Translation of François Laruelle, “Interview with the Editors of La Philosophie, en effet,” from Le Déclin de l’écriture (1977)

Interview with the Editors of La Philosophie, en effet
François Laruelle in conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
In Le déclin de l’écriture (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977), p.244-277
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Jean-Luc Nancy: My question will be one of readability.

First of all, from the most superficial point of view, your text is at least very difficult to read, which is not, however, due to esotericism (a system of allusions, encrypted indications) but to what I will call “hermeneutic clarity” of theoretical discourse when it tends – asymptomatically – towards its absolute auto-construction.

Indeed, erected on the most rigorous, even the most exacerbated mode of theoretical discourse (propositional, thetic, analytic, demonstrative), your text is given entirely as auto-referential. What is otherwise important (in particular Nietzschean and Derridean texts) is not by chance almost always deprived of references and citations: the words of authors that you intend to repeat and re-invest have been in advance detached and re-elaborated into concepts of your discourse.[1] (Undoubtedly in an analogous fashion, the operations of your previous work, Machines textuelles, are here reinjected as acquired results detachable from their place of production, from their text).

Thus, reading you seems to require a psychological disposition that would be, in fact, a philosophical disposition: an intense memorization that allows for the accumulation of conceptual traits without remainder. A reading without forgetting: how does one think this with Nietzsche?

In closing: in your text, the economy of concepts (consequently definitions) comes back in the last instance to “elements” that hold themselves outside-of-definition (libidinal, machinic, intense, textuel), but that are nonetheless posed with all the properties – all the effects, at least – of the concept. Must we read everything like a parody of conceptual discourse that, for you, is a matter of aggravating or activating deconstruction? Is auto-reference itself “fucked up” [se « défoncerait »] in this parody? One can only lend this parodic hypothesis to you however, with no guarantee in your text. – Or must we see in this conceptual functioning the consequence of your refusal of the text’s “primacy”? In this hypothesis, your text without textuality – neutral, strictly referential to things that your concepts present – is it itself the libidinal, the machinic, etc. (or their exposed meaning)? Yet does it still read? And thus: do you not fulfill the metaphysical desire of what I will call the automatic writing of (or by) the thing itself (here, the libido)? Is it, indeed, the desire of the unreadable?

François Laruelle: My response will be one of un?readability – a way of throwing back and displacing your question: I only displace it from an interrogation to place it.

First, “absolute auto-construction.” Why not? I dream of Fichte, infinitely more rigorous than Hegel and the moderns in their approximations. And Fichte teaches me that systematic theoretical construction is the means to decompose the transcendental illusion. By having a lot of “transformations” near the starting point and ending point, I suggest decomposing this modern form of the transcendental illusion that is the linguistic representation of the text. But, it must be said: is this not for the benefit of the Ego, nor for that of faith, duty and labour?

No, for the benefit of power and the libido: the “rest” of textuality once it is deconstructed in its appearance (appearence [apparence] to speak its necessity). This is what authorizes me to refuse the “auto” (autonomy) as much as the “absolute” of this construction: precisely, the terms by which you intend to send me back, completely against my will, to the metaphysics of “absolute subjectivity,” the heavy make-up of the libido [maquillée au plus de libido]. As much as others, I tried to not waste Heidegger’s lesson and work on the “margins” of this “epoch” that we designate as the epoch of “absolute subjectivity.”

Your question proves to me that I have hardly succeeded – even though failing on the margins would not be without interest. This is precisely what Heidegger says of his Kantbuch: “those who think will learn better from their failures.”

However, this detour through Fichte and others – by chance the (concerted) terms that you throw to me – makes us go a bit quick, making me flee in the face of your question. I will present the thing otherwise.

I am not shocked that you suspected a parodic use of the most (construction) and the least (theses) classical theoretical apparatus, but I am shocked that you hesitate to attribute it to me. Is it because I have a rather imperceptible humor…? For I’ve not stopped noting, here and there,[2] the care to only construct one such theoretical dispositive in view of destroying it, as nothing destroys itself: including within itself the possibility of its heteronomy and its destruction by its “remainder.” It’s another way of making a central thesis play out: the subordination of textual values to a-textual libidinal values (but not brute ones, I’ll come to this).

If your insight hesitates here, it’s no doubt because I wanted to be imperturbable in theoretical construction as much as in the destruction of the theory: in the same gesture, something like an objective humor. Yet because you lent me this unhoped-for word: “auto-reference is ‘fucked up’,” then it is obviously a matter of “fucking up” theory [« défonce » de la théorie]. In all senses of the term: as a drug, poison, theoretical intoxication, the flow of theses and concepts, the “trip” (a way of “wandering” or going nowhere); but also as smashing the theoretical fundament and foundation. This debauchery of theory leads me nowhere: this is what some reproach me of – and what encourages me to persevere.

I now come to my essential reason, but it always has to do with theory as a “pharmakon” (cure and poison together). Take the problem: how does one use philosophy (theory) without making an idealist use of theoretical means (you know the problem, it’s not quite distinct: how does one get drunk off pure water?). I find the solution formulated “in” Nietzsche, concerning his “genealogical hypotheses” (the foreword to The Genealogy of Morals): how does one push these hypotheses to the absurd, and the hypothesis of the “will to power,” without falling into absurdity, that is, into nihilism?

As already said (in the first chapter: Minoritarian Politics), there must be an “intensive” practice of theory, a theoreticist deviation, an excessive practice of theses (in fact: perhaps the thesis is not at all a theoretical instrument; it marks a practical intervention – and soon enough a political and libidinal intervention – in theory). Above all, there must not be a theoretical half-will which would precisely remain nothing but a willing! Let theoretical practice go to the end of itself, that is: let it go to the limits where it rubs shoulders with it without passing into the beyond-theory [l’outre-théorie]. It’s something like a super-theory that is not the beyond of theory, but its supplementarity or its excess power, the “absurdity” of the “will to power” as a limit (a transcendental limit: both internal and external) of theory as will to power! To make a dispositive baptized as “Machinic Materialism” into a power, a partial power, therefore, and partial even when it goes to its limits or draws all of its consequences in the field (the “Foll Body” [Corps plain]) that only contains its limits for all content. Theory as an affirmative drive is no longer opposed to non-theory or affect, it is consumed as affect. This is my way of “deconstructing” the theoretical codes, of making them work, of destroying the theses, and conducting the critique of theoreticism.

However, if theory by itself forms a dispositive of drives, nothing prohibits one (there is no law here, this is not a question of right or fact) from introducing – as breaks of these drives – any such term or concept, drawn from the most diverse fields of research, strictly subject to making them function (making them produce effects) within the “formal” conditions defined by this problematic. And for example, to make the “will to power” work as “libido” (occupying and displacing the positions of the “Freudian” libido). This means that with all the statements in my text, you can consider them either as citations (without reference) or as original statements, but when I recopy or parody them in another…Of course, this opposition doesn’t interest me – at least as an alternative. I prefer to see myself attribute this practice as “unique and split”…

All these responses are schematic, but they indicate some problems (that we must cut here) to throw back elsewhere.

If you admit that the use of theory proposed here is a use of a drive that is both active and affirmative (grant me my intentions, and admit that I am no doubt obliged to grant you the insufficiency of their realization), then the question of unreadability is ruled in the principle and in its two aspects:

a) There is an unreadability proper to theoretical construction. This text demands a great contention of mind and memory, indeed. I cannot displace or defer this aspect of your question. Receiving it full force, I turn it back to you without putting more form into it, or just the formula of a question that I cannot retain. You’ll excuse the somewhat rude simplicity, the vulgarity: have we lost the taste and courage to read texts ten times more inconsumable (they only become consumable by dint of the tradition) than the Science of Logic, the Wissenschaftslehre or the Ethics? Should this text be easily consumable because it is modern and written in the style of the day? This question is disarming and devious: it is not without bitterness, even if the comparison that it invokes, without having the right to it, crushes it on all sides. I reclaim the right to be difficult in excess in analysis and in excess in the synthesis of problems.

b) But I didn’t pose my conditions for the reader if the stake was nothing other than theoretical – if I didn’t know that this difficulty of reading also had a wholly other possible meaning. Why do you think this text requires a memory without forgetting? A barely “Nietzschean” memory and without the chance of being an anamnesis? In fact, it is this effort of memory that I postulate for the reader, the reader is greater than you dare, that you fear to imagine them: perhaps you stopped your objection too soon – for my taste (it’s this blocking of the question that produces the opposition or alternative). For my problem, once more, is to lead memory to its limits: in excess of tension or hubris in memory, to which the forgotten benefit comes like nature and grace together. Therefore, we must not quickly block the demanded effort, to have the right to a wholly other pause, something like, coming to it, a Gelassenheit – why not? This requires many readings, a reiteration of readings: a unique reading…

This is why I write “un?readable” somewhat other than you did, you who no doubt has some appearances and reasons to reduce what I attempt to lead readability – namely, the non?being of readability – to the pure and simple unreadable. Here, there’s a formidable equivocity or a very interesting misinterpretation: all that I call Différance – as it happens the Différance that conditions readability, its un?readable – is what you interpret as the contrary of the readable, or the brute or primary thing of desire, as if I would fall back into the opposition between the concept and the intuition without concept! What I call libido is above all not justifiable by this opposition, not more than the opposition between textuality and the “a-textual” libido (a thesis is not an opposition, it is a subordination), not more than the opposition between primary and secondary processes. Where you subordinate “the desire of the unreadable” (the metaphysical, even, indeed), I “willed” the un?readable as desire – which is more, you’ll agree, than a reversal of your thesis. Where you impute me with an “automatic writing,” I spoke of a “machinic writing”: under this (perhaps involuntary) wordplay is hidden a confusion between two very different functionings of the unconscious. I use “machinic” to occupy and displace the categories of the automatic, the machinal, and above all the technical (= objectivating). And I could even sum up all these investigations by the distinction between these two unconsciouses from the point of view of writing or textuality that they render possible (I’ll leave the “automatic” with you: not more than me, you don’t take the unconscious for a telephone…).

And why do I want to enclose myself in the opposition: either the “pure” meaning of this purely conceptual text (the machinic as the concept of the machinic) yet henceforth unreadable, or textuality? You seem to admit that my refusal of the primacy of textuality implies – this is decidedly the postulate that settles your whole question – a naïve return to the raw atextual, to an intuitive and primary materiality (if not to one of the primary processes[3]). But I carefully distinguish between the unavoidable of/within textuality and the primacy of textuality that I recuse as being, in the last instance, the primacy of the signifier. The proof of the fact is that this book only bears on this status of textuality (in its linguistic components and components derived from linguistics) in relation to what differs the dominant character of this linguistic representation. I believe to have said and demonstrated that I don’t consider, in the flippant way of some, these problems of textuality as useless. This is precisely what I try to make understood: we must be given the means to “cross” the opposition where you try to enclose me, and through which I attempt to make a movement pass. Not only is there a de facto deconstruction of my text, one that is more or less “involuntary,” a permanent slippage, a reiteration and a displacement of the “same” signs (this phenomenon is further noted in Machines textuelles), but, from the point of view of my “intentions,” we must retain your hypothesis of “parody” (this term is left to be rethought).

However, this is the critical point of my relation to you as to Jacques Derrida, and what arouses in you this lifting of pairs of opposites in which you clutch me and where I attempt to make my exit – I try to construct and practice, from positions that are not yours without being their opposites (positions, I repeat, of a topological vicinity), an intense deconstruction, that is: without the labour of the signifier. Or, rather: a deconstruction for which the labour of the signifier and the value of the “signifier” would no longer be, as they are for you, unavoidable (even if one were to precisely “deconstruct” them). There is always a labour of the signifier, more or less concerted, and, as it happens, rather less than more, yet not making it into a rule, and granting it effects by (Nietzschean) chance that you lean on but that I hesitate to call “logocentric” or “semantic,” here massively returns…Therefore, I also have another definition of the logos than you, or, rather, the “illusion” or the objective appearence that dresses Différance. Everything changes…depending on what we both practice by “Différance.” Here, it suffices to say that I do not at all identify “Différance” (the correlation of an active Resistance and an affirmative Revolution) with a re-inscription of the signifier, but I identify it with a re-incorporation of drives that are exercised through it, identifying it with their subordination to drives that are capable of governing or resisting the signifier – resistant to the imperialist extension of what is nothing but one of their functional properties (obviously the signifier is not “imperialist” or “fascistic” in itself, but through its indefinite extension, through its becoming-dominant, through its police).

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Jacques Derrida: Of some questions that support an enterprise as singular (I don’t want to qualify it here otherwise: it interests me first as such, as a unique perspective on the more-than-totality of your “space” that is nowhere else represented; this uniqueness, in the worst of cases, would be a more or less probable combinatorial formula, the “break” that associates – according to a still unheard-of order – already readable, already formed elements or quantities in the screw; in the best of cases, that of the strongest, most affirmative force; but I suspect, perhaps you do too, this alternative and it otherwise leads me to my question), I only retain this question: the opposition, if it is one, between the textual and the a-textual plays an organizing role as much in Machines textuelles as in Le Déclin de l’écriture. What you call the “libidinal or desiring break” (MT, p.257) is the condition of this “opposition,” for what it breaks with, this “text” or “textuality” that you oppose, is this not still a very classical (metaphysical, logocentric, etc.) notion determined through an onto-logics of the sign, what allows you to speak of the text as it is a “being” (MT, p.256), “the being (the text, the linguistic value)” (DE, p.204) and textuality that is Being (ibid)? Is this only a strategic passage in demonstration? Do you not believe that an effective crossing of deconstruction, a différantial generalization of textuality, no longer lets itself be understood in this discourse or in one such opposition as one of its terms? Said otherwise, is this what you do not hastily (surreptitiously) reduce the value of text towards its most recognized limits today (by you, in particular, hence my astonishment) to better oppose it with an a-textuality that sometimes resembles a lot of what I would be tempted with attributing to textuality. From there, if it was thus and cannot be a matter of a conventional question of terminology, how are you directing this movement? What are the effects? What consequences? I limit myself to this question because a very great number of others seem to depend on this one, and to not “extract” too much, distracting from the very singular enchainment (scene and intensity) which you drag us along towards.

François Laruelle: Your question raises, from its first into its second moment, a very precise doubt. And this doubt bears on the meaning, moreover on the value of these investigations. You “by definition” suspect (you taught me and you even suggest it here) the questions of originality and the propriety of a thought. Yet they still jingle, a bit far away but very audible, in the oppositions that you cushion the snare of rigor.

To be quick, I advance all that follows as the schema of my response. On the one hand, what I call “textuel” and above all “a-textuality” is really distinguished (such that you understand it) from what you call “general textuality.” This is not a terminological question: being given (my) “positions,” it’s enough to “generalize” textuality or writing to connect the text to really a-textual functionings. On the other hand, this difference (in the use of Différance) cannot signify any claim to originality because, as you know, this gap where I keep myself in relation to you is one where I think “Nietzsche” and others hold themselves as well in relation to you.

Rigor makes me conclude that I have no philosophical existence. What interests me is not a certain practice (to evaluate for itself or in its effects) of writing, but the type of affect where my practice of writing is verified as experimentally. I therefore make an all-rounded arrow, being but one machine to launch once more to what it catches on the fly, a kind of machine that has (a more sophisticated) type of bow or sling, one that is sometimes a frond or a cannon. This is why, in defect of existence, presence, or property, (I have) a “philosophical” insistence. However, it is precisely this insistence, this trace or larval existence that you guess that I lack, as if I would reconstitute despite or because of myself, an existence. You are right as to the produced effects, even though they depend a lot on the reader. As for the theory, I here would explain myself without any simplicity, risking the appearance – under the cover of launching some questions following you – of a “resistance” or a complicated system of “self-defense.”

1) I’ve not made one such consumption of “concepts,” yours in particular, simply for the doubtful pleasure to repeat you. How could I hope, even for a bit, to compensate the wasting of force of your practice when I apparently make the “theory” of it? For a secondary benefit? I only repeated you by trying to inject in your signs and make an interval here and there play (for example, in the use of the mark “différance”) that, I grant you, can remain problematic from the point of view of its real effects – to evaluate, but this is an infinite task – not from the point of view of the intention to which it responds (poorly, obviously) and that we must affirm anyway that it is a divergence, but it cannot be a negation or opposition to your work. I’ll talk about the interval soon.

2) What you invoke of my text is not its effective labour of analysis or construction, but only one thesis: it proposes to subordinate textual values to (libidinal) a-textual values. Like any thesis, this one serves in tracing a directing line at the same time as a line of demarcation (what I call the “General Line” or the “Desiring Oblique”). It massively sums up and anticipates a whole work that is more nuanced and – I use this term on purpose that you made a fate of – “micro-logical.” Therefore, it is what risks at any moment of obliterating it.

Without reckoning that a minoritarian-machinic, rather than dialectical, thesis as already said (first section) does not pose an opposition or contradiction, but only a subordination. A subordination can always obviously leave place for a new mastery or domination, as it happens of the libido (over the linguistic phenomena of the text) having become super, hyper or macro-signifying! But I have very regularly included in this dispositive (first section) that the theses are always abstract and, in fact, function as material syntheses, as theoretical and impulsive processes. And to note this transformation, I oppose (no, exactly, I don’t oppose) the sovereignty of libidinal materiality (“over” the hierarchical form and “dominance” of theses) to the primacy (dominance precisely) that always poses a thesis when it remains isolated, abstract, and not related to a material process.

3) I now come to the main point: what unites me to you from its distance. You see that I only trace a line of divergence in relation to your work to better annul the originality of mine.

As you note, I give myself (among others in this thesis) a linguistic definition of textuality in terms of the “signifier,” in short: the common representation of the textuality of the text, as raw material of my work, as the matrix of the “ideological” image of textual functions. Therefore, the point is to both critique and transform it. I do not “reduce” the definition of textuality to now recognized limits, I only make it a starting point. Like you: for it’s an inevitable datum, all work can only begin from this logocentric matrix of textuality.

Here, it is what I strategically launch as the operator Being/being, textuality as the being of the text-being! For we must provisionally distinguish from our departure between textuality (general, by definition: the Being-textual of the text) and, on the other hand, the text as being-textual. I say: through strategy and provisionally, for if I advance this operator, this is in no way to reduce you there, knowing the labour that you did concerning Heidegger. Not even in this schematic on p.256 of Machines textuelles where I say – but is this contradictory? – that, on the one hand, deconstruction in effect “delimits and exceeds ontological destruction” (this is an acquired point, an unavoidable advancement of the conjuncture) and that, on the other hand, it makes textuality turn “around a being: the text.” I agree with you that this is a summary formula. It needs to be said, from my point of view, that it turns around one being or a being – one to the extent where the signifier was not ex-propriated by the most critical way possible. However, this is an interpretation, I suppose, that you formally contest. Thus, let’s continue, for here, the status of the signifier is the most critical point.

This operator has the advantage of condensing in an indicative fashion a whole chain of problems. It is a functional operator, to work and transform, even if it were against Heidegger (it doesn’t belong to him!), and that it depends on us to fulfill the determined significations at the discretion of our labour. Linguistics, for example, makes the Being of the text turn, or textuality (“general” in its own way and by definition, being that is Being) around being understood as, let’s say, the signifier. Such that you understand me, you yourself make general textuality turn, this time, around these marks: “différance,” the “gramme,” “clang,” etc., which no longer emerge (entirely? This is the problem below) of the signifier.

Of course, what we call (general) “textuality” will change theoretical and practical scope according to the type of interval around which one will make it “turn.” The theoretical and practical “definition” of the Being-textual of the text will depend on the theoretical and practical “definition” of the ontic moment of the text. Thus, what I will call textuality, indeed, a-textuality, is distinguished from what you call general textuality in the strict extent where the employment of the “term” Différance is distinguished from yours.

For here, from my point of view, is the problem: my starting point is necessarily the same as yours (and because…), a certain representation of the text. But I believe to distinguish myself from you by the type of “labour” or, rather, the critical transformation that I make the signifier undergo. The critique of linguistic logocentrism being indissociable from the critique of the ontico-ontological primacy of the signifier (and primacy in general), I attempt to defer the signifier (and therefore, by way of consequence, general textuality) by the means of an interval in which we know that Nietzsche made the quadrangle of his circle of the Eternal Return: active/reactive, affirmative/negative (concerning the meaning of these terms, I refer to Nietzsche and his commentators). It is on the point of this labour of transformation that “I” diverge from you.

Now the crucial question: is this interval the same or not the same as what you specify each time as différance, gramme, clang, or as this “dissemination” that you very precisely say that is “affirmative”? I respond: this interval is not the same, and yet I assume a practice that has the same “syntax,” the same gesture that is “unique and split” of Reversal and Re-inscription (that’s why I say, since Machines textuelles, that I cannot pose the problem of desire or the deconstructive “subject” to you, that because “deconstruction,” “your” writing, has the same syntax as Nietzsche’s Eternal Return: it is this that I baptize the term, as borrowed!, the “machinic”).

Then, where is the difference in the use (the theoretical and practical use) of Différance? Or the ontic interval that commands general textuality?

It is first in the terms that you reverse, in the Reversal, thus, before being within Re-inscription. You reverse, within the linguistic image of the text, from the signified to the signifier (to then re-inscribe the signifier in these marks: différance, pharmakon, etc.). “I” propose to reverse, but on the margins (already, since the reversal) of this linguistic image, from the reactive drives to active drives: from the outset, the signifier itself – which nevertheless can reverse the primacy of the signified – is but one property of a certain subordinated type of drives.

This is why, in the operation of Reversal that I attempted the analysis of and to exclude a whole surreptitious reflection of the signifier, a first certain “re-inscription” is already included, arguing that we must thus proceed to not then have to postulate the unity of the two operations afterwards.

That this claim to derive immediately, from the outset, the signifier and linguistics in relation to an unconscious of production, in relation to genetic intervals or to a différance that would not only be affirmative but equally active (subordinating, therefore, the signifier to the relation of drives among them), poses some obvious problems – I know this just as much as anyone. But it is not up to me to do the reader’s labour. As for yours…it’s enough to say that by substituting “impulsive activity” (in Nietzsche’s sense, which must seem to be mythical and theoretical to you) for textual practice or the labour of the signifier, you are assured a critical rigor and a practical power from which I catch a glimpse of the objection that you suggest to me in return to a certain ineffective logocentrism.

To parody your style, I will leave this objection “to work”…against me. To say it:

a) What I call the subordination of textuality to a-textual values (active-affirmative drives) is nothing other than this double re-inscription of the signifier, and is not above all something like an opposition of the libido to textuality. A-textuality differs without negativity textuality. There’s no return here to the brutality (brutalitas) of primary processes naively erected against signification, language, textuality, etc. I wonder if the contrary objection does not in fact return to presuppose the old argument of language as the necessary medium of intuition. With Nietzsche, we are finally within the conditions to liquidate the expressive primacy of “language” and the theoretical primacy of linguistics (the timely age where there was a “pilot science”…! It was a visual piloting…).

I sum up everything in a formula or a slogan: textuality is said of the libido, not the text.

 b) The theoretico-impulsive apparatus here mounted seems to have a specific property: it is apt to not reflect the signifier in its very re-inscription. It seems to me that strict “textual” Deconstruction cannot escape from this reflection, for it, the work of the text is done around values that I owe, on my side, much to and in virtue of the reflection within them of the signifier that is nevertheless re-inscribed there, denominated as “textual” (but not signifying), to distinguish them from what I call, intentionally reprising the term, Différance, but one that is a libidinal and political (all the more différantial) value, only bringing into play forces or drives according to the correlation of Activity and Affirmation.

This is what allows me, without forcing the terms – I believe – and doing so without contradiction, to “reclaim” the “project” of deconstruction, but upon positions that are not your own, because, in the last instance, they are libidinal, not linguistic. Therefore, cast off, a bit by way of friendly provocation, and to record…in the signifier the trace of a labour that I admire more than any other for the rigor of its effects – I cast the term “intense (desiring, minor) deconstruction.”

4) Hence, some words concerning the (premature, as you can imagine) evaluation of this enterprise.

With you, I suspect the alternative in which one will attempt to enclose me, sometimes playing with the banality of my elements, sometimes with the singularity of their “force” assembling (already! Some have accompanied me with the great “parasitic/arbitrary” air: this kind of thing is always played by a two-chorded instrument).

a) In a sense, no, there’s nothing original in these texts, as soon as laziness claims to decompose them in their minimal elements (themes, categories, intentions, influences: deleuze, derrida, althusser,[4] which hardly makes a civil state) – forgetting that the paleonomy (the différantiating repetition of old concepts) is the condition of critical efficacy. Is it a matter of a combination of philosophes that form our conjuncture and commanded by the order of some signifying chain? I thus formulate the problem to suggest to you what you know: that the oppositions you evoke and where I drag you along despite you and despite me – these are not of your style. Rather, I would speak of a “combination,” hoping to have returned the signifier on the theoretical plane at least (but this is what worries you) to the Nietzschean order of chance, for everything changes, a bit (and not necessarily in the meaning of a problematic originality) as soon as the dice are shaken and thrown: for, by throwing them, is this not enough to utter [piper] them (preferring to pass for trickery or treachery, you have understood, rather than for imitation [épigone])? The philosophical game has some rules, but the transformation of these rules is the stake of the game – according to an interval that is not inscribed on the faces of any die. There are always pre-inscription and data, but nothing is definitively pre-inscribed. This is our chance, this is my faith (I cast this oppressive word, reserving me to explain myself thereon elsewhere or to make a spell, chance and destiny together of it)….the specific faith in the “Nietzschean” libido, the “belief in the future” – which distinguishes me from what you have not and constraining me to another functioning of re-inscription, less sober than yours.

b) And, in a sense, yes, the intention of the strongest possible destruction of some prejudices of our conjuncture – in particular, the primacy of the signifier and the text – btu too affirmed, too voluntary to not lack its affair and produce, therefore, unexpected effects (or too expected) of the logos, what I must grant you.

At this point I break, because we must break to not conclude, and that I agree with you, this is a worrying that is not explicitly formulated in your question, a suspicion that I discussed everywhere and stated since the Introduction of Machines textuelles (is this enterprise a regression in relation to deconstruction, a resistance to its effects?) and to which I also attempted to respond…I won’t repeat myself on this point.

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Sarah Kofman: Reading your text, one sometimes think to Spinoza: not only because of the quasi-“mathematical” character of the exposition, because of the well displayed positions and “clearly” stated definitions; but also because the whole “apparatus” makes one think to a genuine war machine destined to “defend,” in all senses, the access of your text, that is, to defend you. It seems, as Nietzsche said concerning Spinoza, that you arm your philosophy “encased and masked…so as to strike terror into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pallas Athene!”[5] Do you admit that your project, among others, is to “petrify” [méduser] the reader, that your text has an apotropaic value? That, at bottom, your text has to do with Oedipus and castration, perhaps more than with Anti-Oedipus? Does your conception of the libidinal and your reading of Nietzsche allow themselves this type of reading by you? For if, on one side, you write, “Language functions like an unconscious of production, the functioning of language is subordinated to the functioning of the unconscious” (p.96) and also “All writing is the betrayal – of and by drives” (p.99); and, on another side, you immediately add “this thesis is deduced from the “primacy” of materialist theses over machinic theses” (p.96) and “these indications come back to the following problem: language is a libidinal multiplicity that assumes the ‘Foll Body’ physiologically specified here [in Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 247]” (p.99). These are supplements that annul by displacing and re-evaluating them from affirmations that can be Freudian or Nietzschean. Do these permanent displacements of your referents not risk masking differences?

François Laruelle: Why not Spinoza – two times “excellent”: once as a “philosopher,” the second time as “materialist” – because it was a question of Fichte?

On condition, I’m with you in this identification, of not separating the armor of style and thought “itself.”

My text is obviously – like any philosophical text – nothing other than a war machine: but one of attack first, rather than defense! No: of flight, rather than defense: a “resistance machine” (leave the mechanists to the mechanisms of defense), for, finally, if one attacks the signifier, the text and some other fetishes of these times including castration, from a strategy put in place for a long time, it’s not only for self-defense or for the pleasure of giving reason by antiphrasis to castration, but, for the “primary benefit” of producing a new political affect in relation with a drive of theory, to “feel” otherwise, like Nietzsche says, all these things that make up our conjuncture.

I move on from the war machine to the armor of style. There is always armor in style and in any philosophical practice, but what object does it defend? That I “want” to petrify, stop and suspend the reader, rather two times than once. However, the armor that I (dis)cover myself with does not cover or covers nothing. This is what I claim; it hides no hinter-world, not even this guardian and consoling authority [instance] of the phallus. The un?readability that I systematically affect (not yet enough to my taste) readability with, this kind of sterility, barrenness, or resistance to the codes of reading, it is necessary to say with all that follows that, in my intentions at least (one can always suspect them because this text is throughout a lapsus, but that’s your business, no longer mine), they are not explained by castration, by negativity, nor even by absence nor lack. This armor, this sterile shield, are so little disguised that they bear a precise name in this text: the name of the Foll Body. Among other functions, the Foll Body fulfills the functions of sterility, resistance, the “defense” of writing within writing, or better: of desire within and against writing. Not only does the Foll Body resist castration and the signifier (psychoanalysts, to your couches), but it resists textual values: it flees and this active fleeing (to distinguish from the flat concept of resistance that assures the psychoanalysts that they are right) is more trenchant than a frontal attack; it flees through the Ego, the signifier, etc.

The Foll Body: round and flat like a shield. We need to evoke, in Nietzsche, the paradigm of pregnancy [grossesse], for if one among you said that he wanted to write like a woman, I, rather, would write like a pregnant woman with a full, sterile and prickly style. (The child is not a hinter-world, and nothing is more “sterile” in a certain sense than pregnancy.[6]) Therefore, are we sure that Nietzsche’s text on Spinoza lets itself be deciphered by the schema of castration in the sense where this code would be capable of making it produce all these effects, and the most active, the most affirmative ones? One such interpretation is no doubt always possible, together with throwing onto this text the pierced net of castration or varying oppositions, but I arranged myself so that the fish would be both bigger than the biggest stitches and smaller than the smallest nets. That it reels in one of Medusa’s heads is nothing of a miraculous catch…

Maybe you’ll contest the interpretation of this fleeing effect and you’ll put it among the effects of castration? You are in a system of thought that, not only like Nietzsche’s that always has movement to go further and “free” itself from counter-objections and responses, but one that further will always be right by the means of the universal code of castration. Is this not what is worrying? You know like me that, apart from a few technicians of the unconscious to whom this code of castration gives a non-negligible power of intimidation, everyone becomes irrelevant in this regard and hardly any longer believes in this gadget, under its current form at least. I will not fight against it any longer, I do not refuse it, and because you object to me that to not believe in it precisely proves it, I contented myself, depending on Nietzsche’s counsel somewhere, with… “diverting my gaze…” You triumph: because one diverts their gaze in the face of Medusa? However, Nietzsche adds and it’s enough: “…Instead of negating and to affirm.”

Therefore, in one sense, there is always castration, but we must subordinate it to affirmation, that is, to the production of desire, where it is nothing but a secondary effect. That the reader feels castrated by my style and protests, they’re right: but we must not conclude too quickly from the effect to the cause, always too massive in this kind of conclusion, because castration changes function and status. Rather than the axis of the system, it becomes a peripheral event, but all the more visible and sensible: it is what gives rise to all misinterpretations – well-founded ones, consequently – concerning this text and motivates its deciphering by a series of very classical oppositions or contradictions of metaphysics.

A peripheral event. On the one hand, the point is to turn castration back against itself (“castration of castration,” this is even one formula from Clang): we must be Freudian up to the end, that is, exactly: against Freud. On the other hand, this castration of castration is the underside or the effect – not at all the “motor” – of a positive movement of desire that doesn’t need castration to function.

That the here “willed” theoretical style will no longer be the style of simple or molar castration, that it seeks to produce political effects that one will call trans-phallic, therefore does not exclude certain effects locatable under this code. I’ll even say that this positive – but invisible by definition and always tendentially to come – movement only advances under the cover of a procession of destructions. This is why I philosophically go nowhere (this “Machinic Materialism” that I actually affect myself with, like a conjuncture, is rigorously indifférant to me and must only be evaluated by its effects of the occupation and cleaving of positions of Dialectical Materialism – it only asks to be loved like destiny…All this is audible for an ear formed by the Nietzschean inaudible).

Castration, as a system, interiority or code, it works and displaces itself. It’s what the most innovative minds of these times do – those who attempt to close the epoch of the signifier. You see that this text claims more from an Anti-Oedipus (this expression is very unsatisfying by its massive or molar aspect) than an Oedipus. The “Nietzsche” that I draw some of my effects from no longer lets himself be read, if not very locally and in a reductive way, from the analytic codes, even if they were “super-coded,” of the signifier. I ask – but this work has been admirably done here and there – that one evaluates the analytic codes, the quality and the value of the drives that manipulate them and appropriate themselves: one will see that they are not innocent. To evaluate them is to defer them (Différance = Activity + Affirmation, in their Nietzschean definition). The “Eternal Return” is the syntax, the mode of articulation that differs, from this “positive” interval, the automatism of Freudian repetition, and even the signifier and the combination of the signifying chain. As for the “Will to Power,” it is both the concept of a drive that, as active, differs the reactive-dominant Freudian drive (insofar as it has a goal and an object) and the concept of a libido that, as affirmative (and negative, but negation is precisely subordinated to it), differs the concept of a “natural” libido. With Nietzsche, we are able to think an unconscious that would neither be a natural energetics nor technical (= signifier).

I no doubt explain that, reading this text, you perceive it as a permanent equivocity, if not a contradiction between my referents: Freud (but precisely he is not at all here a referent) and Nietzsche: that you inevitably read the word “pulsion” in the Freudian sense, then that you apprehended Marx, Nietzsche, even Althusser in the expression “machinic materialism.” And that even you force your sentiment to make yourself the reader’s advocate. However, these are precisely codes of appropriation and identification of philosophical categories that I attempt to put back into question – not having to transmit any message (if not as a strategic one with a polemical effect against these codes and the philosophies that they command), but, rather, a movement that – let’s repeat – only passes through the successive breakdowns of mechanisms of thought with which the reader believes to be able to walk.

Thus, the categories of drive, unconscious, libido, etc., never have here a Freudian sense, or never have a solely Freudian sense. The concept of drive that I advance is only a local theoretical dispositive to occupy and displace a classical Freudian position; in the same way that I attempt to “displace” (occupy + split [re-fendre]) the “signifying chain” by the “machinic chain.” The meaning (direction, movement, and effects) of these words is defined – provisionally – within the problematic of Machinic Materialism (thus, in the first section, by which one must despite everything pass to avoid the overbearing misinterpretations concerning the “concrete” labour effectuated in the third section).

I don’t see what would prohibit me from changing the meaning (…direction, movement, effects) of philosophical categories, of making them function otherwise, in an otherwise differential dispositive, of breaking (= determining) them and casting them back by others (for example, the category “materialism” by the category “machinic”), of producing more or less unexpected associations in which the reader can eventually affect themselves with.

Said otherwise, we must rethink in a Nietzschean context what this paleonomic constraint: namely, the necessity of determining otherwise, for a new effect and through other internal-external relations, the meaning of an old concept, one that is therefore not annihilated but transformed, worked on, and cast back. To the extent that Nietzsche avoids the oppositions of the concepts and does not at all believe in the contradiction of two meanings of one same sign, paleonomy is required by him as the critical means par excellence to displace, defer, and split an old signification. That’s why drive, here, does not only have a Freudian meaning (to say it according to the “machinic” schema constantly practiced in this text: the Freudian sense of the word drive is identical to its Nietzschean sense that is unilaterally distinguished from it, therefore, or “on its side”).

I understand that the minds that need certainty only very moderately appreciate this kind of somewhat coded exercise (truly speaking: with other codes than the usual). But that’s their business. One can always refuse what I attempt (here, in a still too theoretical way, in Machines textuelles in a more practical way), namely to make “theory” and its apparatuses a use of the flow or the drive (without goal or object) and affect. But if one profits from this refusal to decompose this movement and these machinic language games in a series of fixed positions, and therefore contradictory positions, to whom is the responsibility?

To think is a drive, a body and a passion, nothing other than that, and it is the only way to make thinking thought or material thought. What I call the fusion of the libido (the main side of the hierarchy) and the theory of the libido (the secondary side) no longer emerges from a materialist position, but implies in the last instance a becoming-material of thought (differently from the comical materialists of the 19^th Century who exited thought from matter, like the rabbit from the hat. I don’t exactly attempt to put it back: the relation is a bit more complex). You recognize with me that the materialization of thought itself is the only politically serious objective of philosophy: most books of philosophy, which can hardly be read without disgust, are of the most frivolous and most spineless writing when it is nothing but “theoretical,” when it is the genre, if you will, of “philosophy gets out at 5” and neatly avoids problematizing (rendering problematic) their readability (the tradition, its categories and its apparatuses, protect their authors against this concern).

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Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: It seems to me that all the questions that I would have asked you condense themselves around this one – unfortunately, a central question: what about the machinic – that is, as well, the libidinal (yet I prefer, as simple economic measure, to attach the things on the bias of the machinic)? You don’t indeed stop affirming, and in all possible ways, that the machinic is beyond the technical. This is a bit – all things being equal and if I understood well (but we will come to make it a question for you) – as if the problematic, in its reflective power, is beyond the theoretical, that is, the thetic, for, in the same way that you define technics (I’m citing you) “in the sense that Heidegger made us familiar as an activity of objectivation and representation,” you engage under the name machinic materialism the problematic of the “processes of production (my emphasis) where materiality is not economic, practical or signifying, but libidinal, and whose motor (again, my emphasis), is Différance, rather than contradiction.”

But since when, in Heidegger’s sense precisely, does the essence of technics let itself be reduced to an “activity of objectivation and representation”? Since when has it nothing to do, not only with production itself (Herstellung or even poïesis) but again with what Heidegger names the Ge-stell – what I would propose, for lack of something better, as the equivalent of “installation,” but which brings with it all the values of the position, thesis, stature, stability, etc.? Therefore, what can be, regarding the deconstruction of metaphysics (for it is rather this that is in play, no?), the strategic privilege granted to the machinic that is itself ordered to production and, therefore, this is at least in the order of possible things, ordered to “installation”? What are the chances of a destabilization of the thetic, the theoretical, the positional, etc., if, in hand, it is “installation” that predominates, or if your discourse must fix itself on the value of production? Do you not renew by aggravating them the major presuppositions of “technical” ontology up to “producing” – I am very constrained in turn to come back to this – this type of discourse that one can rather consider as, in its own way, “hyper-technicist,” with all the effects – philosophical and political – that it (just like its “easy” and “spoken of” underside, etc.) cannot fail, today, to entail?

François Laruelle: Indeed, one can bear the question’s blow on the category of production with what follows. On the one hand, that’s not necessary (it’s now interesting and strategically effective because, as you know, it’s at the heart not only of Marxism but ideologies that attempt to occupy and displace its positions). On the other hand, we are nevertheless required to make it a necessity.

Is this to make a return, return to Marxism and to a certain onto-theo-logy of production?

That’s your doubt, and the wound, you think, that you put your finger on.

I respond “paleonomy,” once more. That is, by a certain practice (to determine, depending on what interval? On Différance, thus said) of the old terms that make up our soil. And what is older, more fundamental as well for us, than this value of “production”?

However, the rigorous exercise of paleonomy requires being systematic. One can always create new terms, but adding to culture is no longer my strong suit than yours, and for a long time the problem is no longer to capitalize culture and create new values. No, it’s more exciting, more risky too, to proceed with provocation (here, theoretical, but nothing is ever solely theoretical) in terms of the prejudices of the conjuncture. Do our times want the libido? Let’s give it to time, and beyond-measure, but not only beyond-measure: there are always minds, sorrowful of being on the sidelines, who see the escalation and outbidding where a phenomenon plays that I will call – obviously conforming to this libidinal point of view – intensification. Precisely, I do not at all understand this term in Heidegger’s sense in his Nietzsche: we must not be pressed with extension, capitalization, and the accumulation of energy. Rather, it is the fluency of a writing or a machinic thought that frees us from the capitalist task par excellence of having to proceed in the theoretical order to a primitive accumulation of concepts, that we know at what price this is done. In short, we must subordinate the beyond-measure and excess to a “qualitatively” new functioning (what I call the machinic syntaxes precisely) of the “same” concepts.[7]

Provocation consists in systematically going to seek out the adversary of the moment and to combat them on their terrain of predilection, but from, if not another terrain, at least from “the terrain”?…of the Other! Therefore “from” the libido, more than ever, but not quite the one we’re waiting for: hence, to seek a concept that would neither be natural (energetic) nor technical (the signifier) of the libido (this neither…nor is the objective ideological appearence that covers or masks the effective displacement). “From” production too, but to proceed towards a diversion [détournement] of the theoretico-practical apparatus of Marxism. And precisely because all of Marxism is an ideology of production, it’s the term, this “sign” that we must take back at risk of the worst misinterpretations (but this is a constitutional risk, I’ll come back to this, inscribed within this practice of paleonomy). Two gestures are indissociable here: attacking the fragile points of a doctrine or text and conducting this operation systematically.

But what does “systematic” mean here? Before you respond to the point of “production,” let me pose this question of the “systematic” in my own way.

Can only one gesture combine, without defeating or recognizing its powerlessness, discursive theoretical practice, the labour of the signifier, and the affirmation of desire? What scene or text can arrange and contain the thetic style, the deconstructive style, and the style of the impulsive flow, that is, the productive forces of modern thought? How can one do this without falling into the accumulation of codes, not more than in the over-exploitation of practical and theoretical means? Without closing up in one system the problematic unity of these styles? And without resorting to this diversity as the solution of powerlessness? What “system” of carve outs or articulations will give a superior coherence – neither theoretical nor thetic, nor practical, excluding the specific closures of these styles in the moment of their intervention – to this triple factor?

I propose two solutions that support one another.

1) First, to practice each of these styles “up to the end” and without reserve, to not above all attempt to limit one by the other according to one carve out in extension (in terms of the “object,” the “theme,” the “level,” ordinarily or scientific recognized properties of the object, etc.). And, for example, to utilize the style of the thesis for “vulgar” objects or for the waste of traditional philosophical discourse. Inversely, to treat under the lens of the games of the signifier the worthiest objects, for example Being. Here’s the rule: it is possible to put any such “method” in relation with any such object provided that this method would be systematically practiced and truly speaking generalized.

What remains to be determined is “what does this mean,” or rather, to determine the effects of “at the end,” “systematic,” and the “generalized.” It’s nothing other than what I’ve called a use of the drive of theory, or a “willing everything” (Nietzsche) of theory and varying styles. But why must we not confound this systematic practice with an over-exploitation of the stylistic codes and textual means?

Few problems are as important as the one to evaluate the literary labour of the Avant-garde and their genuine historical signification. A confusion reigns here: the confusion of the superlabour extorted by the signifier, with which one will call an intensification-destruction of the signifier considered as a code, and this confusion reinforces a certain nihilism of textual practices with the appearance of having surmounted it.

Considered as an agent of production, the signifier sees its labour systematically appropriated by the tasks of the capitalization of meaning or, which is not quite different, by the tasks of the de-capitalization of meaning. And this doesn’t concern metaphors…The extorsion of a surplus-value of non-meaning doesn’t get us out of a situation of the servitude of the signifier. The “literature” of a good part of the Avant-garde doesn’t escape from a certain hypocrisy. On the one hand, it’s a tautology to want to make the signifier work. By the practical definition it is given, the signifier is made to work and be worked on: as the worker, it is made to work and be formed by labour.  On the other hand, the overexploitation where it keeps the signifier, prohibits it from destroying, in the signifier, what can be destroyed: precisely its functions of destruction and transformation of the signified, the “nature” against which it breeds the signifier, and the way in which it fixes it to appropriate itself. Literature is damned to breed and educate the signifier in view of these predetermined tasks, or to store it. On the one hand, to only destroy it up to the point of keeping it in servitude, making it feel enough for it to hold on to existence, that is, to hold on to its functions. On the other hand, to sufficiently maintain it so that would be capable of reproducing itself.

Nothing is less metaphorical: in the textual nihilism of the “literature” most conscious of its means, and a philosophy already less aware of its real goals, signification or meaning sometimes function as a nature to destroy, sometimes as a capital to augment. If possible, these are the two functions that they simultaneously fulfill in a complicity where the only effective result is that the signifier is conserved to be exploited. This literature and this philosophy live and conserve themselves from the destruction, now, of what they live on in a previous epoch: the epoch of the “signified.” They therefore reconstitute one another ceaselessly or capitalize effects of meaning and effects of non-meaning on the basis of this destruction. In this cynical game, someone must really pay for their person, and it’s the signifier. They compensate for the loss of the signifier due to its formation or reproduction, also due to the textual labour, with a status as much as maintenance fee, and paid in the daily wage and with values in progress. Marxist values: “practice,” “production,” “transformation,” “labour,” “process,” “apparatus.” Linguistic values: difference, and structure. Said otherwise, they pay for the “labour” of the signifier with a Marxist and linguistic theory of this labour. It’s therefore a wage that is only worth its power to hide the tautology that it lives on and the real devaluing of its value: it is responsible for appraising its money. This is the wage of Zarathustra’s monkey. In a sense, to rethink the term, the labour of the signifier is a political problem and a political symptom.

2) I then propose, and it’s the same gesture, to articulate these three styles in a hierarchical system, for they are not valid for one another, they are not indifferent as nihilism would like. They form an open yet constituted system of subordinations as soon as they function “intensely.” As one will suspect, this intensification of styles is nothing other than their non-extensive “generalization, the production and reiteration of “all” effects that they are capable of. And that’s nothing other than their subordination, the constitution of these hierarchies that each time, and for each style, is its way of going to the end of what it can do or drawing from each moment “all” its effects.

a) Therefore, an excessive [à outrance] practice of theory as if all the objects, effects, and means should pass through its form – an excessive [excessive] practice of theory, its stylistic, demonstrative, and ostensive means, a joy taken from the concept and the thesis, from the kind of abstract and humoristic anarchy that results from the multiplication of the concept. Here, we will only see the theoreticism that the theoreticians lacked, the theoreticians or the “dialecticians” of semi-willing and who did not know how to “render” (…) all their effects to theoretical practice. We will only see here the sophistry that the sophists succeeded in. And don’t hesitate, for example, to place desire under the form of the thesis, nor, in concepts, vomit, nausea, and all secretions carefully repressed or abreacted by the specific organization of the Body of the Logos, because the logos is a body, and even, among others, a spermatic body. This changes the nature of the relations of desire that we have with theory…and gives a whole new meaning to logophilia. To make theory a hubris, each thesis a possibility of desire, each concept of way of blocking the intellectual coherence and launching affect: this is a conception that is both immaculate of theory and maculate of desire…

b) However, to also deconstruct these theoretical positions systematically, the turbulence of textual labour is penetrative here. Not only games of the signifier, but an “authentic” deconstruction (I understand this in the rigor of its procedures and the ferociousness of its practice and effects). In the re-inscription of theory under the condition of the values of the signifier and values of the deconstruction of the signifier, we must still go the furthest, the most systematically furthest possible. This is the only chance to de-theorize theory and prevent deconstruction from becoming a simple technical procedure among others. In this labour, there is “some” deconstruction, even if it is sometimes inapparent, being included – as we will see – in a de-doubled practice (of deconstruction).

c) Finally, to in turn re-inscribe this textual re-inscription in another “system” of intervals, those that bear the affirmation or revolutionary production, in another style: the style of the reiteration of simultaneous disjunction, an “impulsive” style (in the “Nietzschean” sense and to abridge a problem that remains to be thought[8]).

The passage from the first to the second hierarchy is as easy to think, and as difficult, as the passage from the second to the third.

To say some words concerning the function of deconstruction such that it intervenes here, one will note that it separates the “theoretical” style and the “impulsive” style, that it crosses their very immediate relation such that it is now done a bit everywhere,[9] for it’s clear that the correlative style of impulsive affirmation, the style that “would correspond” to an unconscious of production, risks at each moment borrowing from the paths of the most traditional syntactic codes, the codes of the transparency of the signified, “writing” being neglected – but returning as the implicit postulate of a transparent medium of signification – for the (good) reason that the effects that it is accountable for do not exhaust the production of desire, and that the goal without goal of the whole operation is to produce desire rather than effects of meaning, the signifier, or reference.

Deconstruction’s intervention functions like a guardrail against the immediate confusion of theoretical practice and desiring affirmation, dissociating the theory of desire and the desire of theory, subordinating the first to the second (theory as a dispositive of the codes produced by and against the drives), therefore placing the reality of the unconscious of rebellion in a wholly other relation – a transversal relation (I’ll return to this) – with the thetic, conceptual and demonstrative coherence.

As for the relations of the textual re-inscription and impulsive re-inscription of the text, they complicate one another and, simultaneously, become problematic. As one will see, not only does deconstruction reflect itself in the style of “Nietzschean” affirmation by accentuating dehiscence and the breaks, making it lose – very partially, if I judge it after your reactions – its possible, threatening interiority of theory. Yet, this is the first point, the dominance or, rather, the sovereignty that I recognize an impulsive re-inscription of textual procedures with does what deconstruction in the “strict” or “textual” sense splits under the form of a double and unique deconstruction that is called “desiring,” a deconstruction that includes within it, as rigorously unavoidable, the “strict” or “textual” deconstruction. The express labour of the signifier is never useless. It is at least strategically necessary to unsettle the framework, postulate, or the firmest soil that the theoretical, ethical, ontological, or other codes prop up on, namely: the (code of) language and the diffuse conviction that language is not a code but the origin of all codes of all codes, the obliged medium of all our relations to being and various referents.

To know if deconstruction really subverts this belief, it is capable of in turn transforming language (and hence the text) into a simple code, belongs to another order of problems[10] even though they concern the relations of the two deconstructions that we here advance the principle of.

But I perceive that, without wanting to and on the record [par la bande], I will define the use that I make of the category of “production” by defining this conception of “labour” or theoretico-textual “practice.” To say it explicitly, however, and respond to this precise point of your question:

a) “The” machinic (its syntaxes and its libidinal materiality) or “the” problematic are not “beyond” the technical. They cross it and possibilize it in the active-affirmative mode. This nuance is capital for what follows.

b) Like you, I place under “technics” not only objectivation (my project is not to define the technical or reprise Heidegger, but I’ve also not specified the “configuration” (?) of the “meanings” (?) of this “word” (?)[11]) but the varying “kinds” of representation: the theoretical, the thetic, stabilization, installation. And “production,” why not? I grant you all this (and therefore the necessity to deconstruct the historico-systematic epoché of “production”). Except that you know, like I do, that this is a bad, a (very) metaphysical way of speaking and ruling the problems. “Production” is not more non-technical than it is technical. Rather, I’ll write it as non?technical (as above, un?readability). We “must” say (at least) this: the cleaving (Différance = the Other = Activity + Affirmation) from the technical to the machinic (to the Other) passes through all these concepts, among others and to only take this case that occupies us, through “the” production. Therefore, there are at least “two” (?) uses of production, but the border will be moving and fluent (by definition of the libido) from one to the other, and, as I’ve already said, it will not be an opposition. And if you ask me which one I play with, what production matters, I will respond to you in a breath both/either one and the Other and/or one or the Other, taking flight on the point of feet and abandon you to the racket of the signifier.

The value of production is not univocal, in one sense or another, it is precisely its heterogeneity (it is crossed by an irreducible border, the border of the Foll Body that goes beyond it) that renders it strategically effective (ergo, politically effective). This is why I don’t hesitate, consenting in this constraint of the moment that I make a necessity out of, the long chain that enchains me like a destiny, to play “beyond-the-measure” of theoretical, indeed thetic discourse, and to make an excessive use, as you’ve seen, of the technical means of philosophy, but to bring them to their non-empirical, transcendental limit in desire. Thus, subject to – this changes everything from my point of view – that this hubris put to philosophical technics should subvert or relate it to the Other. Therefore, this is not an over-exploitation or super-labour of theoretical productive forces.

As you’ve said, there remains certain “philosophical and political effects” that this style “cannot fail, today, to entail.”

Provided by the previous responses and this response, I pose that these political effects of recoding (“new” theses, “new” problematic, the pathos of the libidinal, etc.) to which I give an occasion, approaching too close to the adversary, would be the mis?interpretation [contre?sens] of (my) “positions.” On the one hand (what effects exactly do you speak of? For, perhaps, we do not ourselves propose exactly producing the same ones? From where do we determine them?), they perhaps will not be all ineffective (this is why I write mis?interpretation) against the philosophical and political state-of-things (do we have a common adversary? We’re not even sure) that we want to tear down. On the other hand, they will be partially motivated, I’ll grant you this, by this text: setting aside the vigilance I postulate in the reader, we must reckon with the main possibility of mis?interpretation that belongs to them – to therefore discount with their efficacy – but according to what arithmetic, what criterion? I’ll come to it.

There is a drift of intentions from this labour to its effects, from theoretical means to the appearance – coming now – of their final failure, this failure, it seems, that puts you in the posture of interrogation. I make an enormous consumption of theoretical means to produce what? New involuntary theoretical effects, and therefore doubtful “practical” effects? In short, a trap that I close upon myself? Yet that’s the law of this drift that interests me (Différance) and it is by definition masked under the produced effects, the appearances, the illusions, the disguises, what I call the objective (ideological) appearence. I can only present this law and can only present it by falsifying it. Hence, I’m interested in a lineage of thinkers (Fichte, Nietzsche, Heidegger) for whom misinterpretations committed to their work structurally belong to this labour.

That’s why I’m afraid of a philosophy that would pose a criterion of the last instance of its own, of its definition. For example, the famous criterion of practice, which functions too often in Marxists as it was self-transparent. I fear that a certain does of idealism is not re-introduced by this angle, and by the Spinozist formula of truth as index sui et falsi. This Reference to practice is not without a hinter-thought, for you, “deconstructors,” you do better (never completely, by definition) by blocking this drift of intentions towards effects, the drift of illusions or misinterpretations – through an unstoppable practice of the signifier and what leaves little chance and little room [champ] for bad faith. It’s on this point that I will break, voluntarily recognizing that this (split) “practice” does not have the massiveness, too often generic massiveness, of the Marxist political “practice,” but by conceding to this unstoppable practicity, I “oppose” faith (I won’t come back to this term), flight, and affect. If there must be a criterion (not of the last instance [dernière instance], but against all authority [toute instance]), I prefer the criterion of affect to the criterion of practice.

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[1] This took place since the beginning of Machines textuelles where the “will to power,” for example, was named “the intensive libido,” but what does this nomination mean?

[2] Nearly in each chapter of the First Section.

[3] The entire end of the chapter, “The text as a formation-of-sovereignty and partial textual objects,” envisages and responds to this objection.

[4] All lower case in original. – Trans.

[5] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 5 – Trans.

[6] It would be necessary to compare this sterility with sodomy as the means of Sadean sterility.

[7] On this problem, cf. chapter: “Textual fluency and stroboscopic writing,” where this is examined in detail. [p.111-126 – Trans.]

[8] This problem is examined in the Second Section.

[9] This is the problem of the fusion of the libido and the theory of the libido, posed in Chapter 1.

[10] Cf. The response to Derrida’s question above.

[11] I am not sure as to why there are question marks here; my assumption is that, because it is on the record, there may be some transcript issues with the words and their recording into text. – Trans.