“Who is the Stranger? A New Idea”
François Laruelle
In Théorie des étrangers: science des hommes, démocratie, non-psychanalyse (Paris: Kimé 1995), p.11-19.
Four problems make up the object of this essay, and the essay brings them one identical solution.
1) Is the traditional antinomy of Philosophy and the Human Sciences (in particular Philosophy and Psychoanalysis) an eternal and unavoidable evil and can we find a real solution to the antinomy? Here, what is proposed begins by renouncing any attempt at a philosophical synthesis or “resolution” as much as renouncing any contrary exacerbation of scientific positivity – renouncing a solution that is in both cases unitary or which would seek a third and superior solution and would thus lead back to the old conflict without really dissolving it. We oppose this unitary solution with the idea of a unified theory – a unified theory and not unitary one. A unified theory consists in determining a radical or nondivided identity of theory itself, a theory of Philosophy and the Human Sciences, determined by the Real rather than an identity of the Real determined by the theory which would divide it anew. It is Identity posed as a simple hypothesis under these new conditions, in accordance with a conception of the essence of man as being the Real, “Radical Immanence,” “Given-without-Givenness,” or “vision-in-man.” This conception is no longer exactly philosophical or it has been repressed by the idealism of any philosophy. It suffices to make this hypothesis of man as the immanent infrastructure, a hypothesis of the scientific type but one that is real, not logico-epistemological, consequently adequate to the nature of their object, and to substitute this hypothesis for these transcendent and metaphysical entities which are the “individual,” the “subject,” “consciousness” or the “unconscious,” to open up a new field of researches that we call, inverting the plural and the singular, the “science of men,” no longer the “sciences of man.” This discipline does not study the objects or properties which belong to Philosophy and the Human Sciences, it does not compete with them on this point, but to take the already elaborated knowledges by these conjoined disciplines for the first time as an object. The science of men is no longer therefore confounded with both Philosophy and the Human Sciences and their conflict ceases from being valued as a norm or authority for thought.
2) Is the antinomy of Philosophy and Democracy condemned to remain glossed over, efficacious to the extent of this glossing, or can it find a solution? This antinomy is less apparent, gentler than the first, but it is effective. Through its original and invariant – though very varied – structure of ontological objectivation, philosophy excepts itself – undoubtedly partially or provisionally, but this exception is constitutive – from its objects to the benefit of its discourse or excepts itself from its discourse to the benefit of its act. Philosophy is thus both anti-democratic and super-democratic and oscillates around a concept of democracy that it does not succeed in fixing rigorously and realistically: in its identity. The philosophical subject of the democratic enunciation only falls very provisionally and partially under the conditions which define the stated democracy. Man is divided between the philosopher who states the democratic ideal of “equality” and man who in this ideal is the object and who can only claim to be the author of this discourse or appropriate it through delegation to the philosopher, so that when democracy is of a philosophico-political origin or when equality is not ordered to identity but dissolved within difference, democracy assumes that man is inequal to themselves even in the affirmation of their equality or that a part of man remains “minor.” Democracy is a “sought” and problematic concept, aporetic at worst, resolved at best in an unlimited becoming-democracy which continues to pose over man the bar of anti-democracy and non-identity and to refuse what man does from side to side or refusing identity access to democracy. To bring an end to philosophical exception which is continued within a super-human exception to man, we must (and here still it suffices) determine a radical, not divided – in no way consequently a “totality” – identity of the philosophical thus transformed and human multitudes; to determine man, as we will see, in the state of Strangers. It is an identity which finds its real cause in this Radical Immanence which makes up the essence of men who we elsewhere call “ordinary.” To “ordinary man” equally participates without distinction or difference, without hierarchy, what the philosopher would distinguish and hierarchize: mundane or vulgar man and the philosopher themselves, thus restored in this use by their identity and its multiplicity.
3) Can the antinomy of Philosophy and the Other Question [la question de l’Autre] or the Stranger Question, which does not cease from being re-activated within contemporary thought, receive a solution? This antinomy is traditional within the Greek horizon of philosophy, but it has been exacerbated, radicalized, and partially resolved by Judaic thought and its affect of the Other [Autrui]: from Freud and Wittgenstein to Husserl and Levinas. We take account of this type of solution by transforming it under the general conditions of reality and thought which we postulate, within the goal of resolving the inseparable problems of democracy and the Stranger together. Whence, the following argument: if man finds their real essence in the absolutely undivided immanence and is proven as such from a given-without-givenness, if man is neither “individual” nor “subject,” nor even “consciousness” nor “unconscious” but what we will call (speaking quickly) vision-in-man or vision-in-Ego, an I that is neither “subjective” nor “objective” but immanent (to) itself, then man is no longer divided between an I and an Other, the Other is no longer exterior or interior and exterior to the I, but the immanent I itself also exists (but without “exiting” from itself) within a new structure of the Stranger – man exists-as-Stranger [il existe-Etranger]. If this I-in-I is real and defines every man, even “the-strangers,” if the I-in-I is the pledge that each man enjoys a radical identity without division which can no longer be refused to them, then this same I can also be called under certain conditions, or “additional” conditions, a Stranger. In terms that are of philosophical origin (but transformed under the conditions which we form the hypothesis), the I is “real” and the Stranger is a “transcendental” property of this I, which does not mean without consistency or “unreal” in the vulgar or even ontological sense of the term. It is to no longer divide identity and the state of the stranger between two individuals or two men wherein one is the subject and the other is not, or again wherein one affects the other and inhibits it as a Forbidden one: each man fully enjoys a radical identity and, for this very reason, is “gifted” with Stranger-existing. The Stranger is no longer “the others.” In a sense, the Stranger is “I” but on condition of understanding this I-in-I as a quasi-infrastructure and the Stranger as the quasi-superstructure in which the I-in-I exists. The formula, “we are all strangers,” ceases from being an unthought slogan. It receives a theoretical pertinence but on the condition of disbarring it from this little skeleton key of philosophy, “all,” and to substitute the all with the identity of “each-and-every-one” [tout-en-chacun] or wholehearted immanence which henceforth defines “real” or “ordinary man.” We condition all of this part of our investigations within the following formula which records the genuine causality of the I and the Stranger: We, I and the Stranger, are identical in-the-last-instance alone. Or again: the Stranger is fully an I (I-in-I) but in-the-last-instance alone. We will explain these formulae which adjoin the causality called “determination-in-the-last-instance” to Radical Identity. These formulae define what we call for reasons that are evident enough the Theorem of Democracy. We oppose this theorem to the vague and transcendent concepts of “political philosophy” and the philosophical exception to democracy. The Theorem of Democracy commands a theory of the identity of Strangers. It is in this last concept that the different directions of this essay converge: the Stranger is the definition of man, the unity of Philosophy and the Human Sciences, and the key to democracy.
4) Can the antinomy of philosophical thought and theory of the scientific type, beyond the particular case of the Human Sciences, receive a solution? We retrieve all of the previous problems, the first but also the second, and bond them within the third which contributes the solution of the perspective of the object and, within the fourth, the perspective of theory. The theorem “of democracy” is obviously not a mathematical or regional theorem, it is a theorem of a real origin where the real is neither regional nor fundamental, nor ontic nor ontological: Immanence-of-the-last-instance. It is a Transcendental Theorem consequently. It is not less of a scientific type or origin as much as philosophical type, without which these contributions give rise to “synthesis” or “resolution.” What we call the Immanence-of-the-last-instance, or the essence of man, indeed determines a “thought-science” or a “unified theory” which draws its materials (but only materials) as objects and operations as much from the sciences as from philosophy. Here again – despite the fact that it is neither the place nor the objective of this book to explain it – what we call “vision-in-One” is the real cause of thought, the cause of a transcendental identity of science and philosophy, theory and pragmatics, to determine. The “science” that we reclaim is expressively in this sense a transcendental science and the theorem of democracy, which bears on man as Stranger (and no longer on man’s real essence alone) is the masterpiece. Then, what can it mean for the set of our problems otherwise than the agent or the cause of the democratic statement is no longer the philosopher and that their object is no longer the philosophical “subject” and its avatars, and furthermore not the unconscious? The agent or the cause is the identity-of-the-last-instance of man as Stranger, the Stranger qua determined in-the-last-instance by the identity of a One-I. In this sense, the Stranger alone can speak rigorously “about” democracy and say what they do as much as do what they say [Seul l’Etranger, en ce sens, peut tenir “sur” la démocratie un discours rigoureux et dire ce qu’il fait autant que faire ce qu’il dit]. The discourse of the Stranger is marked by the immanence of a new performativity which no longer falls under the critiques that, for example, thought of a Judaic origin could deservedly address to the philosophico-linguistic concept of the performative.
If the unified theory of man is completed within the democratic theory of the Stranger, the latter can be specified a bit more by the recourse to the material provided by psychoanalysis. It is the “unified theory” of philosophy and psychoanalysis, the generalized theory of the unconscious, still called non-psychoanalysis or less perfectly non-Freudian and non-Lacanian analysis. Non-Analysis raises one of the most crucial antinomies with very extended variants: philosophy and psychoanalysis, thanks to a fundamental theorem parallel to the theorem of democracy of Strangers. If one formulates it summarily in psychoanalytic terms that are undoubtedly still too undifferentiated, this theorem stipulates thus: jouissance determines-in-the-last-instance the unconscious as the dualysis of the philosophico-analytic imaginary. In short, this formulation is a more complete and even “heavier” theorem, but it is a typical one. Indeed, if we oppose to the unitary and amphibological concept of “jouissance” the unperceived distinction of analysis, but a founding one for non-analysis, of the “Joui” and “Jouissance,” we will say: the Real or the Joui-sans-Jouissance determines-in-the-last-instance (through the organon of Jouissance), the Unconscious as dualysis of the transcendental appearance which is the philosophico-psychoanalytic symptom. Of course, this is a provisionally unintelligible and complex formula since it puts new uses of the concept of the “real,” “symbolic” and “imaginary” in relation that non-analysis transforms from analysis, but one doubts that it displaces outside of their constitutive claim and emplaces as simple material (precisely “imaginary” material), therefore without negating them strictly speaking, the directing and pertinent formulae of Lacanianism: “the unconscious is structured like a language,” “there is no sexual relation,” “the One is not” (but) “there is something of the One,” etc. This treatise’s third chapter will be the term-by-term presentation and commentary on this theorem.
Undoubtedly, we will be interrogated on the meaning and interest of this elaboration, and one will attempt to see here what nevertheless it is not: a meta-philosophy, a meta-politics, a meta-psychoanalysis. Like non-analysis in particular, Theory of Strangers in general has no empirically descriptive or prescriptive claim. It does not describe strangers from the perspective of their assumed political or cultural reality nor respectively the symptoms of a new psycho-pathological perspective. By this very fact, Theory of Strangers has no ontological and philosophical claim, either questioning or normative: it is not a philosophical “solution” to the “Other Question” or an ideologico-political “position taking” on the “problem of strangers.” As for non-analysis, it is further not a new “theory” or “version” of the unconscious, not its philosophical reappropriation. Their signification and pertinence are “transcendental” in the rigorous sense where this term designates predicate or properties which do not add anything to the given, do not add anything of the real to the Real (the One or the Ego here) and do not add anything effective to effectivity (the socio-politico-cultural context or even the symptom here, etc.), but which relate themselves to the already constituted knowledge and “manifestation” which they make up a theoretical use, knowledges on man produced by Philosophy and the Human Sciences, and psychoanalysis as an occurrence. The meaning of this type of theory is to reveal, with the contribution from these primary knowledges, the Stranger as such in each man, or the Universal Unconscious, constituting a genuine intelligible and democratic order not from the “Other” [Autrui] alone but from Selves-as-Strangers [des Moi-comme-Etrangers]. If the theory does not claim to therapeutically intervene within the supposed everyday reality as much as claiming to make a politics of it, a philosophy or a psychoanalysis, the theory nevertheless transforms empirical givens (cultural, linguistic, analytic, political, etc.) which are also philosophical or philosophizable givens, but in view of including them within a relatively autonomous order or reign of the democracy-of-Strangers. The theory does not claim to transform them in view of themselves, not claiming to change them empirically. Therefore, it is not the theory’s problem to intervene within the assumed situation of foreigners [étrangers] in the historico-cultural sense, not even of remaking a “Philosophy of the Stranger” or respectively a “philosophy of the unconscious.” We extend to philosophy itself, analysis and politics (by radicalizing it) the clause of relative philosophical indifference to the empirical. Philosophy already has need of empirical givens but does not really modify them insofar as they belong to the order of the primary or empirical given – the part of contingency. We extend this contingency of the given to philosophy and the Human Sciences themselves; henceforth, it is a simple material wherein one, “transcendental” but precisely more “metaphysical” thought makes up a use, a theoretical use. Its ultimate meaning is to bring man, the Stranger, the possibility of an immanent jouissance of what otherwise they are affected by [ressent], in pain and worry, from the war and the violence which drives culture, language, society – philosophy, too, which adds to this discontent. From there, it is what it can manifest and contribute to constituting non-political democracy as the “transcendental order” of the Stranger and, within its specific order, the non-analytic destiny of the “subjects of the unconscious” that we are.
The treatise is distributed in the following way:
The Problematic draws a table of the set of themes, objectives and objects of a science of man as Strangers and presents the fundamental concepts of what we call a “unified theory.”
The chapters which form the body of the text develop the unified theory in its domains [resorts], objectives, its theoretical context and strives to undoubtedly very schematically put this new discipline in place, each time in accordance with the material.
The first chapter poses the prolegomena to any future science which would present itself as human; simultaneously, the human cause of-the-last-instance of this science (the Ego as vision-in-man); the necessity of a material constituted by Philosophy and the Human Sciences; and finally, the great traits of the specific essence of man-as-Stranger which is the object of the new science of men.
The second chapter specifies this science of humans (or gives it its entire object) as a theory of Strangers and implements the previously posed principles. It passes from the Ego to men, from the cause to the object of this science. It is in all respects the central part of this treatise and what is the most innovative of it within the present investigations. The second chapter strives to knot within one, same transcendental theorem defining man as Stranger(s) the reality of its object: the rigorous knowledge of man as Stranger(s) and the conditions of a real democracy. This theorem opens a new field of objects and investigations and opposes itself, through this identity on the mode of the last-instance, to philosophy (political or not) which proposes of man or democracy only a “unitary” theory or which begins by separating, dividing, and hierarchizing them.
The third chapter implements the previous two chapters onto the case of psychoanalysis. It is an introduction to non-analysis or non-Freudian and non-Lacanian analysis: how could this discipline proceed, what concepts elaborate on the case of psychoanalytic discourses treated as meta-human? Obviously, the point is only that some indications are destined to show the reality of this new field of research and to “force” (if it is possible) the inevitable resistance of psychoanalysts. This chapter presents two difficulties for which we must excuse ourselves to the reader, precisely, from [de] the reader: the chapter assumes assimilated, on the one hand, the problematic of the previous chapters and the author’s way of thinking and, on the other hand, the author’s material (Lacanian theory) truly reduced to its elementary framework, a “standard” and nearly scholastic Lacanianism, but which is quite sufficient for a first elaboration of non-analysis. Finally, its allusive, abrupt, compact character, stripped of any textual location, is explained by this (not discounting any available time for the future towards a research into the non-analytic field): we have chosen to throw into battle all of our available weapons, or, in the game, we have chosen to fold all of our cards, abandoning this construction site to the interest (or disinterest) of young researchers – to their spirit of invention as much as their courage. Considering ourselves in a state of emergency, we have thought that it was better to wildly reclaim a new terrain than to multiply the pedagogical precautions and transitions, in order to furnish a kind of memento (even an indigestible one) of possible problems and solutions. A difficulty of interpretation ensues: it can pass for a supplementary attempt at philosophical meta-psychoanalysis, an interpretation absolutely contrary to its meaning, since it is rather non-analysis which rightly makes the meta-human character of psychoanalysis appear and its supersession illusory (the transcendental illusion) from the essence of immanence of man [de l’essence d’immanence de l’homme]. The most general project of non-analysis would be to institute a use of analysis which liberates it from its amphibological blend with philosophy, but not from any relation to philosophy.
The ensemble can also be read as a critique of the judgment of humanity such that it is formulated and comprised within philosophy in general. Then, the point is to “sensitize” the reader, this spontaneous philosopher, to the antinomies which render contradictory the judgment of humanity and towards the necessary passage from the judgement to the scientific problem of man. The science of the essence of men as Strangers poses the conditions which suppress these antinomies, and which gives to man the thought that they merit and the science the cause which inscribes them in the heart of the human real. Here and there, some very brief indications on a pragmatics of philosophical humanism and in general the pragmatics of Human Sciences, a pragmatics included within a first theory of man, specify the meaning of this treatise.
en-demic 