TRUTH AND GENESIS

Studies in Continental Thought

John Sallis, GENERAL EDITOR

CONSULTING EDITORS

Robert Bernasconi William L. McBrideRudolph Bernet J. N. MohantyJohn D. Caputo Mary RawlinsonDavid Carr Tom RockmoreEdward S. Casey Calvin O. SchragHubert Dreyfus Reiner SchrmannDon Ihde Charles E. ScottDavid Farrell Krell Thomas SheehanLenore Langsdorf Robert SokolowskiAlphonso Lingis Bruce W. Wilshire

David Wood

Truth andGenesis

Philosophy as Differential Ontology

Miguel de Beistegui

Indiana University PressBloomington and Indianapolis

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2004 by Miguel de Beistegui

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beistegui, Miguel de, date

Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology / Miguel de Beistegui.

p. cm. (Studies in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-253-34392-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 0-253-21671-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Ontology. I. Title. II. Series.

BD311.B45 2004

101dc22

2003027302

1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04

Or cest proprement avoir les yeux ferms, sans tcher jamais de les ouvrir,

que de vivre sans philosopher; et le plaisir de voir toutes les choses que notre vue dcouvre nest point comparable la

satisfaction que donne les connaissances de celles quon trouve par la philosophie.

Ren Descartes,Principes de la philosophie

For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, tis certain it must lie

very deep and abstruse; and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, must

certainly be esteemd sufcientlyvain and presumptuous.

David Hume,A Treatise of Human Nature

vii

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

PART ONE. ONTO-TAUTO-LOGY:THE ARISTOTELIAN LEGACY

1. The Origins of Onto-tauto-logy 29

2. Absolute Identity 77

PART TWO. ONTO-HETERO-LOGY:THINKING DIFFERENCE WITH HEIDEGGER

3. Eventful Being: On Ereignis 109

4. Abyssal Being: On Time-Space 141

5. Intersticial Being: On Dif-ference 168

PART THREE. ONTO-HETERO-GENESIS:THINKING DIFFERENCE WITH DELEUZE

6. Physics beyond Metaphysics? 187

7. The Renewal of Ontology 221

8. Virtual Multiplicities 248

9. Smooth Space and Volcanic Time 290

Conclusion 335

Notes 341

Bibliography 375

Index 381

ix

Preface

This book is concerned with a vast and perhaps overly ambitious ques-tion: What of philosophy today? Of what is philosophy (still) capable? Towhat can it aspire? Faced with the extraordinary success of the sciencesand the increasing fragmentation of the eld of knowledge, philosophy isat a turning point. It can no longer be the universal and unifying scienceit once was. But, for that matter, is it condemned to link its fate to that ofthe various sciences, and await from them its own direction and task?Worse still: will it, one day (sooner rather than later), become redundantand disappear altogether? Or can it nd the resources to reinvent itself, todelimit a new task for itself?

This book speaks from a sense of crisis and urgency.It asks whether philosophy can still be envisaged as a legitimate and

fruitful enterprise, and at what cost. That cost, as we shall see, is heavy,and the work awaiting he or she who wishes to follow me on this difcultjourney certainly hard. Why? Simply because the sense and destinationof philosophy I wish to advocate here is at odds with what I would call itscurrent minimalist interpretations. It is a sense born of the refusal to limitphilosophy to being philosophy of science, of art, of politics, of the hu-man, etc. While essentially concerned with science, art, and all the rest,philosophy cannot be reduced to reecting them within the element ofthe concept. Contrary to a common assumption, philosophy does notmerely reect on the discoveries, the data, or even the presuppositions ofother disciplines. Why? Because the essence of philosophy is concernedwith one thing, and one thing onlybeing. To be sure, being is at issue,decisively so, in every region and every discipline. It is at issue, though, insuch a way that these disciplines cannot appropriate it as their own

Preface

x

object. This is because being is a thing that is unlike all other things, anobject unlike all other objects. It cannot be delimited as an object, ortreated as a thing. To say that philosophy has being as its object amountsto saying that its object is precisely the difference between being and allother things, in which being itself remains implicated. The sole object ofphilosophy is this unobjectiable difference. And so, yes, philosophy isconcerned with everything, or with the All, but from the point of view ofthat which, within it, escapes the grasp of things, and of our own dis-course inasmuch as it conforms itself to such things. If philosophy is in aposition to relate to these various elds and disciplines, and even, some-how, to hold them together, it is on the basis of a problematic that is itsown, and in a way that does not so much presuppose these elds andareas as it opens onto them, returning them to their unspoken and un-thought origin. If philosophy is attentive to what all other discourses andpractices say and do, it is rst and foremost attuned to that which, inthem, remains only implicit and unsaid, and yet absolutely decisive.

To the charge of ambition, this book pleads guilty. It is rst and fore-most an invitation to revive the sort of ambition with which philosophyonce identied itself. The terms of this ambition, however, havechangedirreversibly so. For reasons that will be made clear, philosophycan no longer aspire to be the primordial and grounding science it oncethought itself to be. It can, and must, however, reclaim its ontologicalheritage, albeit at the cost of a radical and demanding transformation. Assuch, it nds itself in an ambiguous relation to classical, Aristotelian on-tology, which I shall need to clarify. In this new conguration, which Ishall refer to as the massif of being, philosophy is the science of the up-hill. Philosophy is uphill from all knowing, much in the same way inwhich being is uphill from beings. The essence of being, however, consistsin its own hurtling down, or its own becoming thing. Such is the reasonwhy philosophy spends its time working its way back up the slope thatthe sciences go down. Philosophy is, in the end, a matter of inclination.

No doubt, in its desire to reclaim an old heritage, in its ambition to set-tle the issue regarding the place of philosophy in relation to classical on-tology and science (as well as art), this book is asking for trouble. Nodoubt, there are many points that would benet from further clarica-tion, many thoughts that would require further developments. No doubt,there will be many readers who will object to a number of diagnoses andanalyses made in the course of the pages that follow. No doubt, there willbe many specialists who will object to my treatment of their area of spe-cialization. I welcome these objections, with the hope that they will indi-cate a desire to at least go down the same road as me, and help me furthermy own reection. I am well aware of how insufcient are many of theanalyses I develop. Oftentimes, I have had to negotiate a delicate balancebetween detailed work and general conclusions or diagnoses. I hope I

Preface

xi

have not sacriced the former for the latter. For all its ambition, this bookis, in the most literal sense, an adventure, and an experiment. It raisesmore issues than it can solve, clears paths that it perhaps does not alwaysfollow all the way down. It is imbued with the certainty that philosophycan reach heights and breathe an air that no other discourse can attain.At the same time, however, it is shot through with uncertainty regardingits outcome, and its ability to convince.

This book is not just ambitious. It is also long, and the language it usesoften complex. Its length and complexity are the expression of thebreadth of issues that are dealt with, and the nature of the problems ittries to solve. Its division in three parts, which, up to a point, can be readindependently of one another, and in whatever order should providepause and relief to the tired reader. While long, this book is, in manyways, incomplete. My only hope is that this incompleteness indicates agenuine breadth of problems and anticipates further work. It is only arst step, hopefully in the right direction.

xiii

Acknowledgments

This book owes a debt of gratitude to many. To John Sallis, rst of all,who expressed an interest in the manuscript long before it was nished,and whose force of persuasion turned out to be decisive. To DeeMortensen, whose professionalism is a source of immense comfort. ToRobert Bernasconi, whose generosity and philosophical integrity havebeen sources of inspiration. To my colleagues Andrew Benjamin andKeith Ansell-Pearson, whose encouragements and friendship I havetreasured over the years. I would like to thank also Vincent and ElizabethMeyer, Annick and Juan de Beistegui for providing me with the peaceand quiet so desperately needed, Simon Sparks for his invaluable skills asa reader and translator, his precious suggestions and supporting friend-ship, and Ray Brassier for his uncompromising materialism and challeng-ing position. Finally, I would like to thank Meica for her unconditionalsupport and understanding in times of doubt and ill humor.

TRUTH AND GENESIS

1Introduction

The possibility of upholding philosophy, of identifying and demarcatinga task for philosophy today takes place against the backdrop of a cur-rent situation, the origins of which need to be exposed.

With the birth of philosophy as the science concerning beings as suchand as a whole, or as questioning beings in their being, Western philoso-phy asserts itself almost from the start as the twofold science of natureand rst principles, as physics and meta-physics. It is, on the one hand,concerned with beings in their becoming, and the concept of fsij des-ignates the whole of beings insofar as they are subjected to the move-ment of generation and corruption. If Aristotles physics is a science ofmovement, it is not in the modern, restricted sense of a mechanics, but ina broad sense that includes the processes of generation and corruption,coming into being and withdrawing from presence. Physics is a kinetics,but the concept of movement here presupposed involves change ortransformation in the broadest possible sensein the sense of becoming(metabol). At the same time, philosophy is a science of beings in theirbeing, where being, this time, is opposed to becoming, and equatedwith the primary causes, or rst principles. As such, it is meta-physics, notjust in the sense in which, chronologically, in the order of Aristotles text,it comes after the investigation of nature, but in the sense of the scienceof being beyond beings, beyond beings in their mere becoming. It is inthis latter sense that philosophy also becomes onto-theology, and that itrevolves around the concept of ousa as designating beings in their pres-ence (or permanence) and essence. Almost from the start, being takes onthe twofold trait of presence and essence. Decisive, in this twofold natureof the philosophical inquiry, independently of the orientation it gives to

Introduction

2

the entire history of philosophy, or at least to its dominant, Aristoteliantradition, is the way in which physics does not amount to an autono-mous science, but one that is supplemented and illuminated by meta-physics, the unity of the two constituting philosophy as metaphysics, orontology, in a general sense. This originary twofold and constitutivesense of philosophy is one that has often been ignored or forgotten in itsunity, and philosophy has all too often developed one of its senses at thecost of the other, ignoring its other side, to which it remained nonethe-less bound despite itself. My goal here is to address philosophy in its(meta)physical unity, and to argue for the possibility of philosophy asontology, thus remaining faithful to its initial Aristotelian inspiration, yetin a way that presupposes a radical break with the solution and generalframework of Aristotelian metaphysics. With classical, and specicallyGreek, metaphysics, this book shares the ambition of philosophical dis-course as bearing on being as such and as a whole, on beings in their be-ing. Yet, against the backdrop of the basic structure of classical ontology,determined by a twofold principle of identity and permanence which therst part of this book will bring to light, it seeks to construe ontology onwhat could tentatively (and ultimately inadequately) be called a prin-ciple of difference. It is on this concept, which designates something heldin reserve in classical metaphysics, and thus also a certain excess, that theunity of ontology as meta-physics will be afrmed.

Yet this beginning unfolds only against the backdrop of an onto-historical situation, which I must evoke here briey. The project carriedout in this book can be understood only in the wake of the followingevents. By events, I mean not actual, datable events so much as funda-mental tendencies and epochal shifts, continuities and discontinuitieswithin a single history.

It is not until the birth of modern physics in the seventeenth centurythat the Aristotelian legacy begins to undergo a profound transformation,and this in such a way that philosophy, while positing itself as metaphys-ics, or as rst philosophy, and thus as laying the theoretical and ontologicalfoundations for what has now become natural philosophy, begins to de-tach itself from classical and medieval physics. More specically, it is phys-ics itself which, in the wake of its twofold mathematical and experimentalturn, and through the specic way in which these two traits come to-gether as to dene its singularity, triggers a process of autonomization thatwill turn out to be irreversible. How did such a process of autonomyone, no doubt, that was only partial, and slowtake place? Through themathematization of nature, and the geometrization of space. Aristotelianphysics could not envisage reconciling the formal perfection of mathe-matics with the material imperfection of the physical world, a world sub-jected to perpetual becoming and transformation. Of course, astronomyrevealed such a mathematical perfection. But astronomy was precisely

Introduction

3

not physics in the proper sense, for it dealt with a sphere that was ontolog-ically separate from that of what Aristotle recognized as fsij. Only phi-losophy, it was thought, was in a position to develop a discourse adequateto the intrinsically and irreducibly imperfect nature of the physical world,an imperfection made manifest in the fact that the world of natural thingsis in perpetual motion. The problem, however, was that philosophy founditself in the position of explaining natural phenomena with concepts suchas the heavy and the light, the dry and the humid, the aboveand the below, etc. This was not so much a physics as, in the words ofBergson, an intellectual chemistry.1 The immediate result of the Gali-lean revolution was the collapse of the Ancient Cosmos, which medievalscience had not changed signicantly, despite the omnipresence of theCreator at the heart and origin of all things natural. Nature began to beseen no longer as the place of becoming, over against the changeless andtimeless sphere of pure Being, as manifest in the eternal and perfect circu-lar motion of the stars and planets, but as encompassing the whole of Be-ing, written in geometrical characters, and united under the fundamentallaws of physics, principally that of inertia. At the same time, it is the verysignication and conception of movement itself that changed, from an all-encompassing, metaphysical conception to a purely physical, local signi-cation, from its initial inscription within the ideal and teleologicallyoriented gure of the circle, and thus from the privileging of rest over mo-tion, to the straight line of innite motion as formulated in the law of in-ertia. Movement was elevated to the status of an independent realitywhen Galileo, observing the motion of a marble on a tilted surface, de-cided to study this motion for itself, in itself, without seeking to establishthe principle of its mobility in the concepts of the above and the be-low, these two motionless principles with which Aristotelian physics hadexplained it hitherto. Movement henceforth came to be seen as essen-tially governed by numbers, as expressing an order behind the seemingchaos of worldly phenomena. The geometrization of space meant that theconcrete space of Aristotle as a set of natural places belonging to eachbeing, or type of beings, was substituted for the abstract space of Euclideangeometry, henceforth considered to be the whole of the real.

What Aristotle could not accept, namely, a nature organized accord-ing to the formal perfection of mathematical language, Descartes, whonds himself at the crossroad of the old scholastic doctrina and the newscientia, of the doctors of the School and Galileo, saw as desirable, indeedinevitable:

I delighted above all in mathematics, because of the certainty and clarity ofits reasonings; but I did not then see their real use and thinking that theyserved the mechanical arts alone I wondered that their foundations being sorm and solid, nothing higher had been built upon them.2

Introduction

4

With Descartes and Galileo, and this means with the mathematizationof the real as such and as a whole, the very sense of nature, and of phi-losophy itself, was irreversibly modied. Nature began to be uniedunder a few simple laws, and this in such a way that it could no longerbe opposed to another sphere of reality. It is not that science simplytook over philosophy, replacing it. Far from it. This new science wasseen, and experienced, as the realization of a goal, and perhaps a des-tiny, set underway in Antiquity, but realized only with the recognitionthat, as Plato had predicted, nature speaks the language of mathemat-ics. Physics, in the modern sense of the term, for a Galileo, a Descartes,or a Newton, is realized philosophy, or philosophy of nature. Yet evenin this transformation, and as I was only just suggesting, it is not as ifmetaphysical worldviews themselves had simply disappeared. Onecommentator has shown, rather convincingly, how Modern Science, inits reaction against Aristotelian physics, marked the revenge of Pla-tonism.3 And with this Platonism came the extraordinary effort to ex-plain the fundamental laws of movement with motions that are actuallyimpossible, to describe the real world with the help of objects that donot exist, and phenomena that are nowhere given in experience, andnowhere to be given. In effect, those bodies that move in a straight line inan empty space are not real bodies moving in a real space, but mathe-matical bodies moving in a mathematical hypothetical space.4 What thelaw of inertia does, in effect, is to account for observed variations innatural phenomena through an ideal concept of invariability. This is theremarkable point: it is not actually possible to observe the invariabilityof momentum quantity directly. As such, the law of inertia is not anempirical law, but a law that is posited a priori, and one that presup-poses a new theoretical attitude on the part of the scientistthe veryattitude which phenomenology will describe as naturalist or theo-retical. By contrast, Aristotelian and medieval physics were rooted insensible experience, not thought. It was sense perception, and notmathematical speculation, experience, and not a priori geometrical rea-soning, which provided the foundation of a true science of the realworld. With Descartes and Galileo, a different, negative value comes tobe attached to sense perception and human experience, and nature istransformed in an object of pure contemplation given to mathematicalintuition, of the kind reserved hitherto to essences and Ideas, or to eter-nal types. The physical world is now grasped as what gives itself to purethought, henceforth envisaged as calculation. Thought becomes calcu-lative reasoning, or measure, and the world its object. Paradoxically,the world is now severed from sense perception and experience, andtreated as an abstract object, as a Euclidean space, absolute, necessary,and eternal. And it is not just space that is absolute, but the world assuch and as a whole: time and movement as well are absolute, and can

Introduction

5

be apprehended by pure, a priori thought alone. This abstraction is nowwhat is true. The sense of nature, and of things as belonging to nature,has changed fundamentally.

In this modern phase, however, we are still witnessing an ambiguity.First, physics retains something of its philosophical origin: it is naturalphilosophy, still held within the ambit and jurisdiction ascribed tophilosophical discourse by Aristotle, with this fundamental differencethat the language now recognized as best adapted to the description ofnatural phenomena, the language of nature itself, is mathematical. Thisevent has proven irreversible. Despite its radical and revolutionarysignication, this is an event that is still continuous with a general theo-retical program that had its roots in an intrinsically metaphysical project.As such, modern physics does constitute the historical unfolding of whatwas once considered a philosophical inquiry into the nature of those en-tities subjected to generation and corruption, transition and movement.But it is a development that takes on a movement and a logic of its own,one that is only accentuated in contemporary physics (and biology), al-though, as we shall have to make clear, contemporary natural sciencecan be seen as enacting a return to Aristotelian physics, without, ofcourse, renouncing the mathematical turn carried out in modern science.

Second, the other, metaphysical side (in the restricted sense) of on-tology also undergoes a transformation, one very much triggered by thetransformation of ancient physics in a mathematical science of nature.If it remains rst philosophy, it is now in the sense of providing andsecuring the ontological foundations for the knowledge of nature asnewly revealed. And the place of this securing, the substance withwhich this theoretical foundation is identied, is human subjectivity, orhuman nature. In this respect, it remains consistent with the Aristote-lian metaphysics of the osa-pokemenon, which it interprets in a newsense. Philosophy now turns to the human, and to human reason inparticular, as to the onto-theoretical ground sustaining not just theknowledge of nature, but its very ability to be known, and conse-quently its very being and destination. The Cartesian moment is, in thatrespect, paradigmatic, even though the cogito turns out to be insufcientin order to guarantee the permanence of the world which it is destinedto know and master, thus retaining the necessity of an omniscient, om-nipotent, and omnibenevolent Creator. It should sufce, in this context,to merely recall the full title of Descartess Meditations, as concernedwith First Philosophy, in which the Existence of God and the real Dis-tinction between the Soul and the Body of Man are demonstrated, orthe following passage from his Principles of Philosophy, in which he stillenvisages philosophy as the perfect knowledge of all things whichman can know:5

Introduction

6

Thus the whole of philosophy is like a tree, the roots of which are meta-physics, the trunk physics, and the branches that come out of this trunk areall the other sciences.6

And on the following page, Descartes speaks of the division of his Prin-ciples in the following terms:

I divided the book in four parts, the rst of which contains the principles ofknowledge, which we can refer to as rst philosophy or metaphysics.. . . The three remaining parts contain all that is most general in physics,namely, the explication of the rst laws or principles of nature, and the wayin which the skies, the xed stars, the planets, the comets and in general theuniverse as a whole is composed.7

And if, with Hume, we begin to witness a tendency that will leave itsmark in a certain tradition of empiricism, mostly in the English andAnglo-American world, a tendency to reverse the order of precedence,so that philosophy, while concerned with the analysis of human na-ture as such, is no longer even rst philosophy, but is conceivableonly against the background of natural philosophy, in both its methodand its content, a tendency, therefore, that is a precursor to scienticpositivism, the Cartesian heritage is upheld in the Kantian conception ofphilosophy.8 Indeed, the turn to transcendental subjectivity and its fac-ulties as providing the site for genuine philosophical investigation meansthat philosophy, qua critical philosophy, is established as the science ex-tracting the conditions of possibility of human experience and thus at thesame time as the science securing the objectivity of objectal, scientic na-ture. As critical and transcendental, philosophy is established once againas rst philosophy. First, here, must be understood as providing theground for. . . . Metaphysics groundsjusties and legitimizesphysicsby turning to the intrinsic power and limitations of human reason. Phi-losophy is no longer party, but judge, no longer concerned with thinkingnature as such, but with unveiling under what conditions we can know.With Hegel, this Cartesian, modern impulse is realized in a different way,and taken to a certain completion: reason turns out to be not just humanreason, but the very being or stuff of the material world itself; as Spirit,reason is both subjective and objective, thought as moving itself freelybetween substance and subject. What unfolds, from Descartes to Kantand Hegel, is the movement of substance in its becoming-subject, orwhat has come to be known as the process of the absolute.

The question concerning the relation between the history of classical(meta)physics and modern science is far from straightforward, and in noway can we see the latter as simply breaking with the former. There iseven a sense in which modern science can be seen as the completion ofclassical metaphysics, a sense in which it constitutes the truth of meta-

Introduction

7

physics. This means: the space of questioning opened up by metaphysics,and directed toward nature as such and as a whole, has been taken overby the natural sciences, rst by physics, modern and contemporary, sub-sequently by the theory of natural selection (which, since the advent ofmolecular biology in the 1970s, has become a rigorous and extraordinar-ily successful science), and, nally, by cybernetics, information tech-nology, and mathematical modeling, which have all had signicantrepercussions on the natural sciences themselves. To some extent, then,the natural sciences can be seen as bringing the (meta)physical project toits end. What do I mean by end here? At the most supercial level, rst ofall, the fact that the eld of beings as belonging to nature, and as rstopened up by philosophical discourse, which could not envisage such aeld as altogether separate from that of the meta-physical, has beentaken over by a science, the language and methods of which differ funda-mentally from that of classical metaphysics. At a more fundamentallevel, by end we need to understand the completion of a project that ismetaphysical in essence and origin: the questioning of natural phenom-ena from the point of view of their immanent structures and processes,the quest for an ultimate order hidden behind the apparent chaos of theuniverse. And so, we need to understand that, despite appearances, anddespite what the dominant, positivist interpretation continues to claim,science is not merely opposed to metaphysics, and that, far from consti-tuting the battle of rationality and irrationality, of reason and faith (ormetaphysical speculation), science and metaphysics belong together, in-sofar as they unfold from the same ground and the same space of ques-tioning, one rst articulated (but perhaps not opened up as such) bymetaphysics. They share a common fate, a common history, one that iscoextensive with the history of the Western world. Science lives of (andoff) its onto-theological past, despite the fact that, to a large extent, itovercomes it, and overcoming it, completes it. In that respect, science isindeed the daughter of metaphysics. And so, while constituting the endof metaphysics, science also constitutes its truth. End does not mean ces-sation; on the contrary, it means continuation under a new guise, andthus conrmation, afrmation. Paradoxically, then, the end of philoso-phy in no way signies its disappearance or its doom, but its completeand utter afrmation, in and through the natural sciences. Contempo-rary science marks the unconditional success of the metaphysical adven-ture or destination of the Western Man, the crowning moment of aprocess begun long before modern science ever appeared. In this regard,I can only agree with Bergson, who writes:

Less modest in my claims for science than most scientists [savants] havebeen, I consider that a science founded on experience as the moderns un-derstand it, can attain the essence of the real. No doubt it embraces no more

Introduction

8

than a part of reality; but some day it will reach the bottom of that part; inany case, it will approach it indenitely. It is, therefore, already fulllinghalf of the program of the old metaphysics: it could be called metaphysicsdid it not prefer to keep the name of science.9

Metaphysics, in this sense, designates nothing other than the processthat begins with the possibility of being affected by the very presence ofthe real, and with the ability to question the real with regard to its be-ing. It is, literally, the passion of and for nature.

What of philosophy today, in the face of this historical development?This question itself points in a twofold direction: What has been and isthe reaction of (institutional) philosophy in the face of this (meta)phys-ical transformation? What are the sense of philosophy and the task forthinking which this book sets out to present?

The rst question is naturally vast and complex. It is difcult to seeclearly through the cluster of areas developed under the authority of phi-losophy, and most often represented in the philosophy departments ofour academic institutions. Yet it is my sentiment that there is not a singleaspect of philosophy, or a single philosophy, which remains unaffected bythe evolution I have just alluded to, evenand oftentimes especiallywhere it ignores it. In this respect, we can note the following trends:

There is, rst of all, and beginning with Kant himself, or rather, with acertain (so-called neo-Kantian) interpretation of his thought, the ten-dency to construct philosophy as transcendental epistemology, that is, asthe discourse regarding the possibility and limits of scientic knowledge it-self, as the question bearing on the conditions underlying the knowledgeof all possible objects of (scientic) experience. Kants philosophy, Her-mann Cohen argues, is a theory of experience. Yet the object of experi-ence in question here is interpreted in the sense of an object graspedaccording to the mathematical laws of physics, and revealed in its totaland unrestricted intelligibility only in this context. As a result, the realmof experience is interpreted as the totality of the objects of nature as en-visaged in physics.10 The task of the critical philosophy, as this theory ofexperience, interpreted in the scientic sense, is to identify the principlesthat underpin the systematic knowledge of the physical-mathematicalworldthe principles, and not the laws of nature. It is precisely to theextent that the exposition is directed toward the method by which weknow, and not toward the objects of knowledge themselves, that it is tran-scendental.11 In Paul Natorps words, philosophy is nothing other than amethodical effort by science to achieve self-transparency. In philosophy,science realizes its own principles, procedures, and value orientations.12

And this method, to which philosophy directs itself, is to be of the orderof pure thought. In other words, and contrary to what Kant himself

Introduction

9

thought, it is not to be restricted or limited by intuition, by anything thatwould be given independently of it. In other words, the Kantian Empnd-ung cannot be elevated to the status of a principle of knowledge, and afortiori to the status of a principle limiting or restricting the power ofthought itself. It is only at the cost of neutralizing the role played by sen-sation in Kants thought, and by overcoming the separation establishedby Kant between mathematics (as an independent science) and physics,as rooted in intuition, that the unity of the world, as the world of mathe-matical physics, could be asserted, and that thought could be envisagedas not having its beginning or initial impetus in any principle outside ofitself. Yet although supposedly a priori, this thesis, central to the MarburgSchool, remains bound up with a very specic situation of the sciencesthemselves, and especially with the status of innitesimal calculus as themethodand hence the very logosof scientic physics.13 As Cohen him-self puts it, through a conditional that is as massive as it is decisive: Iflogic is the logic of science, and principally of mathematical physics, thenit must above all be the logic of the principle of innitesimal calculus.14

Natorp, as a faithful commentator and follower of Cohen, clearlyidenties the centrality of the innitesimal method for his mentorsthought when he identies it as the sovereign power of thought overBeing, to which no absolute limit can be opposed.15 It is thus the senseof logos (and logic) itself that has changed, and irreversibly so: to think, inclassical ontology, is to speak, and specically to formulate denitions ofthings or substances according to their genera and specic differences;now, in the face of a nature mathematized through and through, tothink is to calculate, and calculation refers to an ability to produce a con-cept of relation formulated as a function. The mathematical function hasreplaced the category. Yet we know today that the calculus in question,elevated to the status of a universal method by the Marburg School,holds for some aspects of nature only, and that the a priori itself turnedout to be empirically overdetermined. In the end, philosophy can nolonger uphold its ambition to legislate a priori as to what can and cannotbe known, as to what is required in order for something to be known.

As a result, philosophy goes one step further and becomes philosophyof science, epistemology in yet a different sense: it is now the discourseon science, the discourse which, through an examination of the scienticdiscoveries, procedures, and methods, forges the concepts and languagein and through which the sciences reect their own activity. This is es-sentially an operation of reection, and one which, in many circles, hascome to be identied with the sole possibility of thought, with thought assuch. One understands why. The philosophy of science has at the veryleast attempted to come to terms with the signicance of the event ofmodern science. It has drawn the conclusionsconclusions of modestyand humilityof the scientic revolution, and proceeded to reverse the

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order in the hierarchy of knowledge: once the science of all sciences (forscience of the rst cause and the highest being, as well as science of thebeing of all beings), philosophy is now determined empirically, subordi-nated to the dominating discourse regarding nature as such and as awhole, its questions and concepts being derived from whatever emergesfrom within the natural sciences. It has become, one could say, a deriva-tive science. The philosophy of Hume was, in that respect, visionary. In away, given the historical evolution of philosophy, and by that I mean itsself-overcoming in a mathematized science of nature, the philosophy ofscience is the logical outcome of this consummation: having as it wererecognized such a historical process, philosophy can only take the formof a reection on and from the sciences themselves. It is no longer evenmetaphysical in the sense exhibited by Heidegger, and characteristic of acertain modern gesture, from Descartes to Kant, as the science that bringsout the a priori of the sciences themselves, revealing and opening uptheir own domain of inquiry. Rather, and in what constitutes its extremethematization, best expressed by the logical positivism of the ViennaCircle, philosophy becomes solely concerned with the logical claricationof the propositions and method of empirical science. As such, and in thewords of Carnap himself, it is no longer even philosophy (the ViennaCircle does not practice philosophy), in the sense of advancing philo-sophical theses. It simply engages in logical analysis aimed to clarify thepropositions of empirical science and, at the same time, to criticize andrefute the claims of traditional metaphysics. According to Otto Neurath,metaphysics classical ambition to constitute a science of all sciences, or auniversal science distinct from the one empirical science, simply col-lapses in the face of logical positivism: There is no such thing as philoso-phy as a basic or universal science alongside or above the various elds ofthe one empirical science.16 It has now simply become a matter of recog-nizing and validating the scientic and empirically determined concep-tion of the world, which Neurath referred to as unied science:

The representatives of the scientic world-conception resolutely stand onthe ground of simple human experience. They condently approach thetask of removing the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia.17

In relation to this scientic conception of the world, the propositionsof classical metaphysics (or onto-theology) are considered not so muchfalse as meaningless, to the extent that they have no cognitive content.As such, they may be the expression of legitimate feelings, but such feel-ings should have their proper medium in art, music, or poetry, ratherthan philosophy. In short, and in the words of one commentator, phi-losophy, now understood in an extremely restricted sense, has becomean under-labourer to science.18 For the most part, and in a remark-

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11

able inversion of the Cartesian image, emblematic of modern meta-physics, philosophy now becomes a discipline grown out of the tree ofscience itself, a branch of the natural sciences. This historical process isclearly formulated in the following passage from Natorps Philosophieund Pdagogik, in which the demise of philosophy is announced as alogical outcome:

At rst philosophy hid in her womb the germs of all sciences; but once shehad given birth to them and given them motherly care during their infancy,and once they had, under that tutelage, become mature and great, she is notaverse to watching them grow out into the big world in order to conquer it.For a while she watches them with loving care, perhaps now and again witha soft warning word that neither can nor wishes to restrict their newly wonindependence; eventually, however, she quietly withdraws to her retire-ment corner, from where one day, scarcely noticed and scarcely missed, shewill have vanished from the world.19

Once again: the intellectual merit of such a stance is to have recog-nized, more or less explicitly, the full impact of the advent of modernscience in its ambition to take over a domain of inquiry once reserved tophilosophical questioning. But, in doing so, it has condemned the initialambition of metaphysics to a lost era and has failed to recognize the pos-sibility of a genuinely philosophical practice in excess of the natural sci-ences. In addition, the sphere of art, of a certain experience of languageand of certain affects, is excluded from philosophy. This book wishes tobring such an ambition and such a practice back to the heart of philoso-phy, and to show how the fate of philosophy remains bound up with thatof art, and with the sphere of the affective, in a way that is irreducible.

Another reaction, somewhat akin to a metaphysical rebellion, con-ceives of philosophy in a way that is antithetical to the one I have justexposed. This is the reaction which, in the face of the decisive transfor-mation of the very nature of philosophy, shies away from the challengenatural science poses for thought, and recenters or reterritorializes phi-losophy on the human. In the process, it becomes mere anthropology. Byanthropology, I do not mean simply the actual science of the human(although it too, I would suggest, has its roots in classical metaphysics),but, more generally, the philosophical discourses that bear on the hu-man, on its situation and its fate, as the sole concern of thought. Whetherreligious, ethical, or existential in inspiration, they all share this same as-sumption regarding the task of thought. Not all anthropologies amountto anthropocentrisms, however. Many such discourses envisage thehuman in relation to something that exceeds it (the Other, God, Death,etc.). Yet I cannot help analyze them otherwise than as a result of a pro-gressive withdrawal or shrinking away of philosophy, from a questioningregarding the whole of that which is, to the question regarding the ethical

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or existential destination of the human. In classical, medieval, and mod-ern philosophy, the place of the human was directly a function of thebroader metaphysical context within which nature was thought. In away (only this way has become merely implicit), this is still the case to-day: all anthropologies are overdetermined by the current metaphysicalsituation, one that is marked by the prevalence of the question regardingthe knowledge of nature in its totality. Failing to recognize the ontologi-cal and historical ground from which the question of the human canarise amounts to a philosophical abstraction. It is not therefore the ques-tion of ethics, or of existence as such that is at stake, but only those dis-courses about which I feel that they are born of a need to recenter orreterritorialize philosophy on the human, and this from out of a pro-found distress linked to the crisis with which philosophy is faced. Herethe Kantian moment is once again paradigmatic and broaches the ex-traordinary fascination with the ethical in contemporary philosophy: inorder to endure as philosophical questions, the classical metaphysicalpuzzlement regarding the origin of the cosmos, the immortality of thesoul, and the existence of God, the possibility of afrming human free-dom, must undergo a change of place and become a matter for ethics. Letme be clear: it is not, for me, a question of doing away with the questionof the human, of adopting an anti-humanist stance. Such a stance wouldin the end amount to nothing other than a mere gesture, and would runthe risk of introducing another humanism. It is a question, though, of ad-dressing the question of the human from that which, from the start, ex-ceeds it, and in the excess of which it nds its own humanity. But thisexcess is itself not a matter for ethics. It is a matter for ontology.

Finally, philosophy does not just become of science, or of the human.It also becomes philosophy of art, or of religion, or of history, or of poli-tics, etc. This proliferation of domains, of so-called areas of philosophy,once held together within a single and all-encompassing metaphysicalhorizon, seems to testify to the good health and expansion of philosophy.Never, in the entire history of Western civilization, have we witnessedsuch a display of philosophical publications. Yet this proliferation testiesto the very shattering and dispersal of philosophy I here wish to over-come. Its increased specialization and fragmentation, modeled after thatof the sciences themselves (we live in the epoch of specialization, andthis is the only reason why some say we still need generalists, and thismeans philosophers, much in the same way in which general practitio-ners of medicine are seen as the philosophers of medicine), means thatphilosophy is increasingly cut off from its metaphysical ground, and thismeans from the historical process that sustains it.20 The discourses mul-tiply and proliferate as the philosophical shagreen continues to shrink. Inthis context, philosophy does not even have any longer the systematicand highly speculative dimension it once had in German idealism, and in

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Hegels thought in particular, where art, religion, history, science, philos-ophy even, albeit in a singular way, could be developed for themselves,but always and only from out of a rational process (the process of ratio-nality itself) that traversed them all and united them in an organic total-ity, the articulation of which, never given in advance, was precisely thetask of philosophy. For the specicity of philosophy, Hegel tells us in theEncyclopaedia, is that, unlike the various sciences, it cannot presuppose itsobject (truth), which is everywhere represented in the sciences.21 Therethe ambition of systematic philosophy remained intact and managed tobring about the closure of the metaphysical eld rst broached by Aris-totle. But philosophy is now shattered, and its various domains, onceheld together under a unied conceptual apparatus, now dispersed.These are in turn simply taken for granted and nd themselves in a posi-tion similar to the one I described regarding the philosophy of sciencesrelation to science: its eld is pre-given, and the philosophical activityconsists in nothing other than a conceptual reection on the eld itself.Art, history, religion, politics, etc., are given in advance, and philosophicalquestioning is directed at them. This is a situation radically different fromthe one we nd in Hegel. In the case of both anthropology and of what,after Hegel, we could call the philosophy of spirit, we cannot help butnote the remarkable absence of confrontation with the natural sciences,as if questions of ethics, of religion, of existence, of history, of art, etc., es-caped a priori the grip of natural philosophy, as if a certain kind of philos-ophy could live on in total ignorance of the massive impact andborderless nature of science, on the very transformation of the way inwhich nature is now given to us.

This brings me to my second point, regarding the proper task of phi-losophy. In identifying such a task, my intention is not to salvage phi-losophy from its takeover by science. It is not a question of saving fromthe grip of scientic thought what can still be saved, the human, for ex-ample, or nature itself. It is not a question of keeping alive a humanism(and its many idols) as the last glimmer of hope in the desolate land-scape of unrestrained and victorious science, and of the technologicalframework within which it operates. The human (or the divine, for thatmatter)as the being whose secret destiny escapes a priori the grip ofsciencecannot serve as the last bastion in which philosophy with-draws. For it already has been entirely dislocated from its original cen-teredness. That man is dead. At the same time, it would be a huge, andindeed catastrophic, mistake to believe that the end of philosophy inthe sense I have described, and of its conception of the human,amounts to the end or the impossibility of thought as such. The meta-physical project is indeed fullled, or is in the process of being fullled,in the natural sciences. This is the eld where its destiny unfolds. Yetthe question is to know whether the possibilities of thought itself are

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exhausted in this historical process, whether, somehow, thought can-not be dissociated from the becoming-science of metaphysics. Wouldthis mean that a hitherto untouched and preserved area is awaitingthought, and that a new philosophy would constitute itself simply byturning to such a (somehow miraculously spared) territory? In no way.For in the same way in which thought is precisely not (just) metaphys-ics, it is also not merely indifferent to, and simply outside, the realm ofmetaphysics, and of science onto which metaphysics opens. What,then, is the nature of thoughts relation to science? What, exactly, is thenature of thought, such that in turning to science it does not simply be-come absorbed by it, nor subordinated to its logic and destination?

This is a relation based on the recognition of the object that is properto thought, and on which metaphysics has no hold. This object is notto be understood as an area or an aspect of the real. For the real, at leastin its actuality, or its materiality, falls precisely under the authority ofscientic thought. There is, in a sense, nothing real which sciencecannot turn into its object. But this domain of thought, this object, isprecisely not an object; it is precisely that which cannot be turned intoan object, or that which, in being turned into an object, ceases to be theobject of thought. It then becomes the object of representation, ofmetaphysical thought. This object, which belongs to thought mostproperly, is precisely the object through which thought escapes meta-physical representation. At the same time, it is the very object which, inits escape from metaphysics, allows metaphysics to unfold. This objectis the un-thought of metaphysics, this un-thought on the basis of whichmetaphysics thinks. And it is precisely in singling out this horizon, inturning to the un-thought of metaphysics, that thought encounterscontemporary science. It is from this excess that it comes to it and en-counters it, thinks it and is able to extract in it this share beyond meta-physics. In this regard, I am in agreement with Merleau-Ponty whowrites that, in his effort to secure his hold on the world, the scientistends up uncovering [dvoile] more than he actually sees, and this insuch a way that the philosopher must learn to see behind the back ofthe scientist what he himself cannot see.22 Thought opens itself ontoand simultaneously opens upthat which, in metaphysics, closes itselfoff, and in the very closure of which metaphysics as such comes about.This closure is the very event of metaphysics, and of science, whichthought counter-effectuates. The event of thought is the counter-eventof metaphysics. Thought is not opposed to science. Rather, it turns toand returns it toits unknown source, returns upstream, ascends thevery slope down which science descends.

What, then, is this un-thought, through which metaphysics, andscience itself, thinks, or rather, represents, and in the thinking ofwhich the thought beyond metaphysics opens up? It is difference, the

Introduction

15

process of difference, and all the differences to which this process leads.This difference is, rst and foremost, that between being and beings. Thiswork is entirely rooted in the Heideggerian problematic of the ontico-ontological difference. This problematic is, however, enlarged to thesphere of modern science, in what amounts to a certain break withHeideggers thought. Thought situates itself resolutely within beings, yetwithin that which, in beings, exceeds them. This excess is also a default:it is that which, in beings, falls short of beingness. In recognizing such anexcess, it is not a question of reinscribing a degree of transcendencewithin the immanence of the world. There is only nature in its imma-nence, in its immanence to itself, and nature does not refer to anythingoutside itself, or, for that matter, to any privileged being within itself. Yetit is a question of uncovering an excess proper to immanence itself, a res-idue or supplement within immanence. It is as this thinking of Being as asupplement of immanence that thought thinks that which, in metaphys-ics and science, remains un-thought. With Heidegger, we shall see howthe dimension of Being, which escapes all representation, gives itself tothe gaze and the experience of he or she who, withdrawn from all sub-jectivity, and from all objectifying relation to the world, opens him- orherself to the opening of the world, or to the there is prior to all pres-ence. We shall see how this opening opens onto a thought of language,and of history, as granting an instituting or a founding of Being in itstruth. At the same time, against Heidegger, who situates science irrevo-cably within a horizon of representation, and hence within the meta-physics of presence, I wish to show how, by turning to certain recentdevelopments in science, from quantum mechanics to non-linear dy-namics and complexity theory, it is indeed possible to single out or ex-tract a dimension of Being that is proper to physical and materialsystems. I shall go as far as to suggest that it has become impossible to un-derstand the signicance of todays science without turning to this hori-zon. It is not even enough, therefore, to show, as I will, that the study ofcontemporary science enables us to undo the ontological presupposi-tions of classical metaphysics. This critical moment must give way to anexposition of the positive ontology science harbors. If science can be seenas criticizing classical or naive ontology, it is to replace it with a new, pos-itive ontology. This means that, unlike much of what twentieth-centuryontology has claimed, and phenomenology in particular, science does in-deed provide an access to Beingand, I shall claim, to the ontologicaldifference itselfto the same extent as literature or painting. Yet thispositive ontology is not pre-given, already constituted. It must be ex-tracted from scientic discourse itself, the aim of which is primarily to se-cure its hold on a world of facts. The philosopher, on the other hand, seeksto extract the share of eventfulnesswhat he calls a conceptthat isproper to the facts science controls. The philosopher alone is in a position

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to extract the ontological horizon within which contemporary scienceunfolds, and thus to construct a philosophy of nature.

This, turning to the thought of Deleuze, is what Part Three of this bookseeks to achieve. This is the point at which, while entirely rooted in theHeideggerian problematic of the ontological difference, this book dissoci-ates itself from the thought of Heidegger. The fate of ontology will turnout to be played out not only in this dimension that I would like to callpoematic and epiphanic, not only as instituted and set to work in thework of art and in poetic saying, but also in this other dimension, whichI would characterize as mathematical and genetic. If Being is said indeedpoetically, it is also said mathematically. If nature speaks the language ofart and poetry, it also speaks that of geometry. If nature is indeed growthand opening to the gaze and the language of the human, it is also produc-tion and generation of entirely pre-individual and radically impersonaldifferences. If the philosopher, in his desire to think Being in its brutestate, as it is for us, before any thesis, representation, speculation, is drawnto art, which itself draws on this primitive and barbaric layer of signica-tion, must he not also turn to nature as revealed by science? How canwe not be interested in science, Merleau-Ponty asks, when it is a ques-tion of knowing what nature is? And how can we not think nature fromthe point of view of science, when, in the last fty years, [science] nolonger charges toward its object, without being surprised that it encoun-ters it?23 Similarly, though, and as Merleau-Ponty himself has at-tempted to demonstrate, how can we not be interested in art, when it isa question of understanding the way in which Being is there for us, priorto any theoretical construction and thesis regarding the world?

In its attempt to reassert the sense of philosophy as ontology, againstthe backdrop of the historical situation I have already described briey,this book draws widely on two different sources. Through a detailedengagement with the thoughts of Deleuze and Heidegger, a thinking ofbeing in its two-sidedness will emerge. By engagement, I mean pre-cisely this: an effort to grasp that which these thinkers texts actually re-spond to, and an attempt to allow a series of questions and a hypothesisto run through them. By engagement, I mean not so much an exposi-tion, or a critique, or both, but a path that cuts across these texts, athought that attempts to nd its way through them. Needless to say,this approach might be seen as involving a certain degree of violence.Yet this may well amount to nothing other than the irreducible degreeof violence involved in the work of interpretation, which remains thesole form of delity toward what is most thought provoking. Allow me,at least in a preliminary way, to justify the turn to these thinkers texts,and to the way in which they contribute to the overall goal of renewingontology at the end of metaphysics. This will also allow me to clarifythe structure of the book.

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I have already alluded to the fact that the general problematic govern-ing this book is that of the ontological difference. This is the problematicwhich, ultimately, I will extend by turning to the thought of Deleuze, butwhich I will begin by situating in the thought of Heidegger (Part Two).Allow me to introduce itor what I take to be its most important philo-sophical signicanceas economically as possible. At its simplest level,this is an intuition that stipulates that philosophy begins with the abilityto distinguish between beings and their being, but where being, unlikewhat the metaphysical tradition has asserted for centuries, refers not somuch to the beingness of beings, to what is most common to them all(and this means to the twofold sense of being as presence and essence),as to their eventfulness. Philosophical thought begins with the ability todistinguish between things in their presence, and the event of presenceitself, which is nothing like a thing, yet the eventing of which opens ontothe presence of things themselves. The thinking of the ontico-ontologicaldifference wishes to bring things back to their birthplace, to the way inwhich they unfold and make sense for us, prior to any metaphysicalspeculation and scientic representation, prior to the way in which, oncegiven, merely there within presence, they become mere things (blosseSachen, as Husserl already suggested), objects abstracted from theiroriginal and primitive soil. The world that this thought opens up is onethe worldhood of which unfolds from a horizon which itself is not inner-worldy, but precisely horizonal, liminal. This horizon is what, followingHusserl, Heidegger calls the earth, the other side or the lining of theworld and its collection of blosse Sachen. With Heidegger, phenomenologytakes this unobjectiable horizon as its object and, in the process, assertsitself as a phenomenology of the Inapparent (Unscheinbare). Thought isnow directed toward that which, in every phenomenon, withdraws andeffaces itself as the very condition of its phenomenality.

Consequently, there emerges the further step that consists in under-standing this eventfulness itself, or the event of being, in terms of differ-ence. It is now in and through difference that there is. Difference is nowthe principle of Being. This means that thought is no longer mea-sured according to its ability to distinguish between two pre-given andseparate realms, but to think and speak from within the space of thatdif-ference, which coincides with the clearing or unfolding of Being it-self. In this decisive shift, which I shall be concerned to trace, thinking, inits very possibility (or impossibility), is itself born of the very dif-ferenceto which it is directed. In other words, thought is itself of difference, andthis means oriented by and drawn toward it. This is the moment atwhich the radical transformation, indeed, the very overcoming of clas-sical, Aristotelian metaphysics is enacted. This is the moment at which,wrested from the twofold principle of identity and presence to which ithad hitherto remained bound as to the condition of its own possibility,

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Being breaks with all substantialist and essentialist links, and reveals it-self as the forever evanescent Between that sustains and traverses allthings.

There emerges, nally, in the wake of this ontological resurgence athinking of nature as involving a sense and a constitution that is simplyother than that revealed by the natural sciences. Heidegger shares withthe rest of phenomenology a fundamental suspicion regarding modernscience and the image of the world it projects. This is the suspicion bornof modern sciences claimin effect, its illusory claimto present na-ture, or being, as this mathematical construction, forgetting from the verystart that that world is a constructed world, a world rooted in a primitivesoil, effaced and forgotten in the very fruits it bears, ever more forgottenbeneath our faith in this constructed world as in the real world. Scienceaims to grasp the world in order to secure its hold on it, whereas philoso-phy aims to describe the world as it emerges at every moment for us. Noone, I believe, has gone further than Heidegger in this attempt to free asense of nature, from deep within the way in which it is given to us, therefor us, as these beings who stand out in the truth of being, precisely at theplace where Being unfolds and opens up. Human beings are witnesses tothis burgeoning, and their humanity testies to it. The human being isthe being who is only in and through this relation to that which, from thestart, situates it, this being that is only in its capacity to shelter that which,from the start, exceeds it. It is the being whose being consists of this pureopening to the opening up or the event of Being. Consequently, the webehind the for us of Being is no longer the man of metaphysics: neithera thinking thing, or a capacity to represent and know, neither autono-mous and self-positing substance, this being is no longer the man of Aris-totelian metaphysics, dened on the basis of its kind and its specicdifference as the rational animal. Yet he does remain the being to whomBeing is addressed, the destinee and the privileged interlocutor of a send-ing and a dialogue, on the basis of which history (that there is history) andlanguage (that there is language) can be thought. From Husserl to Heideg-ger and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology has continuously striven to re-veal the ontological layer and the dimension of experience marking theopening of the human to the world, and of the world within the human,and consequently the human in its pre-theoretical or pre-noetic under-standing of Being. This is the layer from which not just phenomenology,but also art and poetry, draw, as phenomenology itself has continuallyrecognized (and thematized). Art is never done with presenting (and notrepresenting) this birth of the world, this absolutely singular event. It isnot a coincidence if phenomenology has come to focus on the artworkand the artistic experience as such. As such, this means insofar as it be-speaks the clearing of the world, or its birth. All art is primitive (as Bar-nett Newman so aptly remarked), insofar as it sets out to gather things in

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their birth to presence, to grasp the world as it opens up. All art is logos, inthe strictest and originary sense of the term. And the human being is thiscapacity to gather, and this means to preserve by way of creationinthought, works, and deedsthe event of Being.

Still operating within the problematic of the ontological difference,Part Three seeks to establish a dialogue between philosophy and science,and so to distance itself from the phenomenological, and specicallyHeideggerian, critique of science as naturalistic and technological. It doesso mainly by turning to the thought of Deleuze. Allow me to justify, al-beit briey and schematically, why his thought, as it is developed aroundDifference and Repetition, is so central to my investigation.

In relation to modernity, characterized, on the scientic level, by anabstract, essentially Platonist and Euclidean conception of nature, and,on the philosophical (or metaphysical) level, by the turn to subjectivityas providing the ground for the natural sciences, the question is to knowwhether our age is still held within this horizon, or whether contempo-rary science has not itself evolved in such a way that a metaphysics ofsubjectivity is no longer possible. For, on the one hand, relatively recentdevelopments in the natural sciences, from thermodynamics and quan-tum mechanics to chaos and complexity theory, amount to a return tothe conception of nature as initially developed by Aristotle, and can beseen (up to a point only, of course) as his own revenge against Plato.Today we know that circular motion is indeed the most widespread typeof motion in the universe, whether it be that of galaxies and nebulae,stars, suns, and planets, or atoms and electrons. Similarly, we know sinceEinstein that a local curvature of space can produce motions akin to thespontaneous motion of bodies once described by Aristotle. And the ques-tion of the nitude or innity of the cosmos is itself undecided, althoughwe do know there is no sense in speaking of there being anything out-side this space.24 Finally, we know nature, and life in particular, to bealso the stage where the play of chance and contingency is played out, asAristotle had argued. With the signicant difference, however, thatchance and contingency have themselves become mathematized, sci-entic objects in the modern sense. On the other hand, the so-calledground of these sciences themselves, namely, the res cogitans, or the tran-scendental unity of apperception, turns out to have its own history, andone that is not so much transcendentally as empirically constituted. Forthis ground is itself inscribed within a history, the history of evolution, inwhich the human gures as one accidental development, and not as thepossibility guaranteeing the stability and permanence of a world itselfrecognized in terms of pure becoming. How can we continue to turn tohuman subjectivity as providing the conditions of possibility of experi-ence, and thus of the objectivity of all objects, when this subjectivity itselfturns out to be empirically determined, and contingent, when, contrary

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to what it believed, it turns out to be not essentially different from theworld it contemplates, but made of the same ontological fabric? How canwe continue to situate the eld of philosophy as unfolding between sub-ject and object, when the ground itself begins to open onto an abyss, theabyss of its own groundlessness? Increasingly, the human needs to berecognized and taken into account as being of or belonging to the very na-ture it investigates. This, it would seem at rst, could only reinforce itscentral position amid nature, the impossibility to abstract itself from theposition it nds itself in within nature. In the end, however, it means theexact opposite: it means that it can no longer act as the foundation secur-ing the theoretical and ontological validity of nature, that it is itself al-ways operating and theorizing from within a nature that no longerstands there op-posed to it, as ob-stance, and it as sub-stance, but as thisgaze whose very gazing is not incidental to what it sees, as this gaze thatpresupposes its own material constitution, in what amounts to what thelate Husserl called a reciprocal Fundierungand Merleau-Ponty an in-tertwiningbetween matter (or nature) and spirit, between therelative and the absolute.25 As Merleau-Ponty evocatively puts it, it is nolonger the case that the theoretical gaze of the human can conceive of it-self as a pure kosmotheoros, for the world it contemplates is not ontologi-cally different from it. It sees the world from within, and this in such away that, in contemplating it, it is also always contemplating itself.

In what, with the necessary caution, we could call the post-modernphase of the relation between philosophy and science, and this means ofphilosophy itself, since, as I have tried to show, science is born of themetaphysical project to think beings as such and as a whole, science nolonger nds in philosophy its metaphysical ground. It no longer nds init, or needs to nd in it, the principles of a world or a plane, which it in-vestigates for itself. Objectal nature no longer nds in transcendentalsubjectivity, or indeed in the Creator, its very foundation. For transcen-dental subjectivity is itself referred back to, and indeed reminded of, itsown empirical contingency, of the impossibility of erecting itself, withinthe physical and biological realm, to the status of a world-constitutingtranscendent origin. But should we conclude that philosophy has simplydisappeared in the process, that it has been absorbed by the process towhich it originally gave birth (natural philosophy), devoured as it wereby its very child, and that, in the face of the undoing of subjectivity asproviding the metaphysical ground for natural science, it also collapsedin this abyss? Not Saturn-philosophy, then, but philosophy as devouredby its own offspring? In a way, yes: nature, once inconceivable outsideits philosophical frame of reference, has gained a theoretical autonomyand taken on a life of its own, such that, in a way, of course, very differ-ent from, if not altogether opposed to, that proposed by Hegel, we couldnonetheless speak of a certain Aufhebung of metaphysics in physics, and

Introduction

21

this in such a way that the metaphysical position adopted by philosophyitself came to be called into question from within science itself. But ifmetaphysics, as a metaphysics of the ground, and of subjectivityof sub-jectivity as constituting the very ground for the objectivity of objectalnatureis no longer possible, if philosophy can no longer turn to subjec-tivity as to the transcendental site revealing the conditions of possibilityof experience, and of beings as such and as a whole as a realm of objects,can it not undergo a transformation and reinvent itself, precisely out ofthis crisis of foundation? Can we not think the future of metaphysics,and the possibility of ontology, out of this very event, the event of un-grounding? And so, before proceeding with the rites of burial of philoso-phy, before declaring its death irreversible, and its new life as scienceand, once again, that which, in the context of the current institutional,professional, and cultural landscape, seems to testify to the good healthof philosophy, in my mind only conrms the diagnosis I have just formu-latedlet us at least consider the possibility of a philosophy which,neither metaphysics in the sense of grounding, nor philosophy of science,nonetheless remains in relation to science, at once absolutely differentfrom it and coextensive with it. What sort of relation would that be?

It is a relation born of this crisis of foundation. Yet because it is arelation, it does not coincide simply with a collapsing, whether under-stood as a total collapse, or as a collapsing of the one (philosophy) intothe other (science). Neither grounding (fondement) nor collapsing (effon-drement), it is a relation of what, following Deleuze, we shall call an un-grounding (effondement). This concept is indicative of a twofold gesture,of a double possibility: the possibility of situating philosophy in relationto science anew, rst of all; and, in close connection with this rst pos-sibility, the possibility of reasserting philosophy as ontology on the basisof a distinction in being between the actual, or the empirical (and thescience it enables), and the virtual or transcendental horizon (whichphilosophy brings out) from which the former unfolds. This is the ex-tent to which Deleuze is perhaps the true inheritor of Kant: not aneo-Kantian, but the Kant of the twentieth century, the thinker of thetranscendental as un-grounding.26 But such a characterization must beimmediately qualied. For it is only at the cost of a formidable transfor-mation of the very sense of the transcendental that philosophy will bereasserted as metaphysics and ontology. Specically, it will be at thecost of a series of displacements, according to which the transcendentalno longer refers back to a transcendental subjectivity, but to the real assuch. In effect, the transcendental no longer designates the conditionsof possibility of (subjective) experience, nor the conditions of possibilityof phenomena themselves. It now designates their real conditions of ex-istence and is concerned with their actual generation and production.Yet it is no longer indicative of philosophy as rst philosophy, inasmuch

Introduction

22

as it reveals a layer or plane of reality that is neither a priori nor a poste-riori. It isolates a dimension that relates to the empirical, and to theempirical sciences of nature, by way of neither precedence nor conse-quence, but absolute co-existence and absolute difference. In otherwords, if the relation between philosophy and science is one of un-grounding, it is because Being, with which philosophy concerns itself, isprecisely that in which beings, or states of affairs, with which scienceconcerns itself, un-ground themselves.

The transcendental is therefore a dimension of the real itself. As such,it allows philosophy to overthrow the Kantian revolution and over-come the limitations Kant had imposed on human reason. While thetranscendental understood as identifying the conditions of possibility ofexperience, and of the objectivity of objectal nature, inevitably refersback to a theory of subjectivity (of the faculties of knowledge and thepower of the understanding), precisely as a power of organization and assense bestowal, the transcendental as harboring the conditions of exis-tence of the real refers back to a horizon of being, to a dimension of virtu-ality inherent to being itself. This is the way in which philosophy positsitself again as ontology. Not as fundamental ontology, as the ontology thatgrounds all regional ontologies, and the sciences that unfold therein, butas an ontology of the un-grounding, in which the donation of the real isno longer bound to the a priori conditions of human subjectivity or con-sciousness, but to a virtual and immanent horizon of reality, to beings intheir being. By being, we now need to understand the unfolding of aspatio-temporality that differs essentially (or in nature) from both actualspace and time, with which metaphysical thought begins, and space andtime as the a priori conditions of sensibility. And yet, while differing fromactual space and time, or rather, and quite precisely, in its very differencefrom them, virtual time-space generates them. For the difference at issuehere is not so much a distinction of the understanding as a genetic power,and in fact the only power of generation. And so, we shall have to seehow actual physical and material processes are themselves born of thisdifference, how difference alone, in its many aspects, accounts for thecoming into being of beings, and thus for beings in their being. We shallhave to see how the ontology that characterizes contemporary science isdifferential and genetic: heterogenetic. Here the ontological difference isto be understood as genesis, and not as truth (in the Heideggerian senseof aletheia). Yet, very much like what happens in Heidegger, Being isnothing like a ground. It is rather the opposite of ground: an un-ground(Sans-fond), an abyssal or chaotic ground whence order emerges. Philos-ophy turns to this un-ground not as to the conditions of subjective expe-rience, or of the objects of nature, but as to the conditions of genesis ofthese objects. In all physical and material systems, philosophy identies anon-actual horizon, and this ultimately means the brute and primitive

Introduction

23

spatio-temporality from which the actuality of such systems is playedout. Thus, philosophy is, with respect to science as well as to all otherelds, in a relation of absolute coincidence, or co-extension, and of abso-lute distance, or disjunction. It is at once closest to such elds, and inni-tely remote. For it touches on what, in them, is untouchable. It is linkedto them by the absolute power of proximity and distance of the ontolog-ical difference.

In and through this newly dened concept of difference, aroundwhich it comes to articulate itself, philosophy also posits itself as meta-physics, insofar as it extracts this ground (in the sense of a background)whence phenomena are constituted. But insofar as this ground doesnot refer back to a constituting subjectivity, or a self-present and self-identical moment, but to an always and already differentiated horizon(being as such), philosophy becomes immanent: we must avoid con-fusing the immanence of transcendental reality with the transcendenceof transcendental subjectivity.

It is at the cost of such a reworking that metaphysics becomes oncemore possible. As metaphysics, it comes neither after (Aristotle) nor be-fore (Descartes, Kant, Husserl) physics. Rather, it is with respect toscience in a relation of explication and implication, but not of founda-tion. Its meta no longer refers to any transcendence. It is no longeronto-theology. It is no longer a science of rst principles or causesun-less, of course, we were to afrm difference as its only principle, which,given the very nature of such a concept, would amount to a very prob-lematic, and ultimately self-defeating afrmation. And if it is or remainsa science of conditions, these are, once again, not of possibility, but ofreality, and this in such a way that, between the conditioned and thecondition, there is no relation of resemblance, and thus no identity. Bymetaphysics, we must now understand neither the science of rst prin-ciples and highest causes nor the science of beings as onto-theology,but indeed the science of the being of beings, where being refers toneither a being (or a substance) nor the quiddity or any principle re-sembling the being it founds, but to that which, in excess of beingsthemselves, signals the event of beings themselves. Ontology becomesthe science of being as event, the science of the event of being. In thatrespect, I see Deleuzes thought as keeping open and extending theHeideggerian problematic of the ontico-ontological difference.

Ultimately, then, and following the thoughts of Heidegger andDeleuze, it will be a question of envisaging Being as made up of twosides. There is indeed Being, or nature, in its poematic-epiphanic sideand this is the side phenomenology is concerned to bring out, often turn-ing to art and language as a happening or a grounding of true being. Yetthere is also Being in its mathematical-genetic sideand this is the sideDeleuzian thought is concerned to trace. A different language is spoken

Introduction

24

in each case, and on each side. And it is this double language philosophymust learn to hear, if it is to be attuned to the voice and to the doubletruth of Being. Philosophy does not have to play one side against theother, it does not have to choose one side over the other. It does not evenascend or progress from one to the other, as if on a ladder. It is on bothsides at once, and on both sides it is philosophy of nature. As philosophy,it is concerned with the event of nature, with the natura naturans, andnot simply the natura naturata. And in this effort, it touches on art as wellas science, on truth (as unconcealment) as well as on the real (as produc-tion). Nature or Being is at once in itself and for us.

In introducing this vocabulary of the in itself and the for us, wemust be careful not to reintroduce the concepts of subject and object. Inother words, in identifying such a two-sidedness of nature, it is not aquestion of distributing it along the lines of the subjective and the objec-tive. Subject and object, and their very opposition, belong to a metaphys-ics of representation, and to a phase of the history of Being, which thisbook aims to overcome. Subject and object are here both off-side, or off-topic. And it is not only philosophy, from Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty,Derrida, and others, that has managed to think beyond this distinctionand overcome its dualistic conception of the world. Science itself hasdone the same. What is referred to here as the in-itself of nature hasnothing to do with its so-called objectivity, to which science is sup-posed to oppose the subjectivity of worldviews and opinions. This, ofcourse, does not mean that science is itself subjectivistic, a mere world-view or opinion among others, as creationism wants us to believe. Withquantum mechanics, the (metaphysical) ideal of a purely objective na-ture has suffered a fatal blow. The quantum object is not an object, cir-cumventable and representable in the classical sense. This is an objectthat dees the attitude of the scientist as subject, an object that forces thescientist into a different attitude, a different epistemic posture. If quan-tum mechanics is no longer objective, it is insofar as it reveals an in-completeness that is intrinsic not just to the theory, but to the objectitself, to nature as such. Nature escapes us, from a certain aspect at least,and this escape, this elusiveness, has become a problem for physics itself.It is not a metaphysical problem, as if physics was faced with somethingit could not explain or formalize, as if it had encountered an absolutelimit beyond which it could not venture. Rather, this limit is internal tonature itself, and the problem it poses to physics is a physical problem,one which it alone can formalize. So it is not as if nature escaped sciencefrom one of its sidesa literally meta-physical side, which philosophyalone would be in a position to address. Rather, science itself accounts forthose natural phenomena that escape us. But this, in turn, means thatthis us at issue here has undergone a certain transformation, and is nolonger this kosmotheoros Merleau-Ponty spoke of, or this Gods-eye

Introduction

25

view characteristic of modern science. It is not, at least no longer, thispure gaze of mastery: it itself must surrender to the principle of uncer-tainty that animates nature as such. It itself is no longer secure in its posi-tion as a purely contemplative gaze. Soand I cannot stress this pointenoughthe bifurcation between subject and object is called into ques-tion, and radically so, on both sides of the massif of Being. There is some-thing like a double dissolution of this opposition (and this includes of itsAufhebung), both on the side of being for-us and in-itself.

Nor is it a question, in this two-sidedness, of dividing philosophy alongthe now classical lines of a philosophy of spirit and a philosophy of nature(or matter), whether in its Hegelian or Bergsonian form. For nature iswhat is at issue on both sides of the divide, and philosophy as ontology isentirely absorbed in this two-sidedness. It does not recognize Spirit as theafter or the other of nature, as its corollary or its outcome.

But whether genetic or epiphanic, poematic or mathematic, Beingunfolds only in and as dif-ference. And this is the sense in which it isOne. Difference is the concept that designates the unity of Being, theconcept that grasps Being in the movement that is proper to it, andthrough which ontology avoids reinstituting an insurmountable dual-ism. With the concept of difference, which is the very concept of philos-ophy itself, the concept in and through which philosophy posits itself assuch, philosophy cuts across the two senses or sides of Being. It is in andthrough this concept that the two are made to communicate. Philosophyis the hyphen and the hymen of Being, and difference is the trait thatcuts across and unites the twofold side of Being. The difference ofthought from metaphysics is precisely a function of its ability to open it-self onto difference as difference, and this means onto that which, fromwithin nature itself, marks this excess from which it itself unfolds, of re-taining it within this intangible, undecidable space where nothing is yetxed, where everything is being decided. Ultimately, the question of dif-ference is the question of the placeof the space and the timewherebeings and events are being constituted, individuated. It is the questionof the horizon of actuality of all things actual, a horizon that is beforeall presence and all actuality. Difference will turn out to be that by whichthere is, in other words, that on the basis of which presence unfoldsand the material world is generated. Phenomena themselves will turnout to be traces of difference.

I began by suggesting that philosophy must overcome its current frag-mentation and increasing specialization by taking the real or Being assuch as its object. In its ambition to reconcile itself with its initial (Greek)aspiration and universal impulse, however, philosophy must avoid thefollowing twofold pitfall: reinscribing, almost despite itself, the Aristote-lian metaphysics of substance and essence in the conceptual order; con-doning the death (which we distinguish from the end) of philosophy

Introduction

26

in the ourishing of the sciences, and especially the natural sciences. Inother words, against the backdrop of classical metaphysics, which I willexpose in Part One, and the development of the sciences, to which I shallreturn in the opening chapter of Part Three, I shall attempt to show howphilosophy can reinvent itself as differential ontology (Parts Two andThree). Through a detailed discussion of the ontological difference, andthe way in which Heidegger radicalizes it in his later work, Part Two willreveal a sense of Being as it is for us. There difference will be associatedwith truth. This will be followed by an interpretation of the thought ofDeleuze (Part Three), in which the other side of Being (Being in itself)will be revealed. There difference will be associated with genesis. Theconclusion will highlight the extent to which, whether for us or in itself,difference amounts to nothing other than a process or a dialectic of spac-ing and temporalizing. Ultimately, space and time will turn out to be thetwo attributes of Being as difference.

PART I. ONTO-TAUTO-LOGY:

THE ARISTOTELIAN LEGACY

It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize;

wondering in the rst place atobvious perplexities, and then by

gradual progression raising questions about the great matters too, for example,

about the changes of the moon andthe sun, about the stars and about

the origin of the universe.

Aristotle, Metaphysics,A, 2, 982b1217

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1

The Origins of Onto-tauto-logy

Introduction: The Parmenidean and Platonic Heritage

When the Greeks inaugurated metaphysical speculation they rst askedthemselves of what things were made. From the outset, this took theform of an enquiry into the nature common to all such things. Thus, toknow the nature of the real in general, or of beings in general, is to knowthat each of the beings of which the universe is composed is ultimately,and regardless of the apparent differences distinguishing it from others,identical in nature to any other being, whether real or possible. Driven bythis conviction, which was as compelling as it was spontaneous, the rstGreek thinkers tried to envisage beings as a whole on the basis, rst, ofwater, then of air, then of rein other words, on the basis of a very par-ticular being, until on