The One is thought and said in an unreflected way
François Laruelle
In Le principe de minorité (Paris: Aubier, 1981), p.130-136
Beyond the Idea, and beyond the Idea of the Idea, the ultimate authority [instance] cannot be more than the One. Here, we do not enter into the classical aporia that the “status” of the One has aroused. Why do we begin with a gesture of refusal and indifference? How is this gesture one with minoritarian thought and its non-relation to the tradition? “Multiplicity” or “difference” do not necessarily mean “relativity.” That the multiple and the different would be necessarily relative is a prejudice inscribed in the long chains of Western ontology and politics and whose necessity is one with the codes that define Being, the Idea, and Presence. Inversely, that the One loathes all multiplicity is also a prejudice that presupposes the same codes. There must be reasons, even summary ones, that require the refusal of this tradition and the interminable aporia of the One and the Multiple, such as the Platonic argument that returns, with all accounted for, to measure the One to Being or the Idea, to render the One at best ineffable for a negative henology. The only real problem is not such or such aporia formulated in the Parmenides. It is to know to what extent, to what degree – or absolutely – we can claim to liberate ourselves from this heritage, to imprint upon it a gap whose whole tradition warns us that it can only be relative, at the same time that it warns us that an absolute gap – precisely what we seek – is an absurdity; that to say and write the One is always to say it again and re-write it through Being and within Being, etc.
All these arguments are well-known and irrefutable. Do they even need to be refuted? Do we want and do we really hope to refute them? Do we ever refute reason which has good sense, the tradition and even other things still for it? For reasons that are obvious enough, we cannot hope to refute the rational refutation of a thought beyond the logos. What evidence will support our reasons? Either it would be the reasons of reason – reasons of the tradition, of Western language, and logic, etc. – and yet this absence of refutation would still be a recognition of reason; or it would be “reasons” taken from another “order” – reasons taken from the “heart,” why not, but taken in its ab-solute intimacy – and we only have to move on without remorse and abandon reason to its militant will to always have reason. The Absolute is an immediate given, and Reason knows well that it cannot do without an absolute “relation” and consequently without the One – even if it does not call upon the One, it believes, without reason, for if it calls upon the One, it is always without reason, or with the only reason that is identical to the One.
In general, the One is reputed as unknowable, but it is because it is considered as transcendence: at once falling under the horizon of Being and unknowable as other, more or less other than the Idea when it is not the negative par excellence. However, we distinguish the Essence (of Being) as formed by entirely and absolutely singular unreflected breaks from a universal and consequently negative break which could, qua universal, also claim the essence. Dispersive or pre-universal breaks are therefore no longer the pure negative, negativity as essence, and are represented rather by the universal break. This is a capital distinction: because techno-metaphysics always confounds unary essence with the One-within-Being, confounding the One as universal break with repulsion or original repression, and confounding the One with being-in-the-One. It is the complementarity of these opposite avatars that is necessary to dismiss. The One, we say, the individuating essence, is unthinkable, except by reducing it to all effects and conditions of its efficacy, to discourses, for example, that are concerned with the One. However, through an inevitable turnaround, it then becomes nearly completely unthinkable and only the object of a “negative henology” because we have imagined it not only as an immanent principle but equally as transcendent in the way in which the Idea precisely exceeds the sensible and supersedes itself towards itself. Within the ideal field or the universal horizon that form Ideas, or even in the real-ideal field that forms Being, thinking the One as it is is a contradiction that is resolved by the reduction of the One if not to the Idea, at least to the systems of Ideas or Being, because, then, it is only a Superior Idea or the superior form of Ideas, the transcendence of Ideas towards-itself-as-towards-their-system or “the same.” However, to really think the One beyond Ideas as such is no longer a contradiction: it is to reclaim a knowledge that exceeds the sphere of thought where the contradiction is possible, where its conditions to be evoked and resolved (its relativity, the relative unity of contraries) are excluded. The “contradiction” comes from what one surreptitiously presumes that the One is attributed to itself, that it is substance and/or attribute, that the One is related to itself qua subject and attribute, but the One excludes any relation to itself, it is not itself “one” in the sense where we must attribute it as unity.
Without delay, one will respond that the conditions of the contradiction and its resolution are always reunited, that the One is only thinkable from Being, its light, its statements and its language. However, this absolutely obvious objection that is “correct” [a la « raison »] – the tradition – the objection that is susceptible of tradition, and for it, is perhaps too obvious to not simply be a prejudice in which we can only get rid of through a “minoritarian” or absolute act, both immediate as one of these immediate givens which constitute our very life, and improbable as one such act must be so for Reason. It is as if – such is the prejudice or reason of Reason, Logos, the Idea, and Being – language was descriptive and/or reflexive; it is as if it solely served to manifest on the universalizing, idealizing, ontological and categorial mode…it is as if it was not itself innervated and traversed by a passive multiplicity on the side of syntheses of meaning. What we oppose under multiple forms, the concept and even the Idea of empirical diversity, is still happening: Greco-Western thought has in any case invented myriad means to surmount this contradiction that it reanimates at leisure, and especially to reunite contraries each time. However, if we want to understand what is no longer opposed to Being or the Idea, which is not one of these “contraries” that philosophy smothers and feeds to better stoke its own turf struggles and violence that it makes the law under the name “reason,” an authority that is immediately identical to Reason without being Reason, what can we still blame it for? Everything, obviously, for the reason because the pacifists and the skeptics are intolerable to it with the absolute resistance that they oppose it and must at any price be enlisted. And nothing, obviously, for the “minoritarians” who are the fragile guardians of their uni-city and uni-laterality. We do not pretend to go beyond this misunderstanding: this essay explores the different aspects of this non-communication that it brings to the dimension of a non-acting, of this minoritarian refusal to communicate with Being, the Idea, the Logos, and the State that force us to speech, temporality, meaning, memory and promise, struggle and exchange. The Minorities of thought are content with marking and re-activating against Being this hiatus or this indifference that Being insists on filling and without which – because this hiatus constitutes it rather – it will neither find nor prove its existence.
Apparently, it is impossible to describe an absolute indivisibility. However, the Greco-Western aporia that wants the relatively indivisible alone to be the object of a logos assumes, in its turn (and this indefinitely), that the logos is relatively indivisible. The modern thought of “difference,” for example, will have refused to break this circle and will be limited to distend and make it unlimited, to render the aporia infinite to “resolve” it. This vicious procedure is its business and life, but it has no pertinence to rule the thought of the One, no validity outside of the circle where it encloses itself. The One is not…to-be-thought [à-penser]: thought as immediate given does not even have the form of an infinite, limitlessly reprojected pro-ject. A Kehre is useless to think the Dispersive that is not “to be thought” [« à penser »]. The one is not only thinkable and determinable; it is actually thought and determined because it is no longer a transcendent unity, nor even a transcendent-and-transcendental unity, but an absolute transcendental given or experience, or by-itself. A unifying-and-unified unity is always at once thinkable (as unified and objective) and unthinkable (as unifying), always taken in a circle that deploys itself limitlessly as an infinite border, as a duplicitous process consequently bi-lateral, adjoining a transcendent side and a transcendental side that is withdrawn or subtracted from the first. It is from this schema, from this classical invariant of circularly determined determination (more or less distended and deferred) that we must perhaps liberate the multiplicities and especially the One. We must cease to conceive the One as the superior form of Ideas or even as the Same or the systematic, finalizing-infinite dimension of Ideas. What we attempt to exclude together are the two complementary versions of the One as transcendent unity: as ineffable, transcendent Unity endowed with religious attributes; and as logical, ideal, relative or (because it is not any such Idea, but the system and infinite telos of Ideas) as relative-absolute Unity.
The traditional existence of a negative henology proves nothing against the possibility of thinking the One as it is and in its positivity. A negative logos is only a mode of the logos, and it only testifies to the proper powerlessness of it, the insufficiency of the ratio and in no way the impossibility of a pre-logical thought, except to prejudice that the logos exhausts the essence of thought, which is the Paralogos par excellence, the paralogism of the logos itself that identifies its relative-absolute character wit the Absolute – and Being with the One. To conclude from negative statements on the One – there are many, here as elsewhere, and negative henology is the “inferior” half of thought – towards the impossibility of a specifically unary thought is to prejudge the extent of “logical” representation and confound its omnipotence [toute-puissance] with the Absolute. Thought spontaneously puts these negations on the account of logos and its power alone, and the highest point of thought, what minoritarian thought attempts to get out of by conceiving the “relations” and “non-relation” of Being and the One, technics and mysticism, and the technologos and “transcendental truth,” on a mode that excludes transcendence, exteriority, the conditions in general where they will become contraries. Rigorously stated, the Idea can negate the One, even though this (de)negation can never be an absolute detachment with regard to the Absolute, and that it would be crossed with hesitations, failures and ruses that betray its secret desire even in its self-displayed assurance. The Idea can also negate itself, an operation that further belongs to its essence, though it would rather do that either to positively divide itself through a pure ideal scission (“Difference”) that precedes, in some way, the negation, or is content with rejecting it on its periphery. However, the effect of the One is entirely positive. The One does not itself negate this omnipotence of the Idea through the mediation of a relation, but to constrain, through an efficacy distinct from a relation and a negation, the logos from negating itself, first avowing its relativity, the necessity where it is dividing itself to reach upon the mode of the absolute that it can attain and tolerate. The positive breaks, and then eventually the negations that then invade the statements on the One, are not the specific operation of the One, nor the indication of the omnipotence or the absolute autonomy of Being, but the intra-logical effect of the relation of the Logos in totality to the One. This is the indication of a lack of the Idea in the One, a lack that is one with its omnipotence over itself – the unity of this insufficiency and sufficiency expresses both in the sui-reflexive nature of the Idea, in its solely relative indivisibility. The negations to which the Logos is constrained as to the One are not uniquely its doing, and if in a certain way they still express their own power, it is as subordinated in the last instance to the One. They have a place within the One through and for it and at the same time (real immanence) without it. If this power is positively reflected in-itself, to be negated as well, and is its power, it rather testifies for the efficacy of the One than the inexistence of the One.
With the notion of a knowledge by-itself or an “absolute” minoritarian gnosis given immediately, one that is non-relative and does not fall under the horizon of the reflected light of reason – the thought tested here must “presuppose” what is in question: to know that the One “is” or acts by-itself. The thought does not claim to demonstrate or explain the necessity and efficacy of the One, this would be to share the specific prejudice of Reason, but to recuse any form of objective demonstration, it is not a question to be justified by a “hermeneutic circle,” by a circle in general (even decentered, deferred, infinite), a general recurrence of knowledge, a plane of being, a plane of immanence or a plane of consistency which is precisely what we want to abandon. To suppose or postulate can itself be understood in two or three senses. The first designates the hermeneutic recurrence of everything in-itself. The second designates the exigency of everything as the absolute system of relative syntheses, for example the infinite determination by the Moral Law in Kant. And finally the third that is immediately legitimated by-itself and no longer within an infinite ideal becoming, expresses the unconditioned by-itself of the One, which no longer needs to pre-suppose a universal plane, which is, rather, the exigence no longer for the for-itself but the by-itself of the unconditioned. To anhypothetical Minorities, unconditioned in the absolute sense, and unconditioned with regard to this whole of techno-philosophical conditions that is Being or unlimited becoming-being, corresponds the apriority of a strictly pre-ontological knowledge that does not take the form of an ideality, as absolutely immanent as an immediate, non-synthetic, non-positional given of itself.
We cannot not recognize that the elucidation of the apriority of this knowledge already presupposes its existence. However, if it is impossible to deny a postulation or a presupposition, we must distinguish between the a priori existence of immediate givens that do not have the form of a pre-supposition, an antecedent and subsequent position, and the existence of a mediate-immediate, relative-absolute plane, of a sup-posed Thing, of a universal that serves as a relatively indifferent presupposition like Being always is. We are in the right to demand that we do not confuse immediate, really immediate givens, with a hermeneutic, “negative” or “deferred” circle that always supposes the ideal transcendence of the logos. The apriority about which we ground ourselves is of the same nature as what we will evoke: it is pre-logical and pre-ideal, an a priori that precedes techo-logical or techno-political knowledge, one that does not have the same structure as that knowledge, an apriority that is neither synthetic and reflexive nor self-positional.
Minoritarian thought has as much and as little reason than Minorities themselves to impose itself in the horizon of reason or the field of theoretical power. It is discretely content with insisting, in the state of “essence” without claiming at the same time – or under the same reason, its own contradiction – to receive the honours and salaries of existence – minoritarian thought will in any case receive them but this will not be its doing nor its will: minoritarian thought has no will. In the limits of this reserve that befits the Absolute, minoritarian thought sees no contradiction, no solution either to a contradiction that does not exist in the One, in the effort to think the One as immanent rather than as immanent-and-transcendent or on the mode of ideality and transcendent-transcendental parallelism. As immanence (to) itself or unreflected, the One no longer transcends “towards” itself through a scission; as immanence “to” the horizon of Being or the Idea, the One conditions it as its non-reflexive essence; as unicity and unilaterality grounded in this immanence, the One is by-itself (and not for-itself) the highest power of determination and individuation.
That the One would be “one with” an immediate or absolutely reductive transcendental reduction, that the One signifies the height of immanence rather than the height of transcendence and the purified empirico-transcendental doublet – this discovery cannot be made on the techno-metaphysical terrain. The techno-metaphysical terrain has always exaggerated itself with pleasure or prohibits the knowledge of the One, reputing it as impossible or contradictory, but doing so through petitio principii. How could this petitio principii par excellence that is Being or transcendence be done otherwise, this principle that is the unlimited desire for-itself, the principle that is condemned to become what it is (principle), condemned to re-transcendence, re-affirmation, return, turning, bidding, escalation, and rising, intensification. The principle that has the petitio for essence does not understand the principle that is without-desire, the principle that is too full, too “desiring” to know desire. Desire is the first and last word, the summit of Greco-Western contemplation, the identity of becoming and Being. However, desire determines the absolute transcendental condition (the One) in exteriority and insufficiently. Its experience of the Essence is not sufficiently determinant because it is principally grounded on the trial of the whole. Desire insufficiently determines the One by confounding it with the bidding of unity, synthesis, and ideality, all which crown Being. Crowned being, crowned anarchy: this is what techno-metaphysics has made the One, just as it has made multiplicities an impressional diversity, the diversity of an empirical passivity, or rather and simultaneously the diversity of an activity, of a synthesis that orders them to the power of the logos or its essence.
The One is a sphere of an absolute “knowledge” that is neither a certitude, nor an adequation, nor a hypothesis, nor even a problematic, but a knowledge (of) itself without modality. This sphere is not an absolute science in the phenomenological sense (that is, still universal), but the sphere of an absolutely pre-ontological knowledge beyond a relative anteriority, etc., … which is already or still contaminated by ontology. It is a knowledge qualitatively distinct from the ontological and deprived of modality, relativity, and syntax. It’s true: the thought of Being was always in self-withdrawal, self-forgetting, it was always the forgetting of Being. However, the thought of the One was even more forgotten, more buried under the excesses of ontology, precisely because, to the One, relative forgetting or withdrawal do not belong and do not co-belong to its essence, and do not make up a system with the gift of the One. The forgetting of the One is the work of Being even if its cause of the last instance must be once more sought in the absolute im-mediation of the One, which is too absolute to be tolerated by Being.
The One is an absolute essence. It is immediate givenness. It does not know the mediation (of itself) of a relation. And, what is in this way given immediately is always the essence itself, the essence as it is and not a content or a property of the object. Inversely, one absolute essence, the Absolute, has the structure of immediate givenness. What is given on this unary mode is always the Absolute itself as Absolute. It is not a content or a property of the object. By attempting to think the One as the real, living, and transcendental principle, we have not reduced it to unity as indivisible ontological relation. Reality, life, the immediate experience of itself, the passivity (to) itself or unreflected, are not necessarily affects or events of Being, ideality, the light, intelligibility, nor the absence of all them, nor the nocturnal brutality of objectivated being, which is only obscure and silent by and for the light.
en-demic 