The History of Philosophy as the Techno-Politics of the Philosophical Order
François Laruelle
In “Les Crimes de l’Histoire de la Philosophie,” Pourquoi pas la philosophie? 2 (October 1983), p.31-42[1]
Thesis 10: The whole history of the variable relations of unitary philosophy and politics through the History of Philosophy [HP] is programmed within philosophy as the difference of philosophy and the State, contained consequently in the dominant paradigm of Polito-logical or Philo-Statist Difference.
Let us assume – with dominant philosophy – that the Philosophical Decision is entirely exhausted in a “becoming”-philosopher. How does one become a philosopher?
The unitary paradigm foresees that philosophy can legislate on the State and the Polis – among other things – but, inversely, that philosophy and the philosopher must insert themselves in the Polis. They are defined by many varying traits, but in any case, by this trait: philosophy is by and for the State, exactly in the way in which philosophy is by and for the One-All (Kosmos, Physis, Totality, Being, All-Text, All-Desire, etc. …). We call “difference” this amphibological relation with variable proportions, but where philosophy is never solely itself, either as absolutely autonomous or as absolutely derived, where philosophy = the correlation of philosophy and the State. This correlation is the essence of unitary philosophizing, assigning it a function of relaying, inhibition, and political revival. The philosopher is man of power – and the man of power – to the exact extent the philosopher tames power and legislates over the city and the essence of power. This invariant allows us to comprehend the political figures of the philosopher as soon as we replace them like its variations: the legislator, the tyrant’s counsellor, the teacher of the “official philosophy” or the State “philosophy,” the representative and the instructor [formateur] of the national elite,[2] the manager and finally the everyday framework of philosophy-for-all, the triumphant figure of our near future. Obviously, these avatars correspond to very different societies according to historicizing typologies and periodizations. However, only one “techno-political,” Nietzschean, rather than Marxist or sociological, perspective can define this course of philo-political or polito-logical difference, the avatars of this love for the State without which the small rebellions of philosophers against their unique mastery would not be possible. The specificity of the dominant philosopher is to have, and by definition, only one Master, therefore the State, being thus condemned to a rehashing of rebellion, tragically proving the finitude, monotony, and the vanity of their unlimited rebellion. A genealogy of philosophy-in-the-university is inscribed also, and without remainder, in this vaster invariant, philo-political difference. It can only be done within the horizon not of the State but the horizon of the conflict between the State and philosophy, on the philosophico-political plane of immanence that does not stop stirring, sweeping, and vanitizing [vaner] philosophers. If, for example, philosophy progressively engages itself in a politics of theoretical assistance for the Encyclopedia, then it is because it is “assisted,” from the baptismal and continuous grounds, by the State and its official institutions. There is no simply philosophical or simply political history of philosophy. All the categories that are useable to describe one mundane history and above all philo-political or polito-philosophical difference are always complexes, overdeterminations.
Obviously, there are several possible uses of this Polito-Philosophical Difference, on the relation and/or non-relation of difference as such or as essence for its “isolated” terms. A “Difference” (here between the philosophical and the political) is determined in general as a mode of withdrawal that we call co-essential in relation to its terms. However, Polito-logical or Philo-Statist Difference becomes techno-political when it is said to neither be philosophical nor political, but at the same time and in a complete reversibility, when it must be called both philosophical and political. The withdrawal of the essence only exists for its account on the mode of the entanglement and overdetermination of these fields whose essence is demarcated. A hypo- and super-political withdrawal, a hypo- and super-philosophical withdrawal, this essence itself becomes what we call a Power Play [Jeu de pouvoir], the becoming techno-political of relations of philosophy and politics, such that it is outlined and continuously confirmed within the State, its institutions, “political philosophies” that it maintains, the HP, etc… under the form of a reciprocal process of inter-section, dismemberment and re-connection of these fields, the intermittency, the disappropriation and carrying-on of philosophy and politics. Their essence is not more than the infinite regularity that is immediately one with the distribution into the ramified network of determinations extracted from these dispersed fields. The essence is not distinguished from this network or is only withdrawn from it to better include it not under but as the regularity that it is. The essence is no longer a process of subsumption of this diversity, but a process of co-sumption, a between-taking [entre-prise] (an “inter-heben”[3] if this word could exist), the equal of this philosophico-political diversity and its rules of distribution. The withdrawal of the essence is put to the service of its integral manifestation or its parousia, only serving to revive a closure to which it is posed as identical, to which consequently it is necessarily ordered anew. This infinite closure is traced, coiled over itself through this infinite attribute, the philosophico-political essence. Perhaps there is a Techno-Political Continent, that is, a substance exhausted by the attribute of this name, even if we can discern an infinity of attributes (techno-sexual, techno-economic, techno-ideological, techno-technological, etc. …). However, there is certainly a techno(-politico-)philosophical attribute, an infinite continuum that is constituted both from within and without philosophical and political institutions and which, to be their reproduction with a near alternation or difference, is no longer already their simple reconduction nor their assignation as irreducible positivities, but the affirmation of their co-belonging, still another thing than a reciprocal implication. This co-sumption is thus elevated, with its own positivity, by the functions of their essence, but, inversely, this essence is in turn exhausted in the reversible between-taking of the philosophical and the political, in their reversible institution or (re-)production, which only walls up Greek Polito-Logical Difference and makes it become what it is.
Thesis 11: The HP has become the element in which philosophy and the State tie reversal relations in general. The HP is the principal relay point in the constitution of the current philosophical order and in the most general project of the (self-)subjugation of philosophers to the dominant paradigm.
Of course, we will describe not the facts but the techno-political essence of the phenomena of power, by otherwise deriving this essence of the unitary-dominant paradigm in which it is the complete manifestation and accomplishment. We can only comprehend the role of the HP as the entre-deux of philosophy and the State by using this techno-political schema. The HP then reveals its strategic function not only in the constitution of the current philosophical order, but in the prodigal historical labour of the (self-)subjugation of philosophers to the dominant paradigm. It is true that from the point of view of the other possible paradigm (the minoritarian paradigm), the philosopher is allowed to use by will – not only this “Nietzschean” or “techno-political” conception of Difference but also its rather “Heideggerian” conception – as soon as the point is to describe the philosophico-academic complex. In any case, it is the dominant philosophy itself that renders possible the archeology of the techno-political ways of philosophy and the types of the philosopher through which both insert themselves into an institution and a State, labouring there, destroying and reproducing themselves there competitively with their own “critical” effects on the State.
There is a philosophizing labour-power, and the HP is responsible, before even exploiting it to the ends of teaching, with coding and normalizing it. Philosophy, like the rest, passes through the “disciplines “(Foucault), through the procedures of regulation which are not directly political, and are so indirectly on the mode, for example, of a certain theoretical treatment of texts or on the mode of a certain moralization of the teaching body, a moralization which is of course as much done on “the left” as on “the right.” Take the question: can a philosophy professor still be excluded from their pulpit, or even suspended by their functions, when they no longer assume the normative ideal of the HP? And why, apparently, can they no longer even do it? And is it the concern of a “progress” of the autonomy of teachers in relation to the State? The HP represents a smoothening of the Philosophical Decision, the disciplinary dampening of philosophical passions. Its modes of subjugation and surveillance are molded within the everyday normalizing practice and without brutality. For this reason, and for another one that holds to its massive intervention, to its omni-presence, the State can abandon the previous forms of control of its philosophical workers and replace them with two others: 1) the continuous insertion of teachers in multiplied instances, responsible for dissolving the brutality of the philosophizing passion to with blows of deliberations, consultations, reunions, procedures that are (apparently) democratic that consist in giving the leash and lanyard to the illusions of liberty and decision, in negotiating a supple but omni-present enframing; 2) the delay to nomination, the tolerable equivalent of suspension, a softened exclusion, in the modern fashion: objectivating or dissolving in the constraints of shortage that is all the more implacable. The multiplication of grades and hierarchies, their maintenance towards and against everything has a wholly other significance than “categorial”: it is the softened form of repression, a selection through the limited number of “entries” but that allow for the exercise masked by a filtration by the norm.
However, the HP has not become a philosophical-and-political programme in competition with the education of the philosopher. It has always been, like dominant philosophy itself. HP is dominant philosophy’s triumph, its growing domination over itself that reveals this old congenital ambition of philosophy under the received aspects henceforth as constraining. For the rest, the logic of the dominant model always wants the statist control over philosophy exercised through the relay points of multiple techno-political procedures of the University, but not without reversibility: the University is also the point of implantation of philosophy on the body of the State. This reciprocal control through the HP as the coupling of philosophy and the university is both an effect and a means of the decline of philosophy. In its current procedures, HP is the positive project of the production of “ideologically” normed and subjugated individuals, and not only subjugated by the State! The HP is the ensemble of theoretical and pedagogical technologies that allow to subjugate individuals not to a class nor even to the State, but to Stato-philosophical Difference as the “major” paradigm. This defines the magnitude of the problem and prohibits one from carving out with “Marxist” or “leftist” means. The stake of the decline of philosophy under the auspices of the HP is the perfection and exercise of a strategy of normalization by dominant philosophy, through the model of Stato-philosophical Difference. Nothing is less “ideological” and more “material” – to reprise these old categories – than the HP as the production of “philosophers.” This dominant philosophy, as we know, has always had by essence several strings along its bow: politics, repression, hygiene, therapeutics, control, etc. … of philosophy itself; they are the relay points of its self-production and, therefore, its decline, the means to get through to its “immanence” and “death.” Even its discourses of rationalization – and finally the HP is a prodigious enterprise of the rationalization of the Philosophical Decision – make up a part of its “materiality,” that is, its “effectivity.” As for the academic “apparatuses,” more and more complex, diversified and ramified, are no longer exterior to the thing. They are put on the spot according to varying historico-political ways, but simultaneously with an accrued control of the HP over the discursive, pedagogical and material modalities of philosophy.
The philosophy-of-the-State is not born and has no history: its local modes, its thresholds or its passages are historical. In the philosophy-of-the-State itself is an invariant paradigm, the paradigm of philosophy as the difference of philosophy and the State, even if it is always possible of grasping it within one of its typical modalities. There was always, by definition, a politics of philosophy entangled end-by-end with a philosophy of politics, but thresholds and level jumps are detectable as the very life of this invariant. For example, the philosophy of the State or the official philosophy is not from the 19th Century. There is another philosophy of the State in Leibniz or Hegel that are very much like Cousin on this point of view. By contrast, there are French, German or Greek modalities, academic or not, classical or modern (19th century), liberal or socialist, etc. … of Stato-philosophical Difference. When did philosophy even seem to become private, when did it stop being official? Is there not something undecidable here? In the same order of example, this political-and-epistemological unblocking of the HP under the “Cousin” effect through which one progressively assists in the constitution of a “disciplinary” hegemony (in all senses of this word) of the HP: rather, it took determinations so that this current figure of the HP, the constitutional State, to emerge, the urgency of unifying the nation and reconciling its classes, French socialism and the struggle against socialism, the recognition of the HP as philosophy itself through Hegel; but they have actualized one pre-traced schema. What about the professionalization of academic teaching, and in particular the teaching of philosophy? This is a recent slogan, but it is also a very old tendency that begins at least with the officialization of philosophy, “beginning” with Stato-philosophical Difference, etc. … Or, again, the question of Victor Cousin’s “eclecticism”: this is determinant in a genealogy of the modern philosophico-academic institution and, among other things, the HP – but to what extent, according to what modalities? Is all of the HP reduced, or not or partially, to “eclectic” origins? Are we precluded by the HP because Cousin spent too long a vacation in Hegel’s country? Or is the “Cousin” episode, with its still badly dried up fecundity, a local determination that makes up a system with a long interminable surge of the HP? There is no absolute beginning, but thresholds…The constitution of the Historian of Philosophy type, who roughly overlaps the academic philosopher, is a whole history. But does the history have a history, or is it simply the self-legislation of the unitary paradigm of philosophizing?
We cannot further entirely explain the becoming philosophy/HP through great projects: National Unity, the Reconciliation of Classes and the Nation around a great project, the Constitutional State at the beginning of the 19th Century, the “National Collectivity” of Socialists and the Business/Nation Interface (Nationalized Enterprise). These are fundamental determinations but they are less specifying than determinant for a given historical moment. The concrete or effective labour is done otherwise even if it is through an overdetermination through this kind of projects. In the last instance, it is the determination/overdetermination paradigm that explains the emergence of these manifest finalities and relates them to the effectivity or the material forms of production/circulation/consumption of statements, discourses, values, and pedagogical codes of the HP.
All of these determinations are called upon, supported and carried away by the unitary paradigm, a paradigm that is only philosophical because it is not “simply” philosophy. It is in this Stato-philosophical Difference that is philosophy as such itself that the discursive, pedagogical, and docimological apparatuses of the HP must be re-inscribed, the discursive modalities as much as the statements that uphold HP in the name of philosophy. It is through philosophy that the HP could invade – from within and without – the entire field of the Philosophical Decision, compromising it, rotting it, circumventing it and, finally, rendering it acquiescent. This is the whole history of the constitution of the current philosophical order. Therefore, the HP is not quit the vacating of philosophy and even less the vacations offered to it replenish itself. It is philosophy itself, insofar as it enters into self-representation and into its effectivity, the mode under which it intends to become “real.” The HP is a theodicy of dominant philosophy, and it is grounded on the statist necessity and excellency of academic paths.
Thesis 12: The HP has the function of managing the shortage of the Philosophical Decision that is proper to the unitary-dominant regime of thought. The HP then forms a “principle of sufficient philosophy” that rules the accession of individuals to a philosophical decision dominated by scarcity.
A typology of philosophers-in-the-university will have at least this effect of bringing into question once more the belief according to which any new type of historian of philosopher, with their own practices, would be a progress of knowledge, the democratization of philosophy and research, a progress in the egalitarian distribution of philosophical knowledge. However, this is perhaps still an effect of the first plane capable of making pertinent a certain contestation that is both Nietzschean and leftist against “progress.” More profoundly and through a second turn of thought: yes, it is very well a “progress” – towards the introduction of “people” into dominant philosophy, but also into the struggle against philosophical moralization of popular strata. But progress is nothing but this, this sure decline of philosophy in its works, in its becoming-democratic, even its becoming-popular.
More exactly, the logic of the dominant-unitary paradigm is to self-inhibit on two modes at the same time and develop two simultaneous tendencies, an irreducible ambiguity that belongs to its essence. The first is a “revolutionary” tendency: each new figure of the philosopher as the inter-statist relay point represents a new distribution of the privileged and excluded from philosophy, coming from the general direction into a superior “equivalence,” a reversibility between the privileged-and-the-excluded. Every privileged by philosophy represents an excluded for another privileged, etc. … and “reciprocally.” And there is a second empirically conservative and more manifest tendency, the “historicizing” and academic mode of the decline of philosophy: each new type of philosopher represents an exclusion, both qualitatively other and quantitatively growing, outside of philosophy, of all those (“philosophers” or not, that is, everyone) who will be assisted by philosophy. This is an inevitable paradox. In the previous mode of the decline, there was a reversibility of the privileged and the excluded from philosophical knowledge. Here, there is an equivalence, an egalitarian distribution of knowledge, but on an (“egalitarian”) mode that is precisely a new form of exclusion. The slogans of the future are: “Philosophy for all! Philosophy, always more philosophy! Philosophical Assistance for all disciplines!” These slogans assume a decline of philosophy through a new type of exclusion of philosophy outside itself and the consumers of philosophy outside of themselves. Historically, it is the HP, through the means of the most egalitarian distribution of assuring the treasure of philosophy, that has the task of managing the shortage of Philosophical Decision whose scarcity is the bedrock, the foundation, of unitary philosophizing in the West. More profoundly, the HP is the slowly invented and developed means by the unitary paradigm to subjugate philosophers and exclude them “definitively” from the Philosophical Decision. Not only is the decline of philosophy the means of self-subjugation by the unitary paradigm, it is its self-affirmation, its triumph; not only is this decline as the HP and under the auspices of a philosophy-in-the-university opposed to the triumph of the unitary mode of philosophizing (wherein it is rather the effective realization) but it signifies a pronounced exclusion of its minoritarian and dualist mode.
It is not that philosophers would be alienated and deprived of the fruits of their labour. We certainly do not propose here any re-appropriation of the Philosophical Decision by “philosophers” against “historians,” nor even another “relation” to philosophy, or another “practice” that is even less a more egalitarian distribution of the treasure of a tradition and fruits of a labour. Rather, we denounce an “exclusion” of philosophers themselves outside of the Philosophical Decision because of a practice of relation to…philosophy precisely. One such practice occurs simultaneously through an over-valuing of philosophizing that assumes, at the same time, all the other possible functions and legislates over them – and a de-valuing of philosophizing reduced to inserting itself within theoretical, scientific, sociological, linguistic, and sexual codes, etc. …
What does the extension of the HP signify? It signifies that the HP is rather sufficient for the philosophers and especially for philosophy itself. It is useless to invoke, as in the 19th Century under Victor Cousin, the sufficiency of a philosophical instruction destined for classes who had a vocation to modesty and humility. It is philosophy itself that decides on its humility, its scarcity, and its poverty. If there is a philosophical “vocation,” it is the vocation of the dominant paradigm that programs by all self-assurance its philosophical poverty. This double excess of an assurance and a modesty that makes up a system is paid in a global and ineluctable impoverishment of the resources of philosophizing, an impoverishment proportional with its extension, with its dispersion over the whole Encyclopedia. On condition of taking the word “sufficiency” in its double sense of vanity and poverty, the HP forms a genuine principle of sufficient philosophy whose “sufficient reason” is but one of the local modes, its “rationalist” mode. The HP is a transcendental “principle” that rules the accession of individuals to an essentially scarce philosophical decision.
Dominant philosophy is therefore in turn dominated by a philosophical law of the rate of profit to fall [une loi de baisse du taux de rendement philosophique]. It is not that it could invert the sense of this law, by limiting the effects, warding it off by some finally yet grounded procedure upon it: it only exists under the form of this law, which is not a law, but is its essence and lack of reality. Philosophizing on the unitary mode is always done by submitting the Philosophical Decision to an exigency of profit and the form of a relation or a rate. And any principle of profit or sufficiency is immediately the principle of the fall of profit or (in-)sufficiency. The HP is but the implementation of this (in-)sufficiency of unitary philosophy, the movement of its realization, the effectivity of this “law.”
The HP is the symptom of a really “inegalitarian” distribution of philosophy precisely because it claims to equally distribute philosophical power over the whole encyclopedia and to all its agents. This distribution particularly has this, producing not two classes that have two heterogeneous practices of philosophizing, but only one class devoted to an uncontrolled philosophical consumption: the other class of the distribution does not exist. The HP has never been but the aspect whereby the unitary, stato-philosophical paradigm, could form an employee of legislation and control-elites, cadres, public service, managers, “cultural” animators of any kind, “intellectuals” too. It is so according to the moment and political stakes. However, the HP was the detachment, the advanced part, the secular arm of unitary philosophy, the spiritual arm and the pedagogical vocation of the State. It is assumed that this worker who encounters their “philosopher” masters as commissioned by philosophy by the State (through Stato-philosophical Difference) can only get through philosophy if it is “introduced,” and any introduction is always negotiated within a history. However, history is itself an old story: in general, how does one introduce the people to philosophy? Through history and through the histories of philosophers. Through the myth (Plato), through the oral and exoteric (Plato/Aristotle), through scriptures (Spinoza), anthropologies (Leibniz), tropologies, essays (Hume), works of “popular philosophy” (Fichte) that, by defect of daring to demonstrate reason, recount their reasons; through anecdotes (the Stoics, Nietzsche), through enrooted and everyday images (the almanac, the pathway: Heidegger), through intellectual games (metaphor). From this perspective, we cannot see the difference in nature between these old procedures and the modern HP. There is a history to make – a probable genealogy of the HP as philosophy for the humble, modest and lay, the archeology of an unbelievable and placid humiliation not of the excluded by philosophers, but rather of the philosophers themselves.
Dominant philosophy can only be communicated and taught if it begins by sharing itself with itself, by depriving itself of itself in a more or less exclusive way, by experiencing itself as deficiency, withdrawal, and lack sometimes; through being spoken of in images, texts or discourses, events and operations where it feels and knows itself to be degraded and that it precisely proposes to surmount, surpass, turn, defer, etc. … These are double operations through which it makes history and lives in hope and unlimited labour. The HP is not only the ensemble of the forms of institutional appearance and coding of philosophy when it serves in the instruction of the “ruling classes”: more profoundly, it is the self-subjugation of unitary philosophizing. Philosophers can no longer be examined simply as “waged” (Joseph Ferrari) and under the lens of a very restrictive theory of wage (Marxist or not: Pierre Leroux), but under the lens of a “broadened wage,” that is, “broadened” by means of power or techno-political means that they are worth being commissioned by the State (including among other things the right to meditate on one’s loss). More generally, under the lens of a broadened wage with the bonus of a possible intervention upon the real and a “profit” of the Philosophical Decision correlative with their scarcity. One philosopher for one wage, but don’t be stupid: the interpretation or the transformation of the world integrally makes up a part of the philosopher’s wage.
If the minoritarian paradigm implies a bankruptcy of the pedagogical relation, of the relation to philosophy and the relation in general – it is possible that dominant philosophy is particularly concerned at heart with limiting this bankruptcy, giving it two extreme unlimited limits, but limits all the same, of poverty and excess, establishing a general or rather restrained economy of the philosophical decision. One economy: a certain compensation, complementarity, equivalency between, for example, the magisterial production and docile reception of statements. Perhaps the point is to understand this: every communication in general, as soon as it is grounded upon a relation, an exchange, a physics and an economy, even more so the pedagogical communication of philosophy, implies a noise and a seepage in the message, but this seepage, which is always limited and contained, locally corrected, is still much better than the minoritarian bankruptcy of any pedagogical relation. And if there is one such loss proper to the communicational relation, the HP is the means of limiting it and economizing at best the more or less reversible exchange of statements. The HP is the best possible management – the management itself – of the philosophico-pedagogical relation when philosophy takes on the dominant form of a Relation, when it strives to limit from a relation the minoritarian “in-communicability.”
[1] For what precedes, readers may result to my blogpost entitled “Waiting for the Human Philosopher,” where all the theses that precede and come after thesis 10-12 can be referred to. – Trans.
[2] On the problems of the philosophico-pedagogico-political complex, on the question of a political history of philosophy, one should consult, when they appear, the suggestive works by Patrice Vermeren. On the case of Victor Cousin and the birth of an “official philosophy” in France, adapted to the problems of a constitutional State and a liberal Society that destines the philosopher to instruct elites, Vermeren implements a “techno-political,” rather than “Marxist,” method and institutes what is necessary to call “an archeology of philosophizing.”
[3] A portmanteau of the inter- and the Aufhebung. – Trans.
en-demic 