The Victim Question and the Ethical Response
François Laruelle
In Éthique de l’étranger: du crime contre l’humanité (Paris: Kimé, 2000), p.7-27.
The Conjunctures of Evil
Humanity has always thought their conduct under the principle of the Good, at best by thinking their conduct under the correlation of Good and Evil, and they have never ceased from testifying to the failure of this decision in its acts and even in its philosophies. We thought the inverse (otherwise than inverse) hypothesis should be tested, a kind of perspective revolution should be attempted in morals: Is it possible to think humanity under the principle of Evil, an Evil which would be another thing than the inverse and correlate of the Good, another thing than a new philosophical “principle”? Is it possible to think humanity under the principle of Evil which would be, thus transformed, rather identical to the positive absence of essence, to the being-without-consistency of man?
We must again state that the conjuncture, banally said concrete history, provokes [induise] us to make this hypothesis and make an occasion out of the conjuncture. From this perspective, we will have inherited from the 20th Century three ethical, half-political, half-juridical concepts; truly speaking, they are unintelligible affects, rather than concepts. It took the theory of millions of deaths, in some way the perpetual crime, in order for the 20th Century to produce these utterly new concepts perhaps destined to transform the field of ethics. First, that of the “crime against humanity,” produced by a now well-established and generalized conjuncture of ethnic crime. Secondly, that of the “rights of man,” apparently older but as new and unintelligible as the previous one at the moment of its resurgence under the effect of another conjuncture: the millions of deaths by totalitarianism. And lastly, “human cloning,” produced by a recent but towards the bright future of a techno-scientific conjuncture. Still, they arrived in men’s consciences like in a country becoming older as much as stranger, like in a cemetery of the old values and moreover incomplete concepts. As usual, philosophical thought felt late and was content with reacting with anguish and haste, devoting themselves to the labour of simple adjustment with ethical patchwork and juridical mending which made up the everyday “post-modern.” This busying had a unique cause that our recognized philosophers had discovered if they had had the means to discover it. These three notions displace the ethical, the law and politics outside of themselves and namely towards man; yet, to the question of man, we do not yet have a rigorous response and perhaps will never have one, but only a tourniquet of questions; and finally, we must absolutely begin by responding to the question, who is man, who is this being without-consistence or without-essence, with the response which preceding the question and drawing this consequence: the “essence” of man is not ethical and is not more ethical than juridical or political, and the “essence” of man alone can thus change the face of thought.
Likewise, the point is not to bury or to embalm these new concepts once and for all, to adjust them in a forced way to existent problematics or values, but to render them capable of transforming the existing theoretical field of ethics in order to render it adequate for their emergence. To renew “ethics” is to render adequate to man who is always new, rather than philosophies, already old when they are born. Hence, the sort of inversion that we nuance our hypothesis, not to specularly think the essence of man in direct accordance with this triple conjuncture, according to Evil rather than according to the Good, but to think the Evil of the World, the Good included, according to man such that they are capable, by their unheard-of essence, of this explanation. How do we then use the extreme concept which is imposed here, “radical evil” (Kant)? How can we make a use of radical evil in order so that it ceases being anonymous to constitute the heart of the heart of man, the Real itself insofar as it is distinct from the effectivity of the World, and capable of transforming the ethics-world if not in itself, at least for man? Under these conditions and within this goal, radical evil will change status and designation: no longer “radical evil” but “radical misery” [malheur radical]. Therefore, let us pose that the Real or the ultimate “essence” of man – to still use these terms – is radical misery, and that radical misery is identical to a principle of solitude, a solitude-without-essence, of the human being before Creation itself, an “inconsistency” which liberates it from philosophy and the World together, and even more so from any ethics, but which renders finally possible, under the name “non-ethics,” the very judgment of ethics.
Let it be “posed” at the start that as a first term, the principal but not the only one, of a “non-ethics” engages a particular way of thinking which must be foreign to philosophy, but not without relation to it, in the use of principles and the form of order of reasons. We do not agree that man would be an unfortunate being, as man is said to be wicked or vindictive in a judgment of predication, but that man would be a being (of) misery or a being-in-misery. Rather than an attribute equal to the spirit of vengeance, good will or benevolence, misfortune is the essence-without-essence, not the attribute, of man as they are radically inconsistent. Man (is) miserable by the misery rather than by being. Man is “in-misery” as they are “in life” and, moreover, determined to live and die, to decide in the World and moreover on the World from the misery that they have always shied away from. Rather than an event of existence which would globally affect man like anguish or ennui, rather than a sentiment or an ontological affect, misery exactly coincides with the solitude (of) One which makes up the most human heart of man and their human heart alone. In a nonanthropological way generally and most of the time, we pose their tenor in radical humanity as “One-in-One” or “vision-in-One,” for this One is without Being, forlorn [esseulé] of Being before any forsaking [esseulement] in Being, the One being solitary-of…the essence making up the whole of its essence, what we call the being-foreclosed of the One to the World, the indifference or non-consistency of the One, which is not the closedness-in-the-World [fermeture-au-Monde] of the One. The most radical of openings is that of non-consistency, but this opening is that of a first term and determines a “first” thought and before the ethical. It is on this new basis of a man defined by misery, of a misery defined by the being-indifferent to any ethics and philosophy, of a thought which undoubtedly should be spoken through axioms and theorems in a transcendental style rather than through philosophical theses, dogmas and decision, that could be grounded and can be elaborated as a new posture of the ethical type, what we more exactly call “non-ethics.”
Who, What, or Which One [Qui] is the Victim? Their immanent justice and the in-crimination of philosophy.
Could ethics and philosophy have really, coherently, and without contradicting themselves, prohibit killing a man? If the question seems desperately naïve to be addressed to philosophy, rather than known assassins, let us specify it, since it does not have a philosophical meaning, first from the perspective of interdiction, then from the perspective of man.
For example, under what conditions is it legitimate to forbid, without belying the statement by its enunciation, torturing a man? It is not the permanent spectacle of crime which makes us pose this question of legitimacy addressed to ethics. It proves nothing save to factually verify the powerlessness of interdictions pronounced by ethics and the law. It concerns reasons of this powerlessness and the powerlessness of both ethics and the law: the cause of this fatal companionship of philosophy and the crime against humanity. The question is less naïve than the naivety of spontaneous philosophy. It becomes plausible as soon as the trouble is taken to examine at bottom the most inapparent presuppositions of this companionship rather than to trust in these declarations of ethical intention. Then, nothing in philosophy and ethics as such genuinely forbids (without falsehood nor contradiction) the crime against the human. And all of this shows that one is supposedly the exceptional rabble [fauteur] who authorizes this interdiction perhaps without legitimating it…
Here, the crowd of philosophers, their ruffled dignity, riots out a howl of cries and laughter, redoubling by discovering that this question comes from a member of their assembly, that no tribunal nor prosecutor seems to have ordered this investigation which would claim to suddenly deny the whole legitimacy of the tribunal of Reason. Being shocked by almost everything, philosophy no longer has the means of being shocked of what it does and is content with “resisting.” The reclaimed investigation seems to be hardly diligent and even less ordered by a philosopher. By whom, then? Perhaps by the victim? The victim, however, is by definition “absent” because they are killed or at least not in a state to carry out this investigation themselves. Yet, the investigation must be carried out, if not by the victim, at least “in their name.” What does “in the name of the victim” mean and first what or who is a victim, why can the victim only be defended in their name? Or, perhaps, specifically, in their “name-of-the-victim”?
One victim is regularly twice a victim. Crudely offended a first time, the victim is a second time offended by the special logic of the law and philosophy which manipulates the law’s concept. The thesis of the double offense is therefore neither juridical nor philosophy and cannot be supported, without offending good sense in its turn, but under conditions that are other than juridical and philosophy. Who or what [qui] makes the theory of the victim, and who or what takes on the defense and poses the law? The strong, the victorious, and the powerful defend the victim. They do not offend the victim directly; they await the crime to victimize the victim in their turn. In the same way that philosophers have made the theory of the people, the everyday, vulgar and ordinary man, an ad hoc theory to prepare the ordinary man for the distribution of the goods of thought, the lawyers and the moralists make up the theory of the victim and prepare the victim to receive their status as a victim. If the victim protests, they put themselves in a state of inferiority and in a situation of being accused, to not play the game, and not only through their call for immediate vengeance. One of the possible choices of the victim is silence, but the victim can be silent for two reasons that are often confused and that we must untangle: one reason is through a fatal powerlessness, the underside [envers] of vengeance in effect; and another reason more profoundly so because the victim “knows” without knowing it explicitly or expressively what they “do” in such a way for justice to be immanent. How is it possible for justice to be immanent? The victim, the one who opposes to the strong and skilled who take charge [instruisent] their defense process in the name of the victim but ultimately in the name of their force and power, is the one who presupposes or performs as a victim in and through their radical silence or through their positive impossibility of speaking. In this way, the victim can argue for a justice which would take on the ways of immanence. To presuppose oneself as a victim is not passivity through powerlessness, weakness through bad conscience, vengeance through ressentiment; it is not even to receive or experience oneself as a victim – we must abandon the sentiment, affects and avatars of conscience in philosophy, law and ethics. To presuppose oneself as a victim is to-be-given or to-be-performed as a victim, to make a radical hypothesis and presupposition, without a possible relief, of their being (of) victim. Many nuances are necessary to render acceptable or simply plausible this way of thinking that is barely juridical and philosophical. But only the victim, no longer those who assume the strong, but those who are presupposed because they are performed, can determine their defense themselves, this time a priori, by only helping the strong and the powerful without leaving them this care or concern.
Certain philosophers, and perhaps all of them, in their infantile triumphalism, draw up a caricatural, aggressive and haughty image of the victim. They confound the necessity of taking the victim as a perspective, of acting in the name of their silence and their cries with a “victimizing” reclamation and attribute to the victim an ideology of “all-victim.” The philosophers do as if the victim should lead the investigation themselves, through a vicious circle and with the spirit of vengeance. It is philosophy itself which poses, with this falsifying image, the convertibility – the essence or the law of the “law of retaliation”! – of the victim and vengeance, by bracketing, with some proximal nuances, the investigation, namely the elucidation of the operations of the crime, the knowledge and evaluation of the criminal. Hence, sometimes philosophy’s secret aggravation against the victims, its defense of the strong against the force of the weak, and more gravely – we will return to this – its theoretical revisionism and denial necessarily implied by this image. Philosophy and ethics lead a revisionist enterprise erstwhile through theodicy and now the refusal of the so-called “victimizing ideology.”
Who, what, or which one is a victim? Can the victim still be the object of a question, an intimately revisionist philosophical image? Is there something like a “victimizing judgment,” indeed a possible identification of who, what, or which one is the victim? Let us pose that the “crime against humanity” is still an idealization, that the ultimate phenomenal content of this formula is best preserved by “the crime against the human” and that the phenomenon of the victim is also the phenomenon of the human, obviously remaining to be defined. How does one exit from the vicious circle of philosophy? We must identically pose that there is no victim but the “human,” that the human alone in this nonidealized sense – but what sense? – defines the victim, and that the human is, more than the condition of possibility, the real presupposed for there to be a victim. “Some” victim rather than none? No, one victim rather than only the falsehood of philosophy, heroic and consolatory.
Let us repeat. Who, what, or which one is a victim? What is their identity as a victim? These questions are now already more adequate. The victim is a being who a priori and perhaps more than an a priori has, through their “essence” full of unpower [impouvoir] and non-consistency, no “natural” means of defense. Under these conditions, we understand that the victim cannot lead the investigation themselves, not through an absolute absence or even a relative absence (an idealized presence of the signifier), but through an unpower which precedes any defense and is not a powerlessness-to-defend-oneself, a weakness which precedes the weakness to argue for before philosophical surety and not only before the murderer. This unpower is even less than a “way of being,” it is a non-consistency which refuses to face the being and power of philosophy [face à l’être et au pouvoir philosophique]. Being destitute of any essence or consistency, the victim is not vengeance but the force of this weakness to render necessary and universal an investigation into the ontological conditions of the crime and to which philosophy is no longer able to evade [n’est plus en état de se soustraire]. The victim is condemned to invent a precisely a priori defense. The identification of the victim is in reality that of their defense. To be a victim is not to sufficiently or absolutely exist to be absolutely annihilated by a murder or reduced “to nothing.” And to be a victim is to sufficiently exist to again place the murderer, and with the murderer philosophy, ontology and ethics, into irremissible debt.
This state of the victim is therefore neither being nor nothing, the state excluding the absolute murder and the absolute survival in the sense where the absolute, seized in its full meaning at least, is the philosophical auto-position – decidedly implicated, rather, in the felony. We say that the victim, whether assassinated, murdered or tortured, is a victim alone as much as, through their non-consistency foreclosed to crime, this being-foreclosed designates the victim as phenomenally victim. It is no longer philosophy which designates the victim thus as we believe, since philosophy itself makes a part of the conditions of existence and effectuation of the crime. Foreclosed to murder, forbidden in-the-last-instance, as we will say, to murder and by murder, the victim is precisely a cause as they are and in-the-last-instance alone of the investigation into the crime, but on the other hand, the investigation into the crime will find its complete concept as a philosophical crime which finds its cause in this unsupportable non-consistency of “the victim” and which attempts to give back to the crime an assassinating consistency, killing the victim a second time.
Yet, as we have said, because the victim is a priori without defense or is only victim not having gone to war, the victim must and can at the same time invent the means of an a priori defense. These two traits, the unpower extreme and the power that it allows to the defense, must be posed in the identity of a unique gesture to explain that this investigation would be necessary and universal as an immanent justice, without, nevertheless, raising from a vengeance exercised by the victim; it is an a priori defense without the technology of retribution. Because the murder taken in its effectivity cannot absolutely annihilate man but testifies to their non-consistency as a victim determines or takes philosophy to trial [intente un procès pour la philosophie]; the murder renders necessary and universal the incrimination of philosophy itself, namely its elucidation as being-in-crime. The treatise which follows is the identification of the victim as last-authority [dernière-instance][1] and their a priori defense as “non-ethics.” In this precise sense – not exempt from an appearance where the defense of the criminal can always abuse it – the victim is the point of view over the law, ethics and philosophy, what we substitute as the victim’s perspective for them.
On the crime against humanity, an ethical and philosophical aporia
A “thorough” investigation but one moreover determined-in-the-last-authority by the victim, not lead or carried out directly by the victim, then writes up [met alors à jour] the contradiction of philosophy, namely what will be its status of exception and its crime by exception. If the forbidding of crime against the human is comprised as the first and absolute forbidding of the crime against humanity, as the conceptual and idealizing apparatus of philosophical ethics wants it to be, it is then denying itself, authorizing and has authorized itself through exception. It is not obvious to perceive this cunning of philosophy – which hides itself timidly in the “cunning of reason –, the crowd and the swell opposed to it. Nevertheless, it is a law-of-the-essence of philosophy itself that all of which wants to be ontologically “absolute” and “universal” (the crime like the victim, the forbidding of the crime like vengeance) contradicts and denies themselves, passing through the convertibility of the criminal and the victim – every killer encounters fate under the form of another killer – and finally ends in the “pious lie,” the “superior falsehood” or in the exception whose philosophy is made an unspoken rule.
This contradiction that reveals the in-crimination of philosophy concretely appears in the antinomy of two theses which both belong to the extreme possibilities of the structure of the Philosophical Decision. Each of these theses are antithetical to one another. Through its superior or strictly ethical dimension, that of man and God as “beyond essence” (Plato, Kant, Lévinas), it apparently requires, save for exception precisely, the forbidding of the crime against humanity. And through its inferior or strictly empirical, naturalist and materialist dimension, that of man as the animal (rational, etc.) and human nature, it poses this radical thesis that man is a wolf for man and that man can and must always be killed by anyone, with implicit exception here still of the philosopher. In both cases, the philosopher contradicts themselves by making a self-exception and self-acceptance and therefore falls into crime.
We have already suggested that the first thesis concerning the victim belies its enunciation by its statement, provided that these two dimensions would no longer be comprised solely as those of the ordinary discourse but as those of this discourse with the universal claim, logos. As for the second thesis, drawn and transformed from Hobbes, we won’t judge that it concerns a local and curious idea from an exceptional doctrine. Rather, the second thesis is the coherent consequence of the naturalist and materialist grounds of Philosophy-with-a-capital-P [la philosophie], its “inferior” stratum through which meta-physics directly touches on nature and physics. Indeed, nothing, no law, ethically forbids any animal from killing any other animal even of its own species. If man is an animal, a natural being (a rational one otherwise, but Reason is itself already “natural”…), there is no reason for man to escape from this law which poses that it is possible, that nothing forbids killing man. However, Hobbes’ thesis must receive its phenomenal meaning and be deployed in all of its dimensions, in particular ethics by dint of being not ethical and reciprocally so. It is an empiricist thesis (man is a wolf for man) as much as an ontological statement (is): we must generalize it in its full employment by pinning it onto the structure of the Philosophical Decision. It then means that being killed is the rule and not only the de facto regularity, but which is prescribed by “nature.” If in nature nothing forbids an action, it is “nature” that allows it and all of what is permitted is imperative by one side or one aspect of its philosophical meaning. This is an exigency of the renunciation of ethics by naturalist ethics, an appearance of “non-ethics.”
Thus dis-empiricized and universalized at the limits of the Decision, it contains its antithesis: to kill is an obligation but one which, as a prescription, excepts itself from what it prescribes, and therefore refuses killing. To say that man is a wolf for man and to give this formula a philosophical meaning, the enunciator must renounce being a wolf. Yet the antithetical still inverts or reverses itself: if the philosopher is not a wolf and does not kill, the philosopher contradicts themselves and therefore kills thought in their own way. Not being a wolf for man in their nature, the philosopher is still a wolf for thought, for man in their reason, etc., namely still in man’s nature. Forbidding and authorizing killing, whether they are unequal, are apparently so irreversible according to such or such doctrine, and they conserve one another in the ultimate horizon of philosophical encompassing.
Therefore, two theses confront each other at the extremes: the strictly ethical, supra- or hyper-ontological thesis of the universal forbidding killing (Lévinas emphasized the meaning without creating it); and the infra-ontological thesis, an “ethical” thesis derived and transformed from Hobbes’ cynical thesis on the universal obligation to kill. But these two theses (or the rather rationalist but not solely rationalist thesis, and the rather empiricist but not solely empiricist antithesis), when they are generalized in their implicit philosophical structure and torn from their apparently local doctrinal character, when they are taken as universal or absolute, demonstrates that they harbor their opposite, sometimes their contradiction, sometimes their difference – it is according to the type of philosophy chosen as the model of the Philosophical Decision. At best, in both cases, exception remains the invariant of the antithetical. In the thesis, philosophy authorizes itself through exception to kill; in the antithesis, philosophy equally authorizes itself through exception to not kill and therefore equally contradicts itself. Authorization and interdiction reflect each other in the act of killing within philosophy, the things in the philosopher-subject as authorized and not authorized to kill. Philosophy commands and commands itself to kill and not to kill, etc.
Every attempt to philosophically justify the statement “crime against humanity,” to supersede its neutral kernel towards an ethical interpretation, by making it the object of a judgment of interdiction or even authorization, will lead to the hesitations and indecisions of the antithetical without realizing so that it remains the fact of the philosopher, or by realizing it if it is the fact of the victim who identifies it and detaches themselves from it. As a philosopher, we have the possibility of choosing between the philosopher and the victim, but as a victim we no longer have this choice which has become useless, but the choice forced-in-the-last-authority of in-criminating philosophy.
However, the solution to the antithetical by the victim always risks returning to an ethical decision if the victim is not identified, in their turn, by the “last” first name, that of the “human,” whose crime against humanity, the rights of man, and cloning are conjunctural symptoms.
If this is a man? Because this is a man…[2]
The investigation into the crime against humanity would return to the victim as its cause and would allow us to write up the superior crime of philosophy, its antithesis culminating in the affirmation of the exception, the exceptional right for philosophy to authorize and forbid (itself) the crime against the human, to make an exception-and-acceptance (of) itself. The victim is the last word, the “last authority” to judge ethics but the victim does not at all exhaust man, just their “essence” of the Without-Essence. How do we present the problem of the most concrete man, as subject, towards the other extremity of the investigation, on the side no longer of their solitude as a victim but the investigation itself as the a priori defense?
Let us reprise our question. How can we forbid, for what reason or absence of reason, without falsehood as has been required, to kill This-Man-Right-Here [Cet-homme-que-voici]? What – or who – is within this being who has nevertheless all of the animal, divine, monstrous, human-all-too-human appearances of the anthropoid, who I estimate by law and by duty to simply call “human,” universally my “Neighbour,” without further giving into the humanist myths or humanitarian capitalism? What – or who – exceeds the instability and the confusion of these not especially human appearances that man shares with the rest of Creation, and who or what can forbid me from trying to kill This-Man-Right-Here? This question, however, is perhaps is still rather philosophical and susceptible in its turn to be in-criminated. What, or who, constrains me, and how, from defining these appearances as “human,” as those in-the-last-authority of “This-Man-Right-Here”? At the same time as this forbidding, how can this way of an a priori defense be done, finally without contradiction, for this man that is everywhere pronounced but contradicted?
The question: what or who is man? is too general and unitary. It hardly has a use save for an “ideological” one and contains as much a contradiction, nonperformativity or exception, as a solution. The question in the “what or who,” like the judgment of humanity that it appeals to, necessarily assumes a nonhuman enunciator, a demon or quasi-god, an anonymous and drowned being in ontological garb. Hence, do we first know that this being-here is a man and not only a rational or religious, linguistic animal, etc., with which they could be and have been confounded? We do not know certainly in reality (by certitudo) that this chaos of appearances is one man, but we do not pose and decide on it, with “good reasons” which do not hold to these appearances but to one cause characteristic of man, that man alone can be, and that man can assume through a special decision against all of the league forces of the World. Our decision is “without reason” – even Reason and the Principle of Reason are humanly undecidable appearances –, our decision is not “well-founded” in a “human nature,” an “essence of man,” or an assumed human consistency. This decision is only authorized by being a hypothesis inalienable in its “reasons,” a decision determined in-the-last-authority by its object, namely by “man,” but precisely not by the anthropoid that one proposes to us in general. Therefore, it neither concerns “man” in general” nor man as a “simple hypothesis of scientific labour” but, as we have said previously, man as a solitude of the victim-of-the-last-instance or again as non-consistency.
On the one hand, this hypothesis is no longer that of the victim – that would be absurd – but according to the victim and determined by the victim, but in-the-last-instance, being given their non-consistency. One such radical hypothesis signifies a hypo-thesis, a “thesis” that is without-theoretical, without-scientific or without-philosophical consistency and which, as last-authority, opens an unlimited theoretical and ethical space, without the closure of metaphysics or philosophy.
And on the other hand, the victim must no longer be themselves an appearance of the World but a last-authority for the investigation into the crime and capable of in-criminating philosophy, what motivates our current research. Hence, do we decide, without knowing it, that there is no victim-of-the-last-authority but a human one? A naïve question also calls upon an even more naïve response: it is man as they are this man right here that we know man, or rather that we authorize ourselves to say that this-(is)-“a-man” [c’(est) «un-homme»]. We appeal neither to man-essence, or universal nature, nor to this particular man – both already have a philosophical consistency and are not the victim that they claim to divide identity and can therefore be in-criminated for this act. This-Man-Right-Here is not the object of an acknowledgment, of a recognition of consciences, as an Other or a mode of Intersubjectivity. Where do we find man if not in man themselves, otherwise as in-man rather than in the World and in the City, in philosophy to be honest? Still, the point is to give ourselves the means to expose this apparent tautology in an argument which can no longer obviously be that of philosophy.
This first response (“in-man”) can be said in terms of radical solitude, in the sense where man is, according to a popular use concerning one such individual, “solitary of” … of the World itself, the solitary victim…of the criminal, and in no way “solidary” as philosophical convertibility wants it. We will say later on that they are “in-misery” or again “in-non-consistency.” Solitude is more than destiny: it is misery, and the victim is in-misery as one is “in-life” [en vie]. Even death is not absolutely, ontologically annihilated, or is only so insofar as man is or was – man is “in-death.” Hence, the exposition on radical misery as the cause of-the-last-authority of in-crimination, the non-ethical investigation into the crime. This is the condition of a human use, without the falsehood of ethical exception or (it is the same thing) a human use without the vengeance of the criminal by the victim. The interdiction of crime is no longer absolute otherwise by auto-contradiction: it is radical or determined-in-the-last-authority by the victim themselves. If this is a man…? We pose that only one man can pose this question and therefore make a response to them: because this (is) a man, do we have a right and a duty to do so? If this is a man – such is our inalienable hypothesis in whatever verification by falsification –, then what is to be done to the human with ethics (and the law) rather than what is to be done to ethics with the human? This is a question testifies to a non-consistency of man, a radical opening for a relative verification and falsification, those of the criminal appearances that share the victim.
This is still an incomplete response, which bears on an identity, but nothing concrete or nothing closer to the crime. It leaves us on a point of exclamation, a pure affirmation that we give ourselves as the true [vrai] rather than as trueful [vraie], in some sort a true without truth or without expression. The titular man of truth and not only of the true is by contrast the “subject.” It is now up to subjectivity as the veracious “relation” to the crime-world to respond, rather than to the radicality of solitude. A veracious subject says what they do, does what they say: the subject is performative at least in-the-last-authority. Being given their non-relation to the World “wherein” they are solitude and wherein they have a need nevertheless to constitute themselves as subject,” we will name this veracious subject “Stranger” universally for any man.
Thus defined, the Stranger does not yet exhaust the ethical dimension which belongs to crime and who defines it as the crime against This-Man-Right-Here. When it thus exceeds the Stranger, when the Stranger determines the ethical itself, namely when the Stranger a priori forbids, and without contradicting themselves, the crime perpetrated against This-Man-Right-Here, the Stranger is designated as the “Other-Stranger” [autre-Etranger] or “Neighbour.”
Some specifications:
1) The victim requires that one can and must be able to pose in the same gesture, in the immanence of a unique operation, This-Man-Here as partaking the criminal appearances of the World with the World, and as solitary or separated from this World. The victim determines without carrying it out the in-crimination of the World or (it is the same thing) determines themselves as the forbidden from being killed that they are a priori. To simultaneously identify the crime and the Neighbour, This-Man-Here in their identity, namely in the forbidden from being killed which make up their ultimate being, is the meaning of this treatise on “non-ethics.”
2) It is apparently not paradoxical that the victim alone can determine the investigation as their own defense. But the philosophical paradox is clearer when the victim is posed “before” the crime, if we can say it, or as the Real itself that forecloses philosophy from its own crime which is called “the-World.” However, the victim themselves is to be in a radically “original” way foreclosed to the crime that they can be the “cause” of the investigation.
3) Perhaps there is no other definition of the victim than the being foreclosed to crime, forbidden to murder for example but also, without exception, forbidden from murder. We will thus cease defining the victim through a vicious circle as an object or correlate of the criminal. This latter definition is the vengeance or the vindication of philosophy against the human. The victim, as they cannot kill or enslave – that is their weakness or non-consistency.
4) “This-Man-Here” is an ambiguous formula. It does not define man by their appearances of singularity and particularity but does not exclude them anymore to the benefit of a pure “essence.” Along with anthropo-logy, the assumed constitutive empirico-rational difference is also excluded. But the appearances that man draws in the World are included in their equation as what belongs to the status of the subject that-exists-for-the-World. The victim is foreclosed to crime but, as Neighbour-subject, they are de jure open, without alienation, for the crime, which never saturates them. This does not mean a finality, an identification to the crime, but an assistance for…the criminal.
To the ontological and unitary question of man in the perspective of ethics, a response is substituted which treats this question as its symptom. The response itself determines the question as this symptom. The response articulates three aspects: 1) because this is a man and not only a-man (radical misery), 2) then they are a veracious subject, performed in-the-last-authority as saying (and) doing, statement (and) enunciation, but existing-as-Stranger for the truth which would be said and/or done (philosophy, the World, crime); 3) and this Stranger-subject, veracious in their “relation” to ethics as the ultimate dimension of philosophy, is the Neighbour performing in-the-last-authority the a priori interdiction from being killed.
Rather than postulating through metaphysics that man is a wolf for man, that I can always be killed, tortured, etc., rather than making this statement a philosophical hypothesis on the essence of man, an absolute auto-position and utterly “auto-exceptional (of) oneself,” to thus universalize the crime-by-exception, we will make this statement a hypothesis of another type, revealed by man as the victim of-the-last-authority, said now of ethics and philosophy. We admit this hypothesis, but by philosophically transforming it (the philosopher is a wolf who philosophizes, a rational wolf) and first in a nonphilosophical way (through the point of view of the victim). It is valid under this form for the World as the reign of wolf-philosophers, the auto-exception (of) the wolf. Only a wolf who makes an exception can say that “wolves eat each other,” namely, if we have understood it well, “philosophers eat each other.” This is the law of the World, the Law-World: because it is their worldly definition and because it is even more than passible, man can be killed, enslaved, purified, tortured, concentrated, and exterminated. Man can always contradict themselves, deny themselves and always lie for good reasons, for example ethical and philosophical reasons. Man can be the subject or the object of an exception. Man can always be philosophized or can be a philosopher themselves. However, this uni-versalization of Hobbes’ thesis only makes sense for a victim who refuses to “make a two” with their assassin or torturer. Rather, the victim makes a duality, one that is uni-lateral, with the crime (of) the World.
The non-ethical identification of man as Stranger, then as Other-Stranger or Neighbour, substitutes itself for their ethical and metaphysical identification which could never ground another thing than a use for the vengeance of ethics. The old Greco-Unitary conception of man, more than ever in effect in the misadventures of ethics, is unreceivable and useless for the criminal conjunctures of the 20th Century without a profound transformation of its meaning since it makes an active part of the conditions of the crime against the human. Indeed, it is at this position of the problem, as it is related to ethics without yet being itself ethical, that forces us in their own way into these conjunctures (what we will call an “occasion”) which were in excess of juridical, ethical and philosophical definitions of man. To respond to their very human urgency, it seems to us paradoxically urgent to suspend the ethical and to examine its ultimate presuppositions, even if it means admitting them only “by provision” and without illusion on their assumed or real efficacy.
First Indicative Definitions
On the relations of morals, ethics and non-ethics, we present some indicative definitions and several theories whose principles, not the only ones, are the following:
1.1. Every moral is on the one hand a morality of mores [mœurs], partially co-determined in their essence by their empirical and socio-historical content.
1.2. Every moral is on the other hand “the difference of morality and mores” or it is not entirely confused with them, without necessarily being morality “in itself.” This is philosophizable as the Difference of the general or common being-moral and mores that it circumscribes. This “Etho-logical Difference” is the invariant of the mixtures of morality and philosophy which form the “metaphysics of mores.”
1.3. For its part, every ethics is structured like a metaphysics of mores.[3]
2.1. Every moral qua ethical or de facto or de jure inseparable from a philosophy, structured in the last resort like a metaphysics of mores, maintains a double relation with Evil. With Evil as the opposite and correlate of the Good and which, when it affects its metaphysical foundation, it is called, in Kant’s sense, “radical evil,” but also with a deeper Evil that it partakes in precisely insofar as it is only one ethics and suffers from inhuman “philosophical sufficiency.” From the perspective of radical misery, the correlation of Good and Evil, their convertibility towards a proximal difference, is indeed in its turn a “radical evil” in a second sense, a non-ethical sense, which affects the metaphysics of mores and any philosophical ethics.
2.2. The participation of ethics in this second evil takes the symptomatic form of a real hallucination and therefore of a transcendental falsehood whereby it “contradicts” radical misery, the Without-Essence of man, and lies to itself.
2.3. Ethics lies from the falsehood-of-exception, it does not say what it does and does not do what it says. Ethics of a Greek origin or one directly structured like a metaphysics of mores, ethics poses the primacy of givenness over the given (misery) or makes givenness an exception to the given: this is falsehood-by-givenness. Ethics from a Judaic origin or indirectly structured like a metaphysics of mores, lies from the falsehood-of-chosenness [election], it places between man and ethics an infinite distance which reifies man and equally contradicts the in-misery or non-consistency which makes up the heart of man.
2.4. If philosophical ethics is affected by a transcendental falsehood and even by a real hallucination, it has need to be itself submitted to an “ethics” excluding the exception by givenness and chosenness, submitted to a norm of veracity which can only make the object of a non-ethics. Rather than giving-back a philosophy to morals, the problem is to give a “moral” to philosophy that is independent of it in its cause and its subject. It is to go from the ethical foundations of morals to the veracious knowledge and practice of ethics.
3.1. Non-Ethics finds its cause-of-the-last-authority in man as radical misery; non-ethics finds its subject in man as “Stranger” and their mode “Other-Stranger” or the “Neighbour” (misery or solitude condemns man to exist-as-a-Stranger); and non-ethics finds its empirical objects in the ethico-philosophical mixtures.
3.2. Non-Ethics is genuine first ethics, which is only first without also having the primacy to which the “sufficiency” of philosophical claims through its auto-position (by “radical evil” in the second sense of the term).
3.3. Non-Ethics is first ethics because it is a priori and radically uni-versal in a new sense or it is first for philosophical ethics themselves.
3.4. Non-Ethics is first ethics: 1) for which, on the one hand, radical misery is the essence (of) the without-essence of man or their being-foreclosed to any philosophy and ethics; 2) for which, on the other hand, as a “first name,” “misery” is also a non-conceptual symbol determined in-the-last-authority by this essence (of) man; 3) and for which its subject, as an Other-Stranger or Neighbour, represents “man” in their identity-of-the-last-authority, namely in their duality, with regard to the ethico-philosophical authority which is unitary.
“Ethics” designates a unitary generality that we must specify and, in particular, “dualyze” according to the type of “uni-lateral” distinction proper to non-philosophy. Hence, it is a differenciated [différenciée] object of this treatise, but where the titles must be considered as equivalents or like the faces of one unique structure:
- “Non-Ethics” designates in general the project of a thought for ethics in accordance with its real cause, radical misery as the being-foreclosed of man to any ethics but capable of determining for any ethics one of a new style; in a more specific way the aprioritic structures extracted from philosophical ethics under this condition.
- “First Ethics” designates the position and the place of non-ethics in relation to philosophical ethics: as a priori, transcendental and uni-versal or valid even for philosophical ethics.
- “Ethico-Philosophical Difference” or “Etho-Logical Difference” designates the mixture-form, inseparably philosophical or philosophizable, of the phenomena said to be ordinarily “moral” which are also therefore ethical and from which the non-ethical a priori are extracted.
- “Etho-techno-logy” designates the intensified contemporary form of “Etho-logical Difference” and from which raises, for example, the techno-ethical decisions produced by the social body and its reflection over its ruled conducts.
- “Unified Theory of Ethics” designates non-ethics insofar as it is identically valid for empirical morals and Greco-philosophical and Judaic ethics, that it is their “unification” by identity-without-synthesis or in-the-last-authority, rather than their unitary synthesis.
- “Ethics of, from or by [de] the Stranger” designates non-ethics insofar as it is the only ethics possible whose subject would be man defined as without-consistency or existing-as-Stranger (and Neighbour). Man-only-exists-as-one-Stranger or is only-a-subject-as-a-Neighbour through radical misery.
- “Stranger” designates the most general subject of the unified theory of science and philosophy, non-philosophy; the “Other-Stranger” or again the “Neighbour” designates the ethical or rather non-ethical mode of this subject.
Such is the most apparent content of the theoretical apparatus necessary to suspend the antinomy of the philosophy of the crime and to think in a more rigorous way, namely according to man, the crime against humanity, human rights, and finally human cloning, in what must be for us their non-ethical universality and their non-ethical power to transform ethics that are incapable of thinking these new conjunctures.
Each of the three parts of this treatise runs through the entire cycle of the problems, but each time under a different angle. They are therefore relatively independent, the third being the most decisive. The first part examines non-ethics (undoubtedly in a very “steep” way and which will ask for the reader’s patience) rather under the angle of its cause or the Real, radical misery as the essence (of) the without-essence of man. The second part examines non-ethics rather under the angle of its field of objects or its material, the philosophical ethics-world and its becoming-technological, simultaneously exposed in their structure and insufficiencies. The third part, the principal one, systematically crosses back in a more gathered and synthetic way but under the thorough angle of the subject of non-ethics, the Stranger or, better yet, the Other-Stranger or the Neighbour. Thus are posed in the unity of the same gesture the “ethical” identity of the subject as Neighbour, the radical interdiction finally grounded on the crime against humanity, and the real or human critique of the ethical and philosophical crime.
[1] In French, instance can mean several things: an instance, an occasion, or an authority. Due to the nature that the victim, and no longer the tribunal of Reason, is the determinant of their a priori defense, I have chosen last-authority whenever contextually necessary. To do so suggests the role to which authority as a rule or prescription is bound to or determined by man, rather than the World or philosophy. – Trans.
[2] A reference to Primo Levi’s memoir, Se questo è un uomo, translated into English as If This Is a Man. – Trans.
[3] A play on Lacan’s claim, “The unconscious is structured like a language.” – Trans.
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