhere than
in the places where it was allegedly taught. l learned almost everything on the outside and
a1most nothing on the inside. Yes-we can safely put il that way- everything oljl the outside,
a1most nothing on the inside. 13

1used to laugh at physicists' problems of conscience, because 1 was a biologist·at the Pasteur
Institute. By creating and propos- ing cures, 1 always worked with a clear conscience, while
the physicists made contributions to anns, to violence and war. Now 1 see clearly that the
population explosion of the third world could not have happened without our intervention. So, 1
ask myself as many questions as physicists ask themselves about the atomic bomb. The
population bomb will perhaps prove more dangerous. (Monod) 17

Simone Weil, Philosopher of Violence - Gravitty and Grace 18

The higher one goes on the ladder of social recognition, ilie doser one cames to the most evil
forces. 19-20

But l am driven by a strong disinclination to "belong" to any group, because it has always
seemed to require excluding and killing those who don't belong to the sect. l have an almost
physi- cal hOITor of the libidinous drive to belong. You will notice that this drive is rarely
analyzed as such, since it supports aIl ambitions and serves up the most widespread morality.
20

Weighing those early years in the balance, l can say that l only learned to disobey. Ali the
events that took place around me only left me with a taste for disobedience. l had the impression,
during my student years and at the university, that ilie war was not over, that the Occupation
was still going on, and that therefore one still had to resist, still had to go underground, still
had to say no to the CUITent conventional wisdom that influenced careers or guided what
the press calls "the great intellectual movements." It's terrible or tragic, but perhaps also lucky, to
go through the best institutions of learning and research and only learn there to rebel. Time
wasted or weil spent-who can say? 20

"When you have no affiliations and want above all to avoid them, when you have no home
and cannot live anywhere, you are very much obliged to begin a project. All my life I have
had the distressful feeling of wandering in the desert or on the high seas. And when you are
lost and it is stormy, you quickly feel the need to build a raft or a boat or an ark-even an
island-solid and consistent, and to supply it with tools, with objects, with shelters, and to
people it with characters ... doesn't philosophy consist of such a series of domestic
improvements? Later, whoever wants can seek shelter there." 21

Nonetheless, 1 remain as much as possible in everyday language-I simply use it in aIl its
amplitude. And an author who uses lots of words is usuaIly considered difficult. He forces
readers to refer to the dictionary, but, in reviving language, he puts new life into it. 24

So, one must be interested in everything. Try ta name a single great philosopher who defies this
description. So why would I exclude Iiterature? 27

Cross-breeding-that's my cultural ideal. Black and white, science and humanities, monotheism
and polytheism-with no reciprocal hatred, for a peacemaking that 1wish for and prac- tice.
It's always peace, for a child of war. Add to that the fact that as a corrected left-handed person, 1
write with my right hand but work with the left. 1 now call this a completed body. Never any
fragmentation or schizophrenia. Don't imagine that 1 advocate this kind of upbringing
because it was my own. On the contrary, ail my life 1 have attempted to follow its mie.
Lots of authors practice the same connectedness. Plato was not
afraid to mix problems of geometry with quotes from Pindar; Aris-
totIe addresses medicine and rhetoric; Lucretius writes hyrnns to
physics; as analysts, Leibniz and Pascal write with perfection; Zola novelizes genealogy; Balzac,
La Fontaine, Jules Verne-what author doesn't do it? 28

Now then, in rereading him in detail, I found Auguste Comte to be more profound than his
successors, first as the inventor of sociology, and for having been the first to ask the question
about the relations between science and society, and, more important, between the histories of
science and religion. In this he remains unequaled; none of his successors, in any language, go as
far on this decisive point. 30

No matter how beautifully poetry sings, it remains imaginary and material-this is the theory of a
two-pronged culture, which quickly struck me as scholastic and dangerous. On the contrary, the
poems of La Fontaine, Verlaine, or Mallarmé require as much rigor as a geometric theorem, and
a demonstration of the latter can sometimes deploy as much beauty as those poems themselves.
So. it was worthwhile to reflect on this cammon rigor and
beauty, on this obviously single culture. We have neither two
brains nor two bodies nor two souls. 31

BL What is hardest for me to understand, perhaps because l belong more to the Anglo-Saxon
world, is your relationship to discussion. You never see it as anything but a dispute. FM you the
intellectual milieu is always one ofwaifare with each and ail. Nonetheless, you have had
colleagues who have influenœd you. Was it much later that you knew René Girard?
MS Yes, much later, when l taught atJohns Hopkins in Baltimore and in Buffalo, New York, and
at Stanford, in California. He had an influence on me similar ta what rd received from
Simone Weil. He also had read Gravity and Grace in his youth, and he freely admits that his
thoughts on violence were born from meditating on Simone Weil's texts. 35

It seemed to me that he applied an authentic structuralism to the humanities, to religious history-

a discipline that has always fascinated me, since l am still convinced that it forms the deepest
plate in the history of cultures. By plate 1mean what earth scientists mean by this word-thus
continuing the image Husserl used when he spoke of "formation." A plate that is deeply
submerged, buried, often opaque and dark, that transfonns itself with infinite slowness but
which explains very weil the discontinuous changes and per- ceptible ruptures that take place
above. Indeed, in comparison to religious history, that of the sciences seems superficial,
recent- like a surface landscape, quite visible and shimmering. What's more, when you study
religious history in detail, that of the sciences seems to imitate or repeat it! 36

What makes for advancement in philosophy and also in science, is inventing concepts, and
this invention always takes place in solitude, independence, and freedom indeed. In silence.
We have a surfeit of colloquia these days; what comes out of them? Collective repetitions. On
the other hand, we are cruelly deprived of convents and quiet cells and the taciturn rules of the
cenobites and anchorites. 37

BL This negative experience of discussions, do you hold to it?

MS Why get into discussions of determinism and chaos, when the same things have been
said, by the same factions, in nearly every generation? No, debate is not productive. This is
why a few years ago I sent to a journal organizing an issue on Balzac a pastiche of Balzac
on La Belle Noiseuse, in which chaos takes her oldest name, Noise. Yes, chaos itself is
interesting-I even believe I was the first philosopher to speak about it-but discussion is not
interesting; it is so repetitive.
Polemic never invents anything, because nothing is older, anthropologically, than war. The
opposite notion has become conventional wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon world, which today holds
sway. It is because it holds sway that this method is propagated. That's always the strategy of
victors. Reread Plato: Socrates always imposes the methodology by which he always wins.
Dialectics is the Iogic of the masters. It's necessary first of aIl to impose, in a manner
defying discussion, the methodology for discussion. 38

But did those who didn't choose the superhighways really con- tribute something new? Like
Gilles Deleuze, for example. He separated himself from the traditional history of philosophy,
from the human sciences, from epistemology. He's an excellent example of the dynamic
movement of free and inventive thinking. 39

BL Dumézil too. He had a completely atypical career.

MS Dumézil was ridiculed by all of his colleagues, all his life. Even at the Collège de France and
at the French Academy he was considered not only as atypical but often as eccentric, like
Bergson, who also did not have the good fortune of pleasing his university colleagues. Was
Bergson ever discussed? Can an intuition be discussed? Aren't the great inventions, including the
conceptual ones, based on an intuition? lt always makes the first move; the rank and file discuss
afterward, to tear one another apart. 39

Through family tradition I seemed more destined for fairly servile, manual labor. And because
my youth was contemporary to so many wars, seemed more destined to negative emotions
and thoughts. But in both cases I found myself completely on the other side of things. Indeed, I
only love positive values, and i feel an irrepressible happiness in practicing my chosen vocation,
in teaching (i love my students) and in writing books (if necessary, I would pay to do it).
Enthusiasm for the philosophical life has never left me. If 1 had to name (perhaps immodestly)
the dominant sentiment that is aIways with me, 1 would not hesitate a moment: joy, the
immense, sparkling, indeed holy joy of having to think-a joy that is sometimes even serenity.
42

BL J'm painting out the difficulties ta you sa that you can explain them away. This time machine,
this freedom of movement, is at the bottom of the accusations of "poetry" leveled at your books,
harmful accusations that l know exasperate you . ..
MS What a sign of the times, when, to cruelly criticize a book, one says that it is only poetry!
Poetry comes from the Greek, meaning "invention," "creation"-so aIl is weIl, thank YOU. 44

MS Let me say a word on the idea of progress. We conceive of

time as an irreversible line, whether interrupted or continuous, of acquisitions and
inventions. We go from generalizations to discoveries, leaving behind us a trail of effOTS
finally corrected-like a cloud of ink from a squid. "Whew! We've finally arrived at the truth."
Il can never he demonstrated whether this idea of time is true or false.
But, irresistibly, 1 cannot help thinking that this idea is the equivalent of those ancient diagrams
we laugh at today, which place the Earth at the center of everything, or our galaxy at the middle
of the universe, ta satisfy our narcissism. 48
MS That's not time, only a simple line. It's not even a line, but a trajectory of the race for first
place--in school, in the Olympie Garnes, for the Nobel Prize. This isn't time, but a simple
competition-once again, war. Why replace temporaiity, duration, with a quarrel? The first ta
arrive, the winner of the battle, obtains as his prize the right ta reinvent history ta his own
advantage. Once again dialectics-which is nothing more than the logic of appearances. 49

MS Can I return to my training? I earned a degree In classical studies, in Latin and Greek, and
I was aiso trained in science, earning two degrees in mathematics. Through my entire life 1
have never abandoned this double route. 1still read Plutarch and the great physicists, at the same
time, as a refusaI of the separation between science and literature, of this divorce that
informs the temporaiity of so-called contemporary thought.
50

ln earlier times people dreamed; now we think. 50

But time is in reality somewhat more complicated than that. You no doubt are familiar with
chaos theory, which says that disorder occurring in nature can be explained, or reordered, by
means offractal attractors. 57

But in this, order as such is harder to perceive, and customary determinism has a slightly
different appearance. Time does not always flow according to a line (my first intuition of this is
in my book on Leibniz [284-86]) nor according to a plan but, rather, according to an
extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells,
chimneys of thunderous acceleration, renrlings, gaps-all sown al random, at least in a visible
disorder. Thus, the development of history truly resembles what chaos theory describes. Once
you understand this, it's not hard to accept the fact that time doesn't always develop according to
a line and thus things that are very close can exist in culture, but the line makes them appear
very distant from one another. Or, on the other hand, that there are things that seem very close
that, in fact, are very distant from one another. Lucretius and modem theory of fluids are
considered as two places separated by an immense distance, whereas I see them as in the
same neighborhood. 57

There is in Lucretius a global theory of turbulence, which can make that time really
understandable. His physics seems to me truly very advanced. Along with the contemporary
sciences, it holds out the hope of a chaotic theory of time. 59

This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-
defined distances is called metrical geometry. Classical time is related to geometry, having
nothing to do with
space, as Bergson pointed out aIl too briefly, but with metrics.
On the contrary, take your inspiration from topology, and perhaps
you will discover the rigidity of those proximities and distances you consider arbitrary.
And their simplicity, in the literai sense of the word pli [fold]: it's simply the difference
between topology (the handkerchief is folded, crumpled, shredded) and geometry (the same
fabric is ironed out fiat).
60

In other words, in antiquity physics was not mathematized as it is now. Two systems look at each
other and describe the same world: one, that of Archimedes, with mathematical theorems; the
other with descriptions in ordinary language, although extremely precise and exact. But both
have the same object: turbulences, whirlpools, their spiral shape and their liquid nature-in short,
their formation and, based on their construction, the formation of the world.
What changes is the style of the mathematization, its manner, but what endures is the
mathematization itself. It consists of a correspondence of system ta system and not of the
processes of measurement and quantification. Once again this is very modern. 64

We must conceive or imagine how Hermes Dies and gets about when he carries messages from
the gods-or how angels travel. And for this one must describe the spaces situated between things
that are already marked out-spaces of inter- Jerenœ, as 1 called them in the title of my second
book on Hermes. This god or liese angels pass through folded time, making millions of
connections. Between has always struck me as a preposition of prime importance.64

One of the most beautiful things that our era is teaching us is to approach with light and
simplicity the very complex things previously believed to be the result of chance, of noise, of
chaos, in the ancient sense of the word. Hermes the messenger first brings light to texts and signs
that are hermetic, that is, obSCure. 65

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks
and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability.
67

Because in fact, every time I approached something it wasn't an idle voyage: I only assigned
myself the undertaking on the condition that I invent something. Each time 1 passed somewhere
1 tried to leave a truly original solution. I didn't pass by Lucretius by repeating other
commentators, as far as I know. Nor by Kant without discovering that he was the first to have
invented an eternal return-a solution not common place among the specialists. Sa, I traveled
everywhere, and in order to do il YOll have to travel fast. You have to have a compendium of
thought, take shortcuts. ….. !!!! In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light ta
express the clarity of thought; 1 would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but
also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment. 67
Rapidity. To move, while writing, from one point of the universe ta another. 71

Is there a big difference between the theoretical expression of the message, defending itself
physically against the background noise, and the grasp of language that a poet can have in
relation to the noise he hears in his own coenesthesis? 80

On the other hand, honesty consists of writing only what one thinks and what one believes
oneself to have invented. My books come only from me. "My glass is not big, but l drink from
it." That's my only quote. 81

The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought.
New ideas COme from the desert, from hermits, from solitary beings, from those who live
in retreat and are not plunged into the sound and fury of repetitive discussion. 81

MS l have a great repugnance for master-disciple relationships.

"Here, 1 am your servant": This declaration would give me a lasting
disgust for the master's power. 84

yes yes : The choice of philosophy supposes an altogether different behavior-independence,

freedom of thought, escape from lobbying support groups ... and therefore, indeed,
solitude. I repeat: this is not a question of being exceptional but, rather, of being
independent. 85

To compose-that is the issue. 93

There is a diabolical link between repetition and recognition. The imitable is doubly ugly,
especially in philosophy, because it enslaves. 94

A unique style cornes from the gesture, the project, the itinerary, the risk-indeed, from the
acceptance of a
specific solitude. 94

In literary works one sometimes finds perfect intuitions of scientific instruments that come later.
It sometimes happens that the artist-musician. painter, poet-sees a scientific truth before it is
born. Indeed, music is always in the lead: the popular saying is true, that you can't go faster
than the music. 99

Do you want to taIk about invention? It's impossible without that dazzling, obscure, and hard-to-
define emotion called intuition. Intuition is, of ail things in the world, the rarest, but most equally
distributed among inventors-be they artists or scientists.
Yes, intuition strikes the first blows. 99
Each route invents itself. 105

Do you notice that, in relation to other parts of speech, the preposition has almost all meaning
and has almost none? It simultaneously has the maximum and minimum of meaning,
exactly like a variable in classical analysis. 106

So-stand up, run,jump, move, dance! Like the body, the mind needs movement, especiaIly
subtIe and complex movement. 107

Lucretius launches us into movement--everything in his work

begins with turbulence-it's a very complex figure, which you cali difficult. 107

My way of abstracting is still not so far from that of certain very contemporary sciences, and
perhaps generalizes them, in the sense that, in mathematics, for example, and even
sometimes in physics, relations outnumber subjects or objects. 107

Yes, modes. By a theory of modaIity, of means, of relations, of rapports, of transports, of

wandering. Isn't that, overaIl, a contemporary manner of thinking? For example, aren't physicists
seeking to understand interactions in general? 113

I mean by This that 1 am seeking compatibility more than imitation.

113

I will reply that my goal is not above ail ta be right but, rather, ta produce a global intuition,
profound and sensible. 115

Restless, in order to go everywhere, throughout the entire

encyclopedia-what an undertaking! Restless-in other words, active, not lazy. Unsystematic, in
order to criticize outdated systems.
To show, with a laugh, that the space of knowledge has changed :1
its contours and that these are more tortuous than we realize.
Unsystematic-that is to say, fertilely inventive in the middle of chaos….
Hermes is worse than a tourist; he is a miserable wanderer, crossing the desert. And, worse
yet, he's a troublemaker. Even a thief, if you will! He's both good and bad. And hermetical, in the
bargain. Do you find this terrible? l imagine Hermes as fliled with joy.
117

Traditional philosophy usually has either a central god who is a producer, a radiating source of
life like a sun, or a story of the origin of time. My philosophy is more like a heaven filled with
angels, obscuring God somewhat. They are restless, unsystematic
(which you find suspect), troublemakers, boisterous, always transmitting, not easily classifiable,
since they fluctuate. Making noise, carrying messages, playing music, tracing paths, changing
paths, carrying ... 118

Inversely, to construct on a large scale is ta move in the direction of fragility, to accept it, to
run its risk. To move in the direction of the fragment is the same as to protect oneself. The
philosophy of fragments is a by-product of war but equally a technique of conservation.
Museums are stuffed with bits and pieces, with disparate members. The philosophy of
fragments brings together the philosophy of the museum and the museum of philosophy; thus, it
is doubly conservative.
123

Mankind is the mother of aIl weaknesses. The word springs from the birth wail, life springs
from chance encounters, thought cornes from a momentary fluctuation, science cornes
from an in- tuition that clicks and then vanishes instantly. Life and thought live in closest
proximity to nothingness. Even more so does man when he approaches weakness-woman,
child, old person, the sick, the mad, the poor, the indigent, the hungry, the miserable. 122

I prefer invention accompanied by the danger of error to rigorous verification, which is

paralleled by the risk of immobility-in philosophy as in life, in life as in the sciences. 131

It's better to do than to judge, to produce than to evaluate. Or, rather, it's in mining coal that one
learns if it is gray or black. It's better to create than to criticize, to invent than to classify
copies. 136

HERMES
LITERA TURE, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY
by MICHEL SERRES
Edited by Josue V. Harari & David F. Bell
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE & LONDON, 1982

Don Juan is the first hero of modernity both numerically and functionally, by the double despair
of representation and of will. 3

Let us suppose that he was: he can thus be classified as a scientific observer of society.
Excluding all anachronistic hypotheses, let us restrict our attention to the mystery of literary
creation. Let us decide on the basis of the evidence, and remember that we are dealing with a
feast. 3
Do not return tobacco for tobacco, that is, goods for goods, words for words, love for love ; give
instead words for goods4 and love for money. 5

(…) here we have'''the bride groom of the human race," the unbridled "taker of all hands" (II, 1),
who only gives his hand to take it back, except at the fatal feast. A "madman" outside the law of
reason, a "dog" outside the law of man, a "devil" outside the law of God, a "Turk" outside the
law of Spain, a "heretic" outside the law of Christ. All these rules come down to one: you must
give back the hand. 10

Elvira takes a loftier tone, but repeats the theme: "your offenses have exhausted heaven's mercy."
Then she asks to be paid: "I have done everything for you, and all I ask as recompense is that you
correct your life and prevent your damnation" (IV, 9). In passing, let us note that here again Don
Juan changes his tack and proposes love for discourse : stay, it is late, and we will find you
lodging. In short, we find him converted, but in an inverse sense. He still returns words for
credit-to the forsaken woman, to her brothers, to his own duped father. His changed ways, or
change of clothes, restore to him those "favors" from which he duly "intends to profit" until the
final reparation, "remission" of his debt (V, 1). Beneath the mask he can "ensure his affairs": all
one must do is avenge "heaven's interests" (V, 2). Let there be no mistake: the law of tobacco
still reigns. The libertine declared he was not bound (I, 2) by its binding and obliging quality, but
the hypocrite's grimace is a successful method (Ie bon tabac) for constituting a caste, Thus false
piety: "by grimacing, one can bind together a tight society with men of like mind" (V, 2). Sign
and roll your eyes; you are sheltered, shielded; the cabal will take up your interests. Thus again,
Don Juan is not alone, the solitary hero outside the common law, the pretext vs. the text. The
false exchange generates the protective social cell.
The reversal here is universal. Don Juan says: I am not the one who is breaking the promise; it is
you who have failed to live up to your vows, And the extreme conclusion follows : I am not the
hypocrite; the whole society is an imposture. 11

In order that the treatise be a comedy, Dam Juan had to be a feast. Let us eat, drink, to the health
of one another, let us exchange tobacco to finish off the meal, while an invisible hand writes
upon the wall the unknown words of death. 13

Marcel Mauss, The GIft

For Plato and a tradition which lasted throughout the classical age, knowledge is a hunt. To know
is t put to death - to kill the lamb, deep in the woods, in order to eat it. Moving from combat with
prey outside the species to killing inside the species, knowledge now becomes military, a martial
art. It is then more than a game; it is, literally, a strategy. These epistemologies are not innocent:
at the critical tribunal they are calling for executions. They are policies promulgated by military
strategists. To know is to kill, to rely on death, as in the case of the master and the slave.
Today we live out the major results of these wolfish actions. For the "I," who played the role of
the lamb by minimising his powers and placing the declared powers upstream from himself, this
"I" is the wolf. In the ordering relation, in the game-space, the "I" is clearly in the middle,
between the victorious sheepdog and the defeated devil or the wax. It has taken the wolf's place,
its true place. The reason of the strongest is reason by itself. Western man is a wolf of science.
28

Jules Michelet, La Mer

I arrive at exactly the same conclusion: the strategy of criticism is located in the object of
criticism. All the strategies I need are in the text of Michelet. All I need to do is to answer two
simple questions which have been formulated by analyzing the text in terms of the encyclopedia:
what is a reservoir? what is circulation? It is not necessary to introduce methods to read this text:
the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application.
This is not a special
'case; it is one that is perfectly generalizable. Why should there be a dichotomy between texts,
between the ones that operate and the ones that are operated upon? There are texts, and that is all.
38

It was thermodynamics that shook the traditional world and shaped the one in which we now
work. On the other hand, I maintain that the history of science is not worth an hour's trouble
if it does not become as effective as the sciences themselves. In other words, it offers less
interest as an object or a domain than as a set of operators, a method or strategy working on
formations different from itself. 39

Georg Riemann
Rene Thom

Two centuries ago, almost exactly, Kant began his philosophical career by observing a
paradoxical property of space. He based an esthetics on an unspoken or unspeakable asymmetry.
But his was a twofold mistake: he recognized only one space, whereas one can define a
varied, multiple, and increasing number of them; on the other hand, he attempted the
foolish project of laying a foundation in the transcendental subject, whereas we can receive
everything from language and practical experience. 44

Cultures are differentiated by the form of the set of junctions, its appearance, its place, as well as
by its changes of state, its fluctuations. But what they have in common and what constitutes them
as such is the operation itself of joining, of connecting. The image of the weaver arises at this
point: to link, to tie, to open bridges, path ways, wells, or relays among radically different
spaces; to say (dire) what takes place between them; to inter-dict (inter-dire). The category of be
tween is fundamental in topology and for our purposes here: to interdict in the rupture and cracks
between varieties completely enclosed upon themselves. "Enclosed" means isolated, closed,
separated; it also means untainted, pure, and chaste. Now, that which is not chaste, incestus, can
be incest. The incest prohibition (inter-diction) is, then, literally a local singularity exemplary of
this operation in general, of the global project of connecting the disconnected, or the opposite,
of opening what is closed, or again the opposite, and so forth. We find ourselves once
again in the same domain through this general formal aesthetics. There fore, we must speak
about these difficult operations. The identity of a culture is to be read on a map, its identification
card : this is the map of its homeomorphisms. 45

It would be necessary to draw graphs of itineraries , to define as closely as possible the spaces at
stake, to examine nodes, caducei, wheels, arborescence, a whole set Of spatial tools, the
technology of this discourse and its special morphologies. 50

On the, contrary, physics has shown that any laminar flow sooner or later produces a pocket of
turbulence which fundamentally alters the ori laminal flow.

This logos was first myth, in order to succeed in creating at least one koine.12 All the principles
of the Greek cities go beyond this arm of the sea, before Troy, in order to found a language of
communication-that the gods first make possible. The gods are en countered as the same-here,
everywhere-because in their other space they enjoy a single space. It is essential that one no
longer know where Dionysus was born, where Oedipus and Theseus died. Anywhere : this is far
preferable. Thus, in this discourse, chaos begins again: scattered members, the diasparagmos, the
bones of Mother Earth, the first family of Spartol, dissemination in space, or, rather,
dissemination of morphologies themselves. Whereupon the first problem: to find the single space
or the set of operators by which these spatial varieties in impractical, inconceivable vicinity will
be joined together. To open the route, way, track, path in this incoherent chaos, this tattered
cloud, whose dichotomic thicket is reformulated in the common space of transport when it
is reconstructed. To find the relation, the logos of analogy, the chain of mediations, the
common measure, the asses' bridge; to find the equilibrium or the clinamen. 51

And thus one must find first, find conditionally, a word, a logos, that has already worked to
connect the crevices which run across the spatial chaos of disconnected varieties. One must find
the Weaver, the proto-worker of space, the prosopopeia of topology and nodes, the Weaver
who works locally to join two worlds that are separated, according to the autochton's myth, by a
sudden stoppage, the metastrophic caesura amassing deaths and shipwrecks: the catastrophe. He
works, according to Plato, in a discourse where rational dichotomy and the myth of the two
space-times, common measure and the Weaver, all converge. He untangles, interlaces, twists,
assembles, passes above and below, rejoins the rational, the irrational, namely, the speakable and
the unspeakable, communication and the incommunicable. He is a worker of the single space, the
space of measure and transport, the Euclidean space of every possible displacement without
change of state, royally substituted one fine day in place of the proliferating multiplicities of
unlinked morphologies. In order to practice dichotomy and its connected paths, one must know
that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative in which worlds are torn asunder
by a catastrophe-and only the Weaver knows how to link them again or can reunite them. Then
and only then geometry is born and myth falls silent. Then the logos or relation unfolds, the
chains and networks on the smooth space of transport, which itself alone replaces the discourse
(discours) of itineraries (parcours). Linked homogeneity erases catastrophes, and congruent
identity forgets difficult homeomorphisms. Reason, as the saying goes, has triumphed over myth.
No, it is Euclidean space that has repressed a barbarous topology, it is transport and
displacement without obstacles that have suddenly taken the place of the journey, the
ancient journey from islands to catastrophes, from passage to fault, from bridge to well,
from relay to labyrinth. Myth is effaced in its original function, and the new space is
universal, as is reason or the ratio that it sustains, only because within it there are no more
encounters. As Plato says, one can walk there on two or four legs, follow the diagonal, freely
choose the longest or shortest road, route, ode, or period, and so on, as much as one wishes. The
earth is measured (geo-metry) by means of just measure (the King). The multiplicity, the
dangerous flock of chaotic morphologies, is subdued. Thus the Statesman is written. Hence the
two great vicissitudes of the nineteenth century. Beneath the apparent unity of Euclidean
space, mathematics, turning back toward its origins, rediscovers the teeming multiplicity of
diverse and original spaces-and topology emerges as a science. We have not finished nor shall
we ever again finish dealing with spaces. At the same moment, in an aged Europe asleep beneath
the mantle of reason and measure, mythology reappears as an authentic discourse. The coupling
of these rediscoveries becomes clear : Euler's bridge and the vessels' bridge across the Hellespont
during the storm, Listing's or Maxwell's complex and the Cretan maze.14 Let us not forget that
Leibniz, proto-inventor of the new science, said in time and against his time that one should
listen to old wives' tales.
14Leonhard Eulcr (1707-1783). the Swiss mathematician, proved in 1736 that it was impossible
to cross the seven bridges of Konigsberg in a continuous walk without recrossing any of them.
This proof was one of the early contributions to the development of topology. The vessels' bridge
refers to an incident recounted in Herodotus' Histories (7:34-37). Xerxes' army crossed the
narrow strait of the Hellespont into Greece using a bridge constructed of ships lashed together
side by side. The first attempt to construct the bridge was a failure when a storm tore the ships
apart. The second attempt succeeded. The German mathematician Johann Listing published
various works on what was earlier called the geometry of position and what we now call
topology. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) used Listing's work (notably Der Census
Rumlicher Complexe) in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in order to devise methods
for describing the behavior of lines of force in an electrical field. The Cretan maze refers, of
course, to the labyrinth which contained the Minotaur and which was solved by Theseus with the
help of Ariadne's thread. - Ed.
52-53
From Garrard to Turner, the path is very simple. It is the same path that runs from
Lagrange to Carnot, from simple machines to steam engines, from mechanics to
thermodynamics-by way of the Industrial Revolution. Wind and water were tamed in
diagrams. One simply needed to know geometry or to know how to draw. Matter was dominated
by form. With fire, everything changes, even water and wind. Look at The Forge, painted by
Joseph Wright in 1772. Water, the paddlewheel, the hammer, weights, strictly and geometrically
drawn, still triumph over the ingot in fusion. But the time approaches when victory changes
camps. Turner no longer looks from the outside; he enters into Wright's ingot, he enters into the
boiler, the furnace, the firebox. He sees matter transformed by fire. This is the new matter of the
world at work, where geometry is limited. Everything is overturned. Matter and color triumph
over line, geometry, and form. No, Turner is not a pre-impressionist. He is a realist, a
proper realist. He makes one see matter in 1844, as Garrard made one see forms and forces
in 1784. And he is the first to see it, the very first. No one had really perceived it before,
neither scientist nor philosopher, and Carnot had not yet been read. Who understood it?
Those who worked with fire and Turner-Turner or the introduction of fiery matter into
culture. The first true genius in thermodynamics. 56-57

Turner sees the world in terms of water and fire, as Garrard saw it in terms of figures and
motion. 57

Roger Martin, Logique contemporaine et formalisation

The cacographer and the epigraphist, the cacophonous speaker and the auditor, exchange their
reciprocal roles in dialogue, where the source becomes reception, and the reception source
(according to a given rhythm). They exchange roles sufficiently often for us to view them as
struggling together against a common enp y_ To hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and to
seek to exclude him. a successful communication is the exclusion of the third man. The most
profound dialectical problem is not the problem of the Other, who is only a variety -or a
variation-of the Same, it is the problem of the third man. We might call this third man the
demon, the prosopopeia of noise. 67

Alfred Tarski, Introduction to L ic and to the Methodology ofDeductive Sciences

In other words, the act of eliminating cacography, the attempt to eliminate noise, is at the
same time the condition of the apprehension of the abstract form and the condition of the
success of communication. If the mathematician becomes impatient, it is because he thinks
inside a society that has triumphed over noise so well and for such long time that he is amazed
when the problem is raised anew. He thinks within the world of "we" and within the world of the
abstract, two isomorphic and perhaps even identical worlds. The subject of abstract mathematics
is the "we" of an ideal republic which is the city of communication maximally purged of noiselO
(which, parenthetically, shows why Plato and Leibniz were not idealists). 68
And, as has often been seen in any discussion between an empiricist and a rationalist - Locke and
Leibniz, for example- empirism would alwaye be correct 'I mathematics did not exist.
Empiricism is the true philosophy as soon as mathematics is bracketed. Before the latter imposes
itself and in order that it may do so, one must want not to listen to Protagoras and Callicles-
because they are right. But the more they are right, the less we can hear them:
they end up only makin noise. The argument put forth against Locke by Leibniz, "You do not
know mathematics," is not an ad hominem argument; it is the only loical defense possible. 70

At the extreme limits of empIrICISm, meaning is totally plunged into noise, the space of
communication is granular,ll dialogue is condemned to cacophony: the transmission of
communication is chronic transformation. Thus, the empirical is strictly essential and accidental
noise. The first "third man" to exclude is the em piricist, along with his empirical domain. And
this demon is the strongest demon, since one has only to open one's eyes and ears to see that he is
master of the world.l2 Consequently, in order for dialogue to be possible, one must close
one's eyes and cover one's ears to the song and the beauty of the sirens. In a single blow, we
eliminate hearing and noise, vision and failed drawing; in a single blow, we conceive the
form and we understand each other. And therefore, once again, the Greek miracle, that of
mathematics, must be born at the same time-historical time, logical time, and reflexive time
- as a philosophy of dialogue and by dialogue. 70

In another essayl I have called mechanical systems "statues" or stateurs: they are based on a
fixity or an equilibrium. After Carnot they become motors. They create movement, they go
beyond the simple relation of forces, they create them by energy or power. They produce
circulation by means
of reservoirs and differences of temperature. As soon as one can build them and theorize about
them-steam or combustion engines, chemical, electrical, and turbine engines, and so forth - the
notion of time changes. T h e second law o f thermodynamics accounts for the impossibility of
perpetual motion of the second type; energy dissipates and entropy increases. From this moment
on, time is endowed with a direction. It is irreversible and drifts from order to disorder, or from
difference to the dissolution or dissemination of a homogeneous mixture from which no energy,
no force, and no motion can arise. 71-72

At the beginning of the twentieth century, communication theory introduced a series of

concepts such as information, noise, and redundancy, for which a link to thermodynamics
was rather quickly demonstrated. It was shown, for example, that information (emitted,
transmitted, or received) was a form of negentropy. 73

Right in the middle of the traditional classification of beings, a classification that no longer
makes sense since matter, life, and sign are nothing but properties of a system, we find exactly
what I want to talk about: the living organism. Most often conceived of according to the models
we have already considered, the organism has been seen as a machine (by figures and
movements, or by invariance through variations) from the classical age up to the recent notion of
homeostasis. Equilibrium and mobility. It is evidently a thermodynamic system, sometimes
operating at very high temperatures, and tending toward death according to an unpredictable and
irreversible time (that of ontogenesis), but going up the entropic stream by means of
phylogenetic invariances and the mutations of selection. 74

It is a hypercomplex system, reducible only with difficulty to known models that we have now
mastered. What can we presently say about this system ? First, that it is an information and
thermodynamic system. Indeed, it receives, stores, exchanges, and gives off both energy and
information-in all forms, from the light of the sun to the flow of matter which passes through it
(food, oxygen, heat, signals). This system is not in equilibrium, since thermodynamic
stability spells death for it, purely and simply. It is in a temporary state of imbalance, and it
tends as much as possible to maintain this imbalance. It is hence subject to the irreversible
time of the second law, since it is dying. But it struggles against this time. We can improve
upon the classical formulation of this problem. Indeed, due to the energy and information torrent
which passes through the system without interruption, it is henceforth impossible to conceive of
it as an isolated-closed system, except, perhaps, in its genotypical form. It is an open system. It
should thus be regulated by a thermodynamics, of open systems which has been developing over
the past ten years and which provides a complex theory for this state of imbalance. In and by this
imbalance, it is relatively stable. But here invariance is unique: neither static nor homeostatic, it
is homeorrhetic. It is a river that flows and yet remains stable in the continual collapse of its
banks and the irreversible erosion of the mountains around it. One always swims in the same
river, one never sits down on the same bank.
The fluvial basin is stable in its flux and the passage of its chreodes ; as a system open to
evaporation, rain, and clouds, it always-but stochastically-brings back the same water. What is
slowly destroyed is the solid basin. The fluid is stable ; the solid which wears away is unstable -
Heraclitus and Parmenides were both right. Hence the notion of homeorrhesis.3 The living
system is homeorrhetic.
This river, almost stable although irreversible, this basin, poised on its own imbalance in a
precarious state of quasi-equilibrium in its flow toward death, ferries energy and information,
knowledge of entropy and negentropy, of order and disorder. Both a syrrhesis (rather than a
system) and a diarrhesis, the organism is hence defined from a global perspective. 74

3The word "homeorrhesis" is formed from the Greek words homos, meanin "same," and
rhysis, meanin "flow," Serres replaces the normal term describin the equilibrium of a self
reulatin system, "homeostasis," by "homeorrhesis" in order to emphasize the idea of continual
movement and exchane as opposed to the less dynamic idea of stasis. - Ed.
4The Greek verbs syrrhein and diarrhein mean "to flow toether" and "to flow throuh."
Ain the attempt is to capture the dynamic nature of the oranism by means of a
terminoloh'Y that avoids suestions of the static. The word "'system" is.abandoned because
of its oriin in the Greek verb hislanai, "to cause to stand." -Ed,

Not actually defined (the word meansjn effect the opposite of open), but assessed, described,
evaluated, and understood. Or, within the context of an even more general circulation which goes
from the sun to the black depths of space, the organism is a barrier of braided links that leaks like
a wicker basket but can still function as a dam. Better yet, it is the quasi stable turbulence that a
flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instant, which finds its balance in the middle of
the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else
where. And experience shows that there is no flux without eddy, no laminar flow which does not
become turbulent.5 Now, and here is the crux of the matter, all times converge in this temporary
knot: the drift of entropy or the irreversible thermal flow, wear and aging, the exhaustion of
initial redundancy, time which turns back on feedback rings or the quasi-stability of eddies, the
conservative invariance of genetic nuclei, the permanence of a form, the erratic blinking of
aleatory mutations, the implacable filtering out of all non-viable elements, the local flow
upsteam toward negentropic islands-refuse, recycling, memory, increase in complexities. The
living organism , ontogenesis and phylogenesis combined, is of all times. This does not at all
mean that it is eternal, but rather that it is an original complex, woven out of all the different
times that our intellect subjects to analysis or that our habits distinguish or that our spatial
environment tolerates. Homeorrhetic means at least that: the rhesis flows, but similarity pushes
upstream and resists. All the temporal vectors possessing a directional arrow are here, in this
place, arranged in the shape of a star. What is an organism? A sheaf of times. What is a living
system? A bouquet of times.
It is indeed surprising that this solution has not been reached more qUIckly. Perhaps it seemed
difficult to intuit a multitemporality. We willingly accept, however, the fact that the things
around us do not all share the same temporality: negentropic islands on or in the entropic sea, or
distinct universes as Boltzmann described them, pockets of local orders in rising entropy, crystal
depositories sunk in ashes-none of these things disturbs us. Living syrrhesis combines sea and
islands. In a completely new sense, the organism is synchronous for meanings and directions, for
the continuous and discontinuous, for the local and the global; it combines memory, invariance,
plan, message, loss, redundancy, and so forth. It is old, mortal, and the transmitter of a new
cycle. The organism is fixed on top of a temporal converter-no, it is a converter of 75

time. This is perhaps why it is able to learn about systems differentiated by their individual
time: the world, fire, and signs. 76

Francois Jacob, The Logic of LIfe: A History of Heredity,

Henri Atlan, L 'Organisation bioloique et la theorie de information
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theo o/Communication
The body is an extraordinarily complex system that creates language from information and noise,
with as many mediations as there are integrating levels, with as many changes in sign for the
function which just occupied our attention. I know who the final observer is, the receiver at the
chain's end : precisely he who utters language. But I do not know who the initial dispatcher is at
the other end.
82

!!!!The real produces the conditions and the means for its self-knowledge. The "rational" is
a tiny island of reality, a rare summit, exceptional, as miraculous as the complex system
that produces it, by a slow conquest of the surf's randomness along the coast. All
knowledge is bordered by that about which we have no information.
It is no longer necessary to maintain the distinction between introspective knowledge, or "deep"
knowledge, and objective knowledge. There is only one type of knowledge and it is always
linked to an observer, an observer submerged in a system or in its proximity. And this observer is
structured exactly like what he observes. His position changes only the relationship between
noise and information, but he himself never effaces these two stable presences. There is no more
separation between the subject, on the one hand, and the object, on the other (an instance of
clarity and an instance of shadow). This separation makes everything inexplicable and unreal.
Instead, each term of the traditional subject object dichotomy is itself split by something like a
geographical divide (in the same way as am I, who speak and write today): noise, disorder, and
chaos on one side ; complexity, arrangement, and distribution on the other. Nothing
distinguishes me ontologically from a crystal, a plant, an animal, or the order of the world;
we are drifting together toward the noise and the black depths of the universe, and our
diverse systemic complexions are flowing up the entropic stream, toward the solar origin,
itself adrift. Knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times,
always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called
being. Virtually stable turbulence within the flow. To be or to know from now on will be
translated by : see the islands, rare or fortunate, the work of chance or of necessity. 83
In fact, Thales has dis covered nothing but the possibility of reduction, the idea of a
module, the notion of model. The pyramid itself is inaccessible; he invents a scale, a type of
ladder. . 85

Can one measure visually the distance to the sun, to the moon, to a ship, to the apex of a
pyramid? This is the whole story of Thales who discovered nothing but the precise virtues of the
human gaze, just as, somewhat later, Berkeley organized in an erudite manner a spectacle of light
beneath his microscope, a rigorous organon of optical representation. Since he cannot use his
ruler, he sets up lines of sight or, rather, he lets light project them for him…..
As far as I know, even for accessible objects, vision alone is my guarantee that the ruler has been
placed accurately on the thing. To measure is to align ; the eye is the best witness of an
accurate covering-over. Thales invents the notion of model, of module, but he also brings
the visible to the tangible. To measure is, supposedly, to relate. True, but the relation
implies a transporting: of the ruler, of the point of view, of the things lined up, and so on. In the
realm of the accessible, the transporting is always possible: in the realm o f the inaccessible,
vision must take care of displacements : hence the angle of sight, hence the cast shadow.
Measurement, the problem of relation ; sight, the cast shadow ; in any case, the essential element
is the transporting. 86

Thales's idea (for we must give it a name) consists simply in turning the process around, that is,
in considering and then resolving the reverse problem of the gnomon. Instead of letting the
pyramid speak of the sun, or the constant determine the scale of the variable, he asks the sun to
speak of the pyramid; that is, he asks the object in motion to provide a constant flow of
information about the object at rest. This ruse is much more clever than the one we described
earlier: the constant is no longer what gauges the regular intervals of the variable ; on the
contrary, Thales gauges, within the variable realm, the stable unknown of the constant. Or rather,
with the gnomon, whoever measured space also measured time. By inverting the terms, Thales
stops time in order to measure space. He stops the course of the sun at the precise instant of
isoceles triangles; he homogenises the day to obtain the general case. And so do Joshua and
Copernicus. Hence it comes necessary to freeze time in order to conceive of geometry. Once
the gnomon has disappeared, Thales enters into the eternity of the mathematical figure. Plato will
follow him. This is the old Bergsonian conclusion. 87

A genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.
Exchange the functions of the variable and the invariable. The origin of geometry is a confluence
of geneses. 87

The origin of knowledge acquired through everyday practice is on the side of shadow; the origin
of a practice acquired through knowledge is on the side of light. 90

Still, what Thales's mathematics recounts, at its very inception, is the de-centering of the
subject of clear thought with regard to the body that casts its shadow: the subject is the
sun, placed beyond the object, on the other side of the shadow. This was also Copernicus'
lesson. What this mathematics articulates is the Platonic decision that a geometry of mea-
surement is but a propaedeutic. What it announces, for the first time, is a philosophy of
representation, dominating both the pure diagram and its dramatization beneath the
torches of the solstice. 91

Thales's story is perhaps the instauration of the moment of representation, taken up ad infinitum
by philosophers, but also and above all by geometers, from Descartes and his representational
plane to Desargues and his point of view, from Monge and his descriptive diagram to Gergonne
and his legislative transfers:8 the first word of a perspectival geometry, of an architectural optics
of volumes, of an intuitive mathematics immersed in a global organon of representation, the first
instance of the Ptolemaic model of knowledge. But from Thales's time to the present day we
have forgotten that the shadow was cast, transported by some supporting device, that it itself
transported certain information. We have read that first spectral analysis without analysing its
condition. The most important question - which messenger transports (and how?) which
message?-was covered over for centuries by the blinding scenography of the shadow-light
opposition.
91- 92
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Gerard Desargues (1591-1661), Gaspar Monge (1746-1818), and
Joseph Gergonne (1771-1859) were all instrumental in the development of descriptive and
perspective geometry.

on lucretius
Lucretius's De Rerum Natura is a treatise on physics.
….
The hymn to Venus is a song to voluptuousness, to the original power, victorious-without having
fought-over Mars and over the death instinct, a song to the pleasure of life, to guilt-free
knowledge. The knowledge of the world is not guilty but peaceful and creative. It is generative
and not destructive. But these words already drift toward morality - to ward deeply felt
emotions, toward ataraxia and toward the gaze, the theatrical gesture: to see everything
serenely, in quiet contemplation; to be at last free from the gods. As if Venus were not a
god. As if De Rerum Natura did not begin in prayer. A believer, an atheist? It is a clear-cut
decision: there is only transcendence. Let the figures on the mountain carouse endlessly.
We shall come back later to these peaks which are untouched by marine waterspouts.
Transcendence is all there is, and it must be allowed its own peculiarity. But it is a matter
of immanence.
Venus sive'natura. Mavors sive natura. It is a question of physics and not of feelings, of nature
and not of cruel hallucinations. Immanence: laws criss-cross the world, which is unreservedly the
locus of reasons. 98

What has been modestly called Lucretius's pessimism, seen in the drifting of his text from
Aphrodite to the plague in Athens, is the recognition that he has lost his bet, and that his physics
has been lost as well. Thus science, or what we call science, forbids us to read this lost science.
The laws of Venus-Mother Nature cannot be deciphered by the children of Mars-these children
who die and will continue to die at the stake before they ever understand that locally, within the
walls of Athens for example, but also globally, at some indefinite time and place, the
aforementioned decomposition brings back a large, teeming, atomic
populace sliding down some thalweg, and thereby, by this declination, reconstitutes a world. 99

The order of reasons is repetitive, and the train of thought that comes from it, infinitely iterative,
is but a science of death. A science of dead things and a strategy of the kill. The order of reasons
is martial. The world is in order, according to this mathematical physics in which the Stoics are
met by Plato up the line and by Descartes further down, and where order reigns supreme over
piles of cadavers. The laws are the same everywhere ; they are thanatocratic. There is nothing to
be learned, to be discovered, to be invented, in this repetitive world, which falls in the parallel
lines of identity. Nothing new under the SUIl of identity. It is information-free, complete
redundancy. The chains of cause and effect, the fall of atoms, and the indefinite repetition of
letters are the three necessary figures of science's nullity. You might very well think that the
bloodied rulers were thrilled to find this world and to seize upon its laws of determination-their
own, in fact-the very same ones as they had: the laws of extermination . Determination, identity,
repetition, information-free, not a drop of knowledge : extermination, not even> the shadow of a
life, death at the end of entropy. Then Mars rules the world, cutting up the bodies into atomised
pieces, letting them fall. This is the foedus fati, what physics understands as a law; things are that
way. It is also the legal statute in the sense of dominant legislation: they wish things to be that
way. Mars chose this sort of physics, the science of the fall and of silence. And here again is the
plague. It is always the same sequence of events: an epidemic becomes pandemic in proportions,
if not to say a pandemonium ; violence never stops, streaming the length of the !halweg ; the
atoms fall endlessly; reasons repeat indefinitely. Buboes, weapons, miasmas, causes : it is always
the same law, in which the effect repeats the cause in exactly the same way. Nothing is new
under the sun of identity and nothing is kept under the same old sun. Nothing new and nothing
born, there is no nature. There is death forever. Nature is put to death or it is not allowed to be
born. And the science of all this is nothing, can be summed up as nothing. Stable, unchanging,
redundant, it recopies the same writing in the same atoms-letters. The law is the plague; the
reason is the fall; the repeated cause is death; the repetitive is redundance. And identity is
death. Everything falls to zero, a complete lack of information, the nothingness of
knowledge , non-existence . The Same is Non-Being.
The angle of inclination cures the plague, breaks the chain of violence, interrupts the reign of
the same, invents the new reason and the new law, foedera natu e, gives birth to nature as it
really is. The minimal angle of turbulence produces the first spirals here and there. It is
literally revolution. Or it is the first evolution toward something else other than the same.
Turbulence perturbs the chain, troubling the flow of the identical as Venus had troubled
Mars. 100

n these lofty heights that have· been strengthened by the wisdom of the sages, one must choose.
between these two sorts of physics. The physics of the military troops in their rank and file
formation of parallel lines, chains, and sequences. Here are the federated ones bound to fate,
sheets of atoms bearing arms, exactly arranged, instructa, in a well-ordered fashion, in columns.
This is the learned science of the teachers, the structure of divisions, the Heraclitean physics of
war, rivalry, power, competition, which miserably repeats to death the blind shadows of its
redundant law. Arrange yourselves in ranks; you will learn about order, about the structure of
order, about the chain of reasons, the knowledge of ranks, of blood. Or else the physics of
vortices, of sweetness, and of smiling voluptuousness. On the high seas, people work among
these vortices: they are tossed about in the roll that, until recently, was called "turbination." They
are perturbed. The uexan; however, is only
cruel to a few landlubbers who have never been at sea. The sea-swept movement of intertwined
lovers, or the voluptuous movements of the roll of the high seas. Listen to the line that swirls its
spirals : suaue, uentis, uexari, uoluptas. It's the revolution of voluptuousness, the physics of
Venus chosen over that of Mars. 101

The fact that life disturbs the order of the world means literally that at first, life is turbulence.
What you see from the top of the cliff, in its sweetness, is the first-born being arising out of the
waters, Aphrodite, who has just been born in the swirl of liquid spirals, Nature being born in
smiling voluptuousness. 102

Flow did not follow the theorems of general mechanics that had been around since the eighteenth
century. Until the beginning of this century, no one could bring himself to describe flow in all its
concrete complexity. It is as difficult to become a phenomenologist again as it is to break the
contracts of fate. Epicurus and Lucretius change the paradigm. 103

Atoms are not souls; the soul itself is atomic. 103

What shapes a generation is less what it knows than the learning process that led it to this
knowledge.
107

The fall of atoms and of bodies not at equilibrium, the formation of flows, turbulent fluxions,
fire. They are charged with the birth of everything and everyone. What is a living thing? A
thing in equilibrium and in disequilibrium, a flow, a vortex, heat-perhaps like any other
object. The definition is Lucretius's-as it is our own. Atomist physics is our own. 113

Venus assembles the atoms, like the compounds. She is not transcendent like the other
gods, but immanent in this world, the being of relation. She is identical to the relation. 114

The atoms flow downstream from upstream, and do not form a convention. Events are
adventitious, neither uniting nor joining in a coitus, but becoming immediately undone by abitu.
They spread out and spill over, funditus, from top to bottom and back again. Unstable, they flow
around the resistant and conjoined centers of objects. They cross, irrevocably, carried along by
the flow. 115

Here is the complement of the model. Given a flow of atoms, by the declination, the first tangent
to the given curve, and afterward, by the vortex, a relatively stable thing is constituted. It stays in
disequilibrium, ready to break, then to die and disappear but nonetheless resistant by its
established conjunctions, between the torrential flow from the upstream currents and the river
flowing downstream to the sea. It is a stationary turbulence. At the heart of this nucleus, the
coniuncta crystallize in a network. The thing thereby has weight and, as a liquid, it heats up.
Physics studies these stabilities. All around these volutes, which together are the very nature of
things, the unending flow continues to shower atoms. They occur, finding these voluminous
knots here and there, conjugate vaguely with the profiles of the objects, and then quickly move
toward the exit, disheveled and undone, resuming their parallel path. Barely a disturbance or
ripple on the water's surface. Without objects of matter and space, without quasi-stationary
formations, this movement would not be thus, nor would it be perceived. It is a poorly grounded
phenomenon, totally bereft of conjunctions. It occurs, crosses, expires, or disperses: it is an
event. 115

Slavery and freedom are symptoms of wealth and poverty, themselves symptoms of better-
connected material things. History is a symptom of nature. Time is the symptom of symptoms.
116

This morning my soul is tumultuous, convulsive, and tempestuous, but from its birth and in
its very being, it is only a troublemaker, a product of a storm in the atomic cloud, of an
oblique lightning bolt. It is ataraxia, just like my body, and like things themselves. I know
it; the laws of physics tell me so. And I make my revolution. The physics of the vortex is
revolutionary. It goes back to the first disturbance, toward the original clinamen. And from
there to the streaming, to the constancies of movements, to general invariabilities, whatever
the random variations, to the primordial paths of matter itself, pricked here and there,
marked with convulsions. Thus, ataraxia is a physical state, the fundamental state of
matter; on this base, worlds are formed, disturbed by circumstances. Morality is physics.
Wisdom completes its revolution, going back up the helix toward this first state of things;
ataraxia is the absence of vortices. The soul of the wise man is extended to the global
universe. The wise man is the universe. He is, when pacified, the pact itself. 121

Violence is the only problem so poorly resolved that our own culture is, without a doubt, the
continuation, through other means, of barbarian Ism .
Violence is a major component of the relations among men. It is there, running free, perhaps
fatal for us; maybe it is our destiny and our greatest risk, our greatest disequilibrium. Lucretius is
well aware of sacrificial purging, and, recognizing the sacrificial solution, sets it aside. He is also
aware of the legal solution, which is merely the interpretation of the previous solution by the
rationalization of the guilty parties. 122

The most revolutionary event in the history of mankind and, perhaps, in the evolution of
hominids in general was less, it seems to me, the attainment of abstracts orgene lities in and
through language than it was a turning away from the set of relations that we have within the
family, the group, and so on, and that (my concern us and them, toward an agreement, maybe a
confused one, but a sudden and speetfic one, about something exterior to this set. Before this
event, there was only the network of relations in which we had been plunged without any other
resort. And suddenly, a thing, something, appears outside the network. The messages exchanged
no longer say: I, you, he, we, they, and so on, but this, here. Ecce. Here is the thing itself.
122 !!!!!!

Humanization consists of the following message: here is some bread, whoever I am, whoever
you are. Hoc est, that is, in the neuter. Neuter for the gender, neutral for war. Paradoxically, there
are men or human groups only after the appearance of the object as such. The object as an object,
more or less independent from us and more or less invariable in the variation of our relations,
separates man from mammals. The political animal, the one who subordinates every object to
relations among subjects, is only a mammal among others, a wolf for example, a wolf among
wolves.In pure politics, the dictum of Hobbes, that man is a wolf to other men, is not a
metaphor but the exact index of a regression to the state which precedes the emergence of
the object. 123

Listen now to the lessons of Epicureanism, which boil down to the following: reduce to a
minimum the network of relations in which you are submerged. Live in the garden, a small
space, with a few friends. No family, if it is possible, and, in any case, no politics. But
especially this. Here is the object, objects, the world, nature, physics. Aphrodite-pleasure is
born of the world and the waters. Mars is in the forum and in the armed crowd. Reduce
your relations to a minimum and bring your objects to the fore; reduce the intersubjective
to a minimum and the objective to a maximum. With your back turned on politics, study
physics. Peace through neutrality. Such knowledge brings happiness, or at least the end of
our worst pains. Forget the sacred; that means: forget the violence which founds it and
forget the religious which links men to each other. Consider the object, objects, nature.
Yes, Memmius, he who said here, ecce, hoc est, that one, is a god, a god among men, for he
changed human nature. 123

It is not politics or sociology that is

projected on nature, but the sacred. Beneath the sacred, there is violence. Beneath the object,
relations reappear. 124

“Ascultati lectiile lui Epicur, care se rezumă la: reduceți la minimum rețeaua de relații in care
sunteți implicat. Trăiți în grădină, într-un spațiu mic, cu câțiva prieteni. Fără familie, dacă e
posibil, și în orice caz în afara politicii. Și în special asta:

Parasite, Michel Serres

Our relation to animals is more interesting-I mean to the animals we eat. We adore eating veal,
lamb, beef, antelope, pheasant, or grouse, but we don't throw away their "leftovers." We dress in
leather and adorn ourselves with feathers. Like the Chinese, we devour duck without wasting a
bit; we eat the whole pig, from head to tail; but we get under these animals' skins as well, in their
plumage or in their hide. Men in clothing live within the animals they devoured. And the same
thing for plants. We eat rice, wheat, apples, the divine eggplant, the tender dandelion; but we
also weave silk, linen, cotton; we live within the flora as much as we live within the fauna. We
are parasites; thus we clothe ourselves. Thus we live within tents of skins like the gods within
their tabe acles. Look at him well-dressed and ado ed, magnificent; he shows-he showed-the
clean carcass of his host. Of the soft parasite you can see only the clean-shaven face and the
hands, sometimes with out their kid gloves. 10

There are always intercepters who work very hard to divert what is carried along these paths.
Parasitism is the name most often hese numerousana diverseactivities, and I fear that they are the
most common thing in the world. 10-11

The difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the
radical origin of things is really that difference, even tough classical rationalism damned It
to hell. In the beginning was the noise. 13

Who then is the real interrupter? It is the country rat. Broken himself by the interruptions, these
uneasy feelings, the disruptions of his relaxing meal, it is he who definitively breaks the
system.He could live on simple and easy chains, but he is horrified by the complex. He does not
understand that chance, risk, anxiety, and even disorder can consolidate a system. He trusts only
simple, rough, causal relations; he believes that disorder always destroys order.He is a rationalist,
the kind we just spoke of. How many of these rough politic rats are there around us? How many
of them break things they don't understand? How many of these rats simplify? How many of
them have built such homogeneous, cruel systems upon the horror of disorder d noise? 14

The noise, chance, rain, a circumstance, produced w that this case is inverted or contradictory,
but that in general could be entirely different from the one that was interrupted. This is a new
kind of logic and a strong one. We are rid of excess whose only use was relative to negative
entropy, and we are finally free of the overly simple chains of contradictions whose use was
rarely apparent. 18

Now we know that order sometimes comes only from an explosion of noise. And that reason errs
and cheats us when it looks for full causes and entire reasons. 20

Hell is the separation of paradise and Hell, the Devil is the bifurcation between God and the
Devil, evil is the crossroads of good and evil, and error is the du ism that only opposes twins. 20

But history hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around
him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily
their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his
favour when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues
to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. 24

What does the lion give in exchange for his good? Nothing? Not entirely. An edict, a document,
a passport, words and writing. He pays for his meal in well-tu ed, well-written phrases. And thus
he is in the position of a parasite, a universal parasite. One day we will have to underst d why the
strongest is the parasite that is to say, the weakest why the one whose only function is to eat is
the one who commands. And speaks. We have just found the place of politics. 26

Among , modem men, here and now, be they poets or fighters, known or un known, the
freely given occurs only after the owing, the feast after the payment;maybe they fear losing,
besides what is owed them, the ihaks of praise, freely given. Exchange first; the
celebrations, if possible, later. Business before pleasure. 30

The societies of giving have disappeared; even in antiquity they were thought to be divine.
They have left a place for the collectives of giving and having. There are only barely perceptible
traces of the history of giving in texts and on monuments. Since then, we have been caught up in
economic history, a time of calculation of exchanges and of making up for losses. Does this
history have an outside? That is precisely the subject of this book. I have not finished yet. When
history and time are . measured by the calculation of exchanges and brought back to this
calculation, I fear that here and there there will be some insolvents. People who can give
nothing but their children, their muscles, their bodies, a pound of flesh. It is a time of death
and a history of death. People who can give only their life and their bodies, bit by bit. How
many times have men sent up a cauldron filled with scattered libs to the table of the gods? I
can only give my approach to death; I can only pay with my courage in the face of this
shadow; I can only write of its immediacy. This time and history are invaginated around
nothingness. They need a zero to be calculated; there has to be a nothingness for their
meta physics. Now I understand why the gods seemed immortal to men; at least I think I
know what ambrosia did not contain. 31

But I want to say that there is something divine in this word, divine things. What I am
saying is really beside the real, direct question: God is a noun, a name; divine is an
adjective, thrown to the side. The world is divine and is full of divine things. This sea, this
plain, this river, the ice floe, the tree, light and life. I know it, I see it, I feel it, I am
illuminated by it, bu ing. The wine-dark sea and divine life. The adjective, placed to one
side, at a distance from the names and notions of philosophy is enough for me as a parable.
Yes, the divine is there; I touch it; these things e improbable miracles; I never stopped
loving the world and seeing that it is beautiful. Yes, my philosophy is adjective ; it is awe-
struck. The real is not rational ; it is improbable and miraculous. 46
It is not at l certain that religious matters do not have everything to do with intersubjective
relations. God is lost behind physics. God is lost behind objects. God is lost behind the subject,
be he intelligent or pathetic, of knowledge or of feeling. The one my forefathers called the
Father, infinitely hidden, remains absent. The canonical proofs, along the paths of the world or
the function of rigor, are out of bounds. When philosophy is neither in the object nor in the
subject nor in their obsolete relation, the religious is not thinkable. I have lost forever the
power and the glory, total knowledge and the abundance of the Creation.
I live among things-divine things-and I am plunged in the obscure group. They are easier to
understand than it is-not more simple, for they are exquisitely complex. I find happiness in the
divinity of things themselves; they push me toward pantheism; I suffer quite often in the group
and in the dark, in my intelligence and in my life. Soon, in order to make the collective
clearer, I shall use the notion of quasi object. It circulates, it passes among us. I give it; I
receive it. Thank you; you're welcome. Eucharist and Paraclete. We are the second and third
persons, submerged in the inca action and in the wind of the Pentecost, leaving the Father to
infinity for all eternity. Grace passes in the fuzzy area between words and things, between
the canals where substantial foods and sonorous voices flow, between the exchanges of
energy and information, an intermediate space, a space of equivalence where language is
born , where fire is born , where it makes the things of which it speaks appear, an unstable
distance of ecstasy and existence, of incaranation and ascension, of bread d birds. I move
forward a bit in the black box. I hear the invitation to live together in the space in which the
material and the logical are exchanged. The third appears; the third is included. Maybe he is
each and every one of us. 47

As soon as we are two, we are al ready three or four. We leaded that a long time ago. In order to
succeed, the dialogue needs an excluded third; our logic requires the same thing. Maybe they
also require an included fourth. 57

The Devil or the Good Lord? Exclusion, inclusion? Thesis or antithesis? The answer is a
spectrum, a band, a continuum. We will no longer answer with a simple yes or no to such
questions of sides. Inside or outside? Between yes and no, between zero and one, an infinite
number of values appear, and thus an infinite number of answers. Mathematicians call this new
rigor "fuzzy": fuzzy subsets, fuzzy topology. They should be thanked: we have needed this
fuzziness for centuries. While waiting for it, we seemed to be playing the piano with boxing
gloves on, in our world of stiff logic with our broad concepts. Our methods can now be fine-
tuned and in the process, increased in number. Henceforth, my book is rigorously fuzzy.
Geometry has made its peace with finesse. 57

It is of no small interest to notice here that the well-run machine does not copy the bodies of
animals and their organic system , but rather our relations among ourselves. 61
From the point of view of the third, the thing is always double, everyone is both fish and fowl,
host and guest, and enemy to boot. The channel is bad ; the third is the master. But we already
know how a subject can become an object. But if that happens for one, it happens immediately
for the other. And for the relation as well. This is my body; this is my blood. 62

A third exists before the second. A third exists before the other. As Zeno the Elder would
say, I have to go through the middle before reaching the end. 63

You didn't eat so often nor so well nor together before the miraculous Neolithic Age, when
agriculture and animal husbandry were invented. No banquets, no mounts for horses, no feasts,
no beasts of burden. La Fontaine says these things in parallel, a parallel which instructs us
today.* The wedding is a result of domestication and of the farmyard; without that, where would
the sheep, calves, chickens and broods, all be? No feast without a parasite, as I was saying. 64

The noise is a joker. It has at least two values, like the third man: a value of destruction d a value
of construction. It must be included and excluded. This is both the story of the rats and that of a
complex system. Computer science and anthropology are joined together. 67

This couple and their relation are set apart by an observer seated within the system. In a
way he ove alues the message and unde alues the noise if he belongs to the functioning of
the system. He represses the parasites in order to send or receive communications better
and to make them circulate in a distinct and workable fashion. This repression is also
religious excommunication, political imprisonment, the isolation of the sick, garbage
collection, public health, the pasteurization of milk, and so forth, as much as it is repression
in the psychoanalytical sense. But it also has to do with a history, the history of science in
particular: whoever belongs to the system perceives noises less and represses them more, the
more he is a functioning part of the system. He never stops being in the good, the just, the
true, the natural, the norm . All dogmatism lives on this division, be it blind or decided. 68

In other words, the game of exclusion can be played without ever leaving the system, and, on the
contrary, getting more and more into the system. The best way to succeed in it is to misconstrue
it. The counter norm is never a noise of the norm but the same norm reversed, that is to say, its
twin. If you make a motor tum in reverse, you do not break it: you build a refrigerator. 68

We see only because we see badly. It works only because it works badly. Every system is a set of
messages; in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to the sender. As
soon as love lessens, the noise comes back in. As soon as the discussion of love lessens,
Alcibiades is at the door, yelling at the top of his lungs, accompanied by his flute-player. As soon
as we are two, there is a medium between us, the light ray is lost in the air, the message is lost in
the interceptions, there is only a space of transformation. The torus and the crown devour the
system. There is no need to move away from the system for the fluctuating couple of message
and noise to appear. Maybe I understand the message only because of the noise. 70

But the systems are not that different from this milieu itself. The milieu is only the extension of
one particular system. The transcendental is only the extension in the conditional of a system of
singul events. analysis of the space of immersion can be applied to the trascendental. The
conditional space is not that different from systematic space. And it is equally as relative. 70

That is what existence is: facing death, being in perpetual difference from equilibrium. These
flows never stop running over lacunar lands. To devour them, parasite them, nourish them, and
make them live. The fall kills us and creates us. We move unfailingly toward noise, but we come
from noise. Oxygen feeds the heat of our lives, but aging is an oxidation. It works because it
doesn't work. The system is very badly named. Maybe there is not or never was a system. As
soon as the world came into being, its transformation began. The system in itself is a space
of transformation. There are only metabolas. What we take as an equilibrium is only a slowing
down of metabolic processes. My body is an exchanger of time. It is filled with signals, noises,
messages, and parasites. And it is not at all exceptional in this vast world. It is true of animals
and plats, of air crystals, of cells and atoms, of groups and constructed objects. Transformation,
deformation of information. 72 - 73

When we can finally open the box, we see that it works like a space of transformation. The only
systems, instances, and substances come from our lack of knowledge. The system is
nonknowledge. The other side of nonknowledge. One side of nonknowledge is chaos; the other,
system. Knowledge forms a bridge between the two banks. Knowledge as such is a space of
transformation.
This whole question is fractal.
Leibniz described fractal reality , formed of pools and fish, filled tu , with fish and pools, ad
infinitum. Mandelbrot repeats this of the world, inventing the world, and undoubtedly, the thing.
I am saying the same thing of the process of knowledge. 73

You can't eat an image but you can fight to the death for an idea. The longer struggle is all the
rage, and the longer it goes on, the more the objects disappear. In a world lambent with lights
and shadows, the war goes on. History. 75

If you expel him, he inevitably re tu s. I have undoubtedly found a good definition of the
parasitic function. It is ineluctable and almost a necessity. The force that excludes it is
immediately overtu ed to bring it back. What is repressed is always there. 78

Weren't we happy, Margot, don't you remember, when our problems, were, as they say,
not yet resolved. 78 :))
Rigorously speaking, there is never silence. The white noise is always there. If health is
defined by silence, health does not exist. 78

Health remains the couple message-noise. Systems work because they do not work.
Nonfunctioning remains essential for functioning. And that can be formalized. Given, two
stations and a channel. They exchange messages. If the relation succeeds, if it is perfect,
optimum, and immediate; it disappears as a relation. If it is there, if it exists, that means that it
failed. It is only mediation. Relation is nonrelation. And that is what the parasite is. The channel
carries the flow, but it cannot disappear a channel, and it brakes (breaks) the flow, more or less.
But perfect, successful, optimum communication no longer includes any mediation. And the
canal disappears into immediacy. There would be no spaces of transformation anywhere. There
are channels, and thus there must be noise. No canal without noise. The real is not rational. The
best relation would be no relation. By definition it does not exist; if it exists, it is not observable.
79

What we enjoy we have a relation with and thus we parasite. The revenue, the fruit of the
gardener, never comes back to the one who offers it. Calling it revenue (returns) is a lie. It is an
abuse of a word and of things as well. The original relation is that of abuse. It never stops. It is
contemporaneous with the relation; it is the relation itself and the opening of the system. 85

I am here alone in my garden. My land is my blank space; my hoe is my pen ; I make furrows for
sowing. I am a farmer, like my father, in my closed field, harming no one. Wanting to do good is
often so cruel. I admit that I have never worked; I have had the unbelievable, unheard-of, and
miraculous opportunity not to know what work is. There, intuition and joy grow as they will. I
never wanted anything more than some soup, a cobbler for the children, and some dessert on
Sunday. My beautiful sweet garden of fervour, of constant prayer, my waiting for dawn, hoping
for the light. Before daybreak, I am drawn to ward white revelation. Time is dense and
incandescent. Space is transparent. I see the immeasurable smile of the world. I am not working;
I would like to be in paradise. But the hedge is crawling with wounds. I write. For example, I
have to name the im s, just like Adam. And the din begins, messages and noises. The tohu-bohu
(chaos) from which everything came has never stopped. It crosses both space and time. Dis order
engenders order and moves through it. We don 't move -Margot d I-and yet a thousand masters
are there whom we never called but who offer to chase the hare from the disorder. At the door of
my room, they make a never-ending noise. They cross this page on horseback, send their pack of
dogs into my words, and their men, their grooms, their whippers-in, their trumpeters, into my
sentences. Suddenly, I work. And I work myself to death so that amidst all this mess something
transparent remains, so that a bit of light can be saved in this medley. I am expelled from
paradise ; I work; I shall die, drowned by disorder; I lie down among all this sadness and misery;
I have lost my immortality. 85

What is work? Undoubtedly, it is a struggle against noise. 86

To work is to sort. 86
The spider's web loses the angles of its spirals; the plots of sorrel and cabbages are trimmed by
the hare; there is no honey with out wax and no discourse without obscurity. 87
Death is always accepting death. Death is the end of work.Life is work, simply, and work is life
itself. 87
He who works has a relation to life, walks between the earth and the sky, comes out of the
infernal abyss when he decides to, knows the path that leads out of the underworld, the path of
work. 87
Life works; life is work, energy, power, information. It is im possible to translate this
description into an ethical discourse. It is thus, must be thus; I really don't know. The work of life
is labor d order but does not occur without borrowing from elsewhere. It makes order here but
undoes order there. And it reinforces disorder and noise. 88
Things are not yet moral, but they are becoming serious. Cultivate your garden, but first of all
do not destroy the garden, do not let it be destroyed. The Greek word for "chaff" or "weed" is
zizania-that is to say, "discord." The introduction of ziz ia; eeds, discord, the hare. This book, as
you have seen, is the book of evil, the book of the problem of evil. Don't chase the hare out; you
would need the entire armed forces to do so. 88
As long as you have one hare the garden, only one hare, it's better to make your peace with it.
Bacteria cannot be exterminated, but they can be used for cheese: milk c be fertilized with this
pestilence to create the gods' ambrosia. The hare is a magician, a devil-a good devil. The others, I
think, are all worse. 88

Fontaine.* An outpouring, an overflow, never running dry. Divine fables: the more the author
writes, the more he has left to write. The production could not dry up. It is not a miracle
but it is t e, perhaps the only true perpetual motion. The more one writes, the more one
writes. Always thirsty d always giving drink. 98

Let us not yet close the triangle: someone has a relation to someone or something else. A third
arrives who has no relation to the people or the things but who only relates to their relation. He
branches onto the channel. He intercepts the relation. He is not mediation but an intermediary.
He is not necessarily useful, except of course for his own survival: this relation to the relation
allows him to exist. But the danger he is in is immediately visible: he can be excluded by an
association grouping the two subjects whose relation he parasites, or by one subject who wants to
keep the object exclusively for himself. This risk of exclusion is known to him as soon as he sits
down at the table, as soon as he is hungry. A risk of death. 109

He is well aware of exclusion, wandering, outside the city with its closed gates; he is not of this
world. He is well aware of persecution: here I am alone on earth, excluded by unanimous agree-
ment. Excluded by a combat, by the general will. Henceforth I have only myself as a resource.
Can he survive this way? Can one be auto parasitic? Reveries: having only myself to feed. No,
no, it's impossible. Death comes while he is writing of his vicarious mother, and the last word of
his life is the watchword of his life: the help I received. This help is not returnable, never given
back, never erased, unpardonable, like a relation without a reciprocal and without a converse. Is
it necessary to continue telling the true story of the parasite and the paranoid? Either word
works-the essential is the prefix. "The Tiger and the Flea" was not a fable but a parable.* 110

No father, no mother, no brother, no wife, and hence, no children. No upstream, no

downstream; we will destroy the aqueducts. The thing is deducible and necessary. It was
not an event in his life but a continuation of its rule. The five children are expulsed, like all
the rest, like father and mother, like me, like those must be who might parasite me. They
would have lived at my expense, living off me; they would have put me in the position of the
august nut tree. I want to remain a willow, watered, weeping, and without shade. Destroy
the aqueduct, destroy the canal, undo genealogical ties, or remove dependence. Insularity
can be defined in that way. The paradise of the Ile Saint-Pierre or the people of Corsica,
unsullied by legislation, a new people. I am an island . I am unique, no father or mother.
My mother died at my birth: nature broke the mold I was made in. My enterprise never
had an example, and its execution will have no imitators. General theory of agenesis. Sine
patre, sine matre Melchisedec, I belong to the number of great messianic figures. In The
Words, Jean Paul Sartre repeats the same gesture, the same genealogical cut-off. 114

No, I would never have given this ribbon to Marion. What I wanted was to get it from her hands.
It is not I, but the Xenophon of the Symposium (another meal) who defined philosophy as a
procurer or a panderer. As someone who places himself in the middle of a relation of desire to
parasite it. Canonic example: one day, at the table, at the very moment she put a morsel in her
mouth, I yell that I see a hair: she spits out the food on her plate; I grab it and hungrily swallow
it. The model is brought to its most abstract simplicity. Or to its naming: when she offers me a
plate [assiette] , I move my fork to take [piquer] a small morsel of what she was offering:
parasite, sponger, pique-assiette. 115

Harmony is not a law; it is not regularity. Harmony is rarity itself. It is, quite precisely, a
miracle. I call a miracle a very great improbability. When the miracle occurs, from an
improbable accord, it produces a new song, so very rare that it is forbidden for repetition
to have ever occurred for as long as the period of time was before the meeting. This
agreement is negatively entropic ; it is a producer; it is perhaps production itself-its
definition and its dynamism. 122

If you are naive, you will be the child of novelty. But also, listen, you will have children.
Here childbirth has come in beauty, in the middle of the banquet. 123

If there is no knowledge, how could there be will? 127

Noise destroys and horrifies. But order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death. Noise
nourishes a new order. Organization, life, and intelligent thought live between order and
noise, between disorder and perfect harmony. If there were only order, if we only heard
perfect harmonies, our stupidity would soon fall down toward a dreamless sleep; if we were
always surrounded by the shivaree, we would lose our breath and our consistency, we would
spread out among all the dancing atoms of the universe. We are; we live; we think on the fringe,
in the probable fed by the unexpected, in the legal nourished with information. There are two
ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid-a head-first dive into chaos or stabilized
installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us
against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from
order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony. 127

Jean-Jacques dies and his last sentence attempts to give to woman the aid he received. His last
word confesses that he never returned any aid. Truth from his last drop of ink-perhaps he dies
without knowing that he finally discovered what he was looking for. The simple chain-me, my
brother, my neighbor, my friend, and my society-demands a linkage and there is none. No there
is one ; it is the simple arrow, the logical atom, the atom of relation, lived, obscure, in his life at
the hostess's house. But as for me, separated from them and from every thing, who am I myself?
The one who always received and who, in ar ticulo mortis, suddenly remembers that he had
resolved to give back. The parasite. Detached, yes; I am nothing but a poor madman in the
shadows, but my first attachment is derivation, scion and stock, graft ing, installation in a small
house with my family. Small. 130

A parasite defends itself from being parasited; the thing is there in all its simplicity. 131

What makes us disagree? What interrupts us? The one who eats our bread and prohibits our
messages: the parasite. The guest becomes master, and he produces a terrible noise. I am that
guest. We must begin with him, with noise, with me. Who am I? The parasite. And I am outside,
alone, on the middle of the isle and during the night. Listen. Open your ears. The words give you
the solutions. Follow the words. The parasite dis-accords, makes noise. I a partition. I am alone,
isolated, solitary, disjointed. Alone without any relation, or armed with a relation that mixes up
messages. Henceforth, I am exceptionally qualified for the study I set for myself. I am an
exception to the "we," making this "we" impossible. But this exception is universal. What is it,
then, that puts us in accord? The agreement, the tuning up [accord] itself. 133-134

Just as a hungry guest is fascinated by the buffet of a feast, Jean Jacques keeps (to) music. There
lies, manifest and under wraps, the solution. This solution includes and excludes him; it includes
him as a partition, and it excludes him as a parasite. Who am I? The condition of music, of the
accord, and its obstacle.134
If a pen ever left a rustling noise on the blank silence of its field, if ever someone heard it, to
describe in kind celestial voices or the noises of hell, it was the keeper of this music. Free of
parasites, free, free, free of itself, absolutely purged of ego. The more I write, the less I am
my self. Finally free of this noise. 134

…don't stop writing on the wrong side of chance, disorder, noise on the wrong side of your
own circumstances, and even in their esh, a small music-harmony, for the other and with him.
135

The first who, having enclosed a terrain, decided to say, This is mine, was a dead man, for he
immediately gave rise to his assassin. In the beginning was the murder; ancient texts tell us so,
and reason shows us. Romulus only worked to bury Remus deep in the ground. 139

No one moves more quickly than music. 142

I'm able to make my own way ; that's enough for me ; some paper, a pencil, light, a brasier,
I am content; leave me at least a moment of silence. I live in the immediate. With the hard
contact with the referent and of metal in the gan e to be tr smuted into gold. In the immediate of
the world. In the happiness of the immediate. I can't separate myself from it. I am tied to
my work more tightly than if by chains. I haven't, no longer have, never had time. I don't
have time to run around. They don't know how to do anything, and thus they have time.
They w k, see, compare, judge, and know exactly where to find a good meal. They examine,
measure, criticize. They are the men of mediation. Of choice and of judgement. They
occupy space; they know where to place themselves and where to place another, who in tu
is looking for a place. 148

It's true, I admit it. I have never been demanding. I have never stopped being active. I have
to know and understand this difference. This difference of existence whose static notion I
have made a bit clear around the point of equilibrium. Here the difference is dynamic,
since it is written: action. 148

No, existence is not stable. To exist is already excess or an exception. 149

Every relation between two instances demands a route. What is already there on this route either
facilitates or impedes the relation. Sometimes the screen helps, and the aide sometimes is an
obstacle. Love forbids us to love, and words sometimes deafen; the tongue is the best and worst
of things; I don't invent the law; I don 't invent the fact that there is no law. Between these two
poles everything is possible except the excluded third. The third, by nature and function, is the
population on the channel. We call it parasite, as is already known. But we have prepared its
logic: the algebra of fuzzy subsets. Fuzzy subsets are found exactly on this route, on this can .
150
To be demanding means to choose. This choice, this filter, implies elimination, for order and
coherence; we are coming back to the first meaning: chase, push outside. The one who examines,
separates; the one who judges, excludes ; the one who chooses, divides things and populations.
any case, they produce rarity. No, they don't produce it; they select it when it is already there.
152

!!!I shall c l this object a joker. The joker i s often a madman , as we know. He is wild, as
they say in English. It is not difficult to see the double of the sacrificial king in him, come
from the Celebration of Fools, come from the Saturnalia. This white object, like a white
dom ino,* has no value so as to have every value. It has no identity, but its identity, its
unique character, its difference, as they say, is to be, indifferently, this or that unit of a
given set. The joker is king orjack, ace or seven, or deuce. Joseph is a joker; Tam , queen,
just, despised, whore, is also a joker. A is b, c, d, etc. Fuzzy. That joker is a logical object
that is both indispensable and fascinating. Placed in the middle or at the end of a series, a
series that has a law of order, it permits it to bifurcate, to take another appearance,
another direction, a new order. The only describable difference between a method d
bricolaget is the joker. 160

The question is not so much finding one or two or three or n keys, but of speaking a
language that takes jokers into account. 162

If the rese cher is in his niche, if he has his method, his cup of tea, his pres sure group , he stops
producing and starts reproducing. He no longer goes out; he no longer heads toward the pitch-
black attic; his whiskers no longer twitch at imperceptible signs; he falls asleep in the cradle of
the same. Do you w t to discover? Forget about the cheese. 165

Rivers usually remain in their beds; they rarely look for a valley that is higher than their thalweg.
Distances and fluctuations are needed. That is rather rare, but it winds up happen ing. The
acquired information is remarkable. This rarity is sometimes called justice. A difficult effort, an
exceptional, miraculous, human one. 168

He who wants to take power to increase justice lies or fools himself or fools us. He only
accelerates the abuse values. 168

The new cannot be foreseen. It is outside, with the madman, the genius, the hero, the saint.
How is it possible for them to be there? 170

Whoever lives inside enclosures survives, eats the stock, parasites what justifies the closure
of the system. It is closed for and by the parasites. Whoever is excluded from it is not
provided for with food; he has no larder, no pantry. He must make do with what he finds,
seeking his fortune in the world. Or else he dies or he goes mad. Or else he be comes mad as
a hatter or follows the paths of genius. And becomes a producer. With what he gathers on the
ground that had never gotten anyone's attention, with the remains of divisions and cells, with the
refuse found in the garbage dump, with the crumbs from the masters' dinner, he succeeds in
creating a work. Or he dies. For him, the work is a question of life and death. He becomes a
producer by putting his whole life into this primary material. I have called him an archangel be-
cause he bears information, news, and novelty, and because he is necessarily at the head of the
line in relation to the parasitic chain. Head of the series or outside the closure-it is the same
image in one or two dimensions. His novelty is having injected his life into the produced
object, instead of drawing his life from the chosen object. The only novelty is my
improbable life. 170

The real, ultimate capital is the sun. Subcapitals are time functions, but our time is that of the
sun. Our cosmological, astronomic, energetic, entropic, informational times, all cyclic and
reversible, as well as the irreversible times of disorder and death, of life and order randomly
invented-all of these intertwine in the sun. In matter of energy and of matter, only the sun creates
and transforms. All kinds of materialism, and especially those that seek to account for real
movement and its excess, join together with various energetics and perhaps idealisms here -they
are, when all is said and done, all subcults of the sun. 173

I do not know what this revolution, again an astronomical one, will be called. One of Ptolemy's
successors will give it his name. It will and won't be new.
We will have completed a trip on a known path. The mastery and manipulation of these suns and
these satellite s-of these two capitals -fires and signals-of this new system of our ancient world,
will express our virtuosity with high- and low-level energy, with transformable material, with
understandable languages. Our world was one of production d translation. It made two
philosophies fight in order to be established on their common agreement. 174

!!! Work without end and with diminishing returns. It is not the labor of Hercules;
Hercules' labors were optimistic. When the Greek hero had chased out the parasites, the
monsters, or cleaned the Augean stables, the space was finally purified. As far as I know,
mythology did not consider the return of the parasites. The return of the chicken-pox virus
as shingles, fifty years later. 176

The space discovered by the Nile, the Tigris, the Garonne, or the Hwang Ho is the white domino,
the virgin spot of the excluded thirds, the difference from equilibrium. This expanse, because it is
empty, is homogeneous, isotropic, and measurable. It is the field of agriculture in thevalley, the
templum spoken of by Mircea Eliade, in both its etymological and sacred meanings; but at the
same time it is the abstract space of geometry. 179
Everything in it is torn up , expelled; the space is white, homogeneous, and covered with silt.
This smooth square appears as the waters abate: who will come to limit it? The farmer, the priest,
and the geometer. Three origins in three persons in one motion at the same moment. The field,
the temple, and measured space. Democritus d my ancestors said it right; it was necessary only to
listen to them. The space discovered by the Nile, the Tigris, the Garonne, or the Hwang Ho is the
white domino, the virgin spot of the excluded thirds, the difference from equilibrium. This
expanse, because it is empty, is homogeneous, isotropic, and measurable. It is the field of
agriculture in thevalley, the templum spoken of by Mircea Eliade, in both
its etymological and sacred meanings; but at the same time it is the abstract space of geometry.
The abstract space from which everything was
subtracted, from which everything was uprooted, from which everything was taken away, from
which everything was extracted. Read attentively Plato's texts where he wants to define the space
or the figure: they are negative, or more exactly, apophatic. The philosopher acts like the p r i e s
t o r t h e farm e r ; h e r e m o v e s f r o m t h e r e e v e ry t h i n g t h a t m i g h t reappear,
including color. He gets, once again, a white domino. Thus there is a rent culture; thus there is
the mad proliferation of one variety that has never stopped increasing, even today. And that is the
same solution as my first one, that of the excluded third. The latter was dialectic ; it did not
appropriate a space. The two must be united to stay with the Greeks. Everywhere else that
agriculture was bo , only the geometry of agricultural surveyors was bo . That is to say every
thing, except science. 179-180

there is nothing at the origin but this white and empty spot. The origin is always this empty set.
As they say, we'll start from scratch
[zero] . History is like the series of numbers, and dating is essential. 181

But the whole question is producing zero. By total exclusion in a given spot. History would
begin with the Flood, if the Flood hadn't left some remains: Noah, the ark, and its animals that
escaped the inundation. What remains is the motor of history that follows a state without
remains. And thus, from the first verses of Genesis with the spirit of God over the waters, it was
the first ood, the total inundation from which creation ex nihilo had to follow. The work of
limitation and division begins, and soon waters are separated from waters. Eve thing-by that I
mean the world-comes from the first inundation, the first operation that suppresses everything
and leaves nothing behind. 181