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I

Among the themes that tend to dominategeneral discussion of recent French philos-

ophy, four seem to recur with particularfrequency. Complexity: the field retains a linger-ing reputation for daunting if not arcane diffi-culty and sophistication, which restricts accessto initiated insiders only. Subversion: recentFrench philosophy is supposed to have brokenwith the sterile certainties of metaphysics, tohave exploded the benign intimacy of thesubject, shattered the stability of reflection,undermined every figure of the absolute orimmediate. Eclecticism: in place of traditionalconcerns with being and truth, French philoso-phers are supposed to have drawn their inspira-tion from the sciences and humanities, frompsychoanalysis, from anthropology, fromlinguistics, from the artistic avant-garde, andmore recently from liberalism, analytical philos-ophy, and so on. Exhaustion: over the lasttwenty years, in particular, our philosophers aresupposed to have stepped back from the moreradical implications of their most subversivedeclarations – the end of philosophy, the deathof man, the dissolution of the subject – to acceptthe more humble tasks of remembering histori-cal events, supervising institutional changes,rationalising administrative practices, clarifyinglogical arguments, resolving methodologicaldisputes, and excavating details about thehistory of philosophy itself.

Combine the last two themes and you havewhat is now perhaps the most prevalent pictureof contemporary philosophy – a melancholic,chastened discipline more or less resigned to thepragmatic ways of the world.2 Combine all four

themes and you‘ve got a discipline in retreat, adespondent branch of learning defeated by itsunsustainable ambition and subsequentlyrearranged by needs external to its own, needsborrowed or imposed by government, pedagogy,science, history.

The grain of truth in this admittedly simpli-fied picture is perhaps just large enough to ruleout adoption of its mere inversion as the organ-ising principle for the following survey of thefield. Nevertheless, the planning of this issue ofAngelaki, which set out to provide a broad(though obviously far from comprehensive3)overview of the most innovative and most inspir-ing projects currently underway in the field ofFrench philosophy, was guided by very differentpresuppositions. Namely:

EDITORIALINTRODUCTION

peter hallward

THE ONE OR THEOTHERfrench philosophy today1

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/03/020001-32 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725032000162549

A N G E L A K Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 8 number 2 august 2003

1. Just as earlier accounts of French philoso-phy tended to exaggerate the disruptive noveltyof the years of its most dramatic innovations –the decades shaped by Althusser, Deleuze,Foucault, Lacan, Derrida – so too more recentaccounts tend to exaggerate the degree of subse-quent “decline” or withdrawal. Some things havecertainly changed. The nouveaux philosopheshave left their mark. A reader of Wittgensteinpresides over the Collège de France. A critic ofla pensée ’68 presides over the nation’s educa-tion. Established institutions are firmly in reac-tionary hands. But the work of innovationproceeds apace and reports of exhaustion aregreatly overblown. The field remains exception-ally dynamic and inventive, and, when it occursphilosophical thinking usually takes place todayas a work of persistence and perseverance, termsthat figure prominently in the work of many ofthe authors represented here.

2. Less than an eclectic profusion of interdis-ciplinary experiments, much of the field remainsmarked by a stubborn commitment to thespecific tasks peculiar to philosophy itself (or itssubstitute – ethics, theology, non-philosophy,etc.). That these tasks involve philosophy inother disciplines has been obvious since Plato;the fact remains that this involvement isoriented, one way or another, by concepts andpriorities internal to the active practice of philos-ophy as such, however this is prescribed, ratherthan to its own history or to one or another setof objects or knowledges. Very roughly speaking,“philosophical” here means, negatively, some-thing irreducible to the sociological or cultural,i.e. to the forms and conditions of representationor interpretation whereby certain groups ofpeople make sense of what they know about theworld; more positively, it means forms ofthought that (i) defy any further analysis andsurvive, one way or another, any subsequentparalysis of analysis, and that (ii) transform thethinker in ways that could apply, in principle, toall possible thinkers.

3. The majority of contemporary philosophicalconcepts derive from perfectly traditional meta-physical concerns, i.e. from questions regardingthe ultimate nature of being, the forms and foun-dations of knowledge, the relation between

subjects and objects of thought, and so on. Inparticular, many of the thinkers under discussionhere embrace versions of that most quintessen-tially metaphysical theme: the evocation, as theultimate point of reference, of an absolute orautonomous principle, one that is effectively self-grounding, self-causing, self-necessitating. Theyinvoke principles that are independent, in short,of any constitutive relation with some other prin-ciple. That these principles differ from thosepropounded by Aristotle or Plotinus is againobvious, but no more so than the fact that muchrecent French philosophy pursues metaphysicalaims by non-metaphysical or quasi-metaphysicalmeans. We might say that the most distinctiveprojects in the field – those most “typical” of thefield in general – are precisely those that pursuethe most adamantly metaphysical agenda withthe most apparently non-metaphysical means.Gilles Deleuze, for example, is perhaps best readas a thinker concerned, through the most variedof contemporary occasions, with the renewal ofmainly pre-Kantian metaphysical questions: interms of his essential priorities he has far morein common with Spinoza or Mulla Sadra thanwith, say, cultural critics preoccupied with thecategories of race, nation or class.

4. What I am calling the most distinctiveaspect of the field is best characterised, then, bya sort of simplicity in the proper sense of theterm – an orientation to a principle marked byits essential singularity, its indifference to themechanics of mediation and interaction (inparticular to the forms of mediation involved inthe process of representation, i.e. the processwhereby a subject seeks to identify recognisableand classifiable aspects of an object and thenorganise these aspects in a body of knowledge).The fact that the non-relational principles atissue here are typically principles of radicaldifference or limitless creativity does not by itselfqualify the singularity of the principle itself.

5. There is nothing especially “contemporary”about such a philosophical orientation. Onthe contrary, the basic parameters of a philo-sophy that seeks to align itself with a singularprinciple of absolute creativity are very ancient.Though theology clearly has no monopoly on thearticulation of such principles, various forms of

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monotheism offer some of the most obvious andmost sophisticated examples. Before Deleuze orHenry, before Boehme or Spinoza, the essentialdistinctions at issue are already well establishedin the work of a radical theophanist like JohnScottus Eriugena (himself working in a neo-Platonic tradition that goes back to Pseudo-Dionysius and Plotinus). Adapting the terms ofEriugena’s fourfold “division of nature,” wemight say that any singular principle of radicalcreativity will entail the distinction of (a) anuncreated and consequently unknowable orunthinkable creator, which in itself can bethought only as no-thing; (b) the immediate andadequate expression of this creator in multipleself-revelations or creatings (which are bothcreated and creative); (c) the various creatures(created but not creative) that lend materialsubstance to these creatings; and (d) the virtualor uncreated state beyond creaturely perceptionand distinction to which these creatures aredestined eventually to return. Versions of thesedistinctions recur in any fully singular concep-tion of thought, be it transcendent or immanent.For as Eriugena explains, once “every creaturevisible and invisible can be called a theophany”or manifesting of God,4 and if God qua creator isnothing, then only nothing separates God fromhis creation. This is why, he goes on, “we oughtnot to understand God and the creature as twothings distinct from one another but as one andthe same: the creature, by subsisting, is in God,and God, by manifesting himself, in a marvellousand ineffable manner creates himself in the crea-ture.” Understood in this way, God not only“becomes in all things all things,” he “dwellsnowhere but in the nature of men and angels, towhom alone it is given to contemplate theTruth.”5 God expresses himself in the infinitemultiplicity of his creatings, God is only in thesecreatings, but these creatings remain expressiveof a single creative force, “an indivisible One,which is Principle as well as Cause and End.”6

6. For the same reason, then, the simplicity orsingularity at issue here must always be distin-guished from mere uniformity or homogeneity.Singularity involves non-relational or immediateforms of individuation, precisely, as opposed toboth relational or dialectical forms of individua-

tion on the one hand and pure dissolution or de-individuation on the other. A singular creativeforce is nothing other than the multiplication ofsingular creatings, each of which is originally anduniquely individual in its own right, before itdiffers from other creatings. The essential pointis that such individuation does not itself dependon mediation through the categories of represen-tation, objectivity or the world. An individual isonly truly unique, according to this conceptionof things, if its individuation is the manifestationof an unlimited individuating power. Morecrudely: you are only really an individual if Godmakes you so.

7. Philosophies oriented around a singularprinciple can only cohere, in the end, as philoso-phies of the subject in what is again a supremelymetaphysical sense of the term – a subject that isitself self-grounding, self-causing, a subjectmodelled more or less directly on the paradigmof a sovereign actor or creator God. If recentFrench philosophers have often attacked thephilosophical foundations of the Cartesian cogitothis has most often been in favour of a neo-Spinozist cogitor: they have cast doubt on theontological implications of the “I think” in orderto clear the way for the still more absolute impli-cations of a passive “I am thought” or “I ambeing thought.”7 Thought thinks through me.Illuminated by the absolute, the knowing subjectceases to be a subject in relation to an object.The subject of representation, the subject boundup in relations with objects, the subject as ego,tends to yield here in favour of a subject withoutobject, a subject “subjectivised” as the facet of aradically singular or non-relational principle.Such a principle not only acts freely orcreatively, it creates the very medium in which itacts. As a result, an absolute subject can never beknown through conformity to a model or norm,as the object of knowledge or representation; itcan only be accessed through immediate partici-pation in what it does, thinks, or lives. As Corbinexplains with particular clarity, absolute creativ-ity, or God, “cannot be an object (an objectivegiven). He can only be known through himself asabsolute Subject, that is, as absolved from allunreal objectivity,” from all merely “creatural”mediation.8 Adjusted for different contexts, this

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point can be extended to our field as a whole: farfrom seeking to dissolve the subject, the greateffort of French philosophy in the twentiethcentury, the effort that is broad enough toinclude Bergson and Sartre, Lacan and Foucault,Levinas and Baudrillard, Badiou and Rancière, isinstead to dissolve everything that objectifies thesubject, i.e. everything that serves to mediatesubjective thought through the representation ofobjects. The most general goal has been to evac-uate all that serves to reduce an essentiallycreative being to the mere creature of objectiveforces.9

8. Subjective participation in the absoluteproceeds in an equally absolute indifference tothe world, or at least to the principles that shapethe prevailing “way of the world.” Access to theabsolute is not arrived at through some processof approximation or progression, it is not theresult of a dialectical revaluation of trends in theworld. It is not the culmination of some complexprocess of mediation. It is instead a point ofdeparture, an original or pre-original affirmation,a sort of axiom, which opens the field of itssubsequent effects as a series of essentially inter-nal consequences or implications. Preoccupationwith the world or concern with the orderly repre-sentation of the things of the world inhibits anysuch affirmation, which is “extreme” by defini-tion (non-conditional, non-relative, non-deriva-tive). Thinkers as different as Lardreau andRancière can agree that true thought is compro-mised precisely when the world succeeds inassigning it a place and making it “fit.” Thephilosopher’s concern is instead, says Deleuze,“one of knowing how the individual would beable to transcend his form and his syntacticallink with a world” in order to become the trans-parent vessel for that “non-organic life of thingswhich burns us [… ,] which is the divine part inus, the spiritual relationship in which we arealone with God as light.”10 Or, as Eriugena mightremind us: hell is not a place, it is the psycho-logical state to which we commit ourselves in sofar as we refuse to abandon the circumstancesthat sustain our specifically creatural fantasies.11

9. Subjective, absolute, such philosophy isindeed best described as “spiritual” in this ratherloose sense of the term, i.e. one compatible with

the sort of anti-spiritualist materialism thatLardreau himself espouses,12 or with the generaleffort of Bergson and Deleuze’s work: the devel-opment of ways of thinking and acting “thatliberate man from the plane or level that isproper to him, in order to make him a creator,adequate to the whole movement of creation.”13

The absolutely subjective inheres on an exclu-sively spiritual plane; what remains of the subjectin a world purged of spirit is only the corpse, orits equivalent – robot, consumer, citizen … Thepersistent effort to deny (or to limit to a recent“ethical” or “theological” turn) the often explic-itly spiritual dimension of our field, to insist onits exclusively secular inspiration, is usually justanother aspect of the attempt to reconcile it withthe way of the world – an attempt vigorouslydenied by those who, like Corbin and Henry, tosay nothing of Levinas or Jambet, are most atease with the metaphysical orientation of philos-ophy and its consequent engagement with formsof religion. Such engagement provides, in turn, abasis for the sharpest possible version of theancient distinction between philosophy anddogma.

10. Spiritual and hostile to the world, thecutting edge of this tendency in French philoso-phy is for the same reason hostile to any quasi-Heideggerian attempt to re-enchant or“spiritualise” the world itself. There is nothingmore irrational or “archaic” in Corbin’s work onAvicenna or Ibn Arabi, say, than there is inDeleuze’s work on Spinoza or Nietzsche. Onbalance, most twentieth-century French philoso-phers have remained faithful to the rationalistprinciples of their predecessors and presumedthe essential autonomy of language, imaginationand thought, their independence of mediationthrough nature or psychology. The formalisingpriorities affirmed by Lévi-Strauss, Althusser,and Les Cahiers pour l’analyse have had a last-ing impact. Lardreau and Jambet, no less thanBadiou or Laruelle, remain faithful to the anti-hermeneutic orientation of Descartes and Lacan.Even Henry, who of all the thinkers at issue hereis the most explicit in its affirmation of an affec-tive vitality, withdraws it from the phenomeno-logical logic whereby this vitality might showitself within the world. As for those who, like

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Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, continue to workthrough a quasi-Heideggerian inheritance, whatis perhaps most distinctive about their work isthe lengths to which they go to purge it of itssentimental aura, of its nostalgia for an intimaterelation with the sacred, with the authentic orproper, so as to affirm, as the sole medium ofthought, a generalised impropriety.

The remainder of this introduction will try tojustify this somewhat unorthodox account of thefield through the illustration of some salientexamples, beginning with the particularlyinstructive work of Michel Henry and subse-quently framed by the more familiar figures ofLevinas, Bergson, Deleuze, Sartre, and Derrida,along with a few others. Three qualifications,however, are already overdue.

In the first place, if much of the field isoriented around a singular one, then consideredin terms of the field as a whole this is a one that,like its Maoist instance, is no sooner one than itimmediately “divides into two.” Singularthought always polarises between the twin limitsof immanence and transcendence (even if, attheir own limit, these limits themselves tendback towards a singular indistinction). Deleuze isnot “like” Levinas, obviously, nor Rosset likeCorbin – the point is that they are all equallycommitted to non-relational means of orientingor polarising thought.

In the second place, this division of one intotwo implies the possibility of a third, a sort ofsituated or localised combining of the two – thescattering of multiple points of transcendence,the deployment of exceptional processes,processes that then open zones of egalitarianimmanence or generic im-propriety against abackdrop of inertia, indifference or confusion.As we shall see, such points and processes condi-tion the work of Sartre and Badiou in one sense,and of Derrida (and Lacoue-Labarthe, andNancy) in another.

Thirdly, and most obviously: the singularorientation of the field is by no means homoge-neous or all-inclusive. Far from it. Camus,Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur have worked mainlyagainst this orientation, for instance, as do,in different ways, Stiegler, David-Ménard, andBensaïd. Others, like Foucault and Rancière,

operate at its limit or edge. Needless to say, itwould be quite impossible to account for sovaried and complex a field within the scope of asingle model. On the other hand, it would bestill more unsatisfactory to avoid any attempt ata comprehensive characterisation, to take refugein an empirical aversion to generalisation. I amnot suggesting that all those who embrace singu-larity do so to the same degree or in the sameway: Jambet’s orientation is no doubt moreadamantly non-relational than is that of Badiou,say, and Rancière is in turn more relational thanBadiou. The singular pole of the field isprecisely that, a pole. It is not the field itself.Nor am I suggesting that all significant Frenchphilosophy of the past few decades hasembraced a singular orientation: my argument isthat the most original and most striking figuresin the field have tended to embrace such anorientation, and that their innovations have inturn sparked reactions – Merleau-Ponty toSartre, Rancière to Althusser, and so on – lead-ing to more or less radical reorientations. Ifanything holds the field together, if anything(beyond the contingency of languages and insti-tutions) allows us to speak here of a field andthus to think of these various reactions andinnovations together, then it is the continuouspersistence of singularity as the strong polaris-ing principle of the field as a whole. It is thisprinciple that “unites” the field, precisely as afield split between its own poles and divided byattempts at its reorientation.

II

The fundamental ideas of what I am calling thestrong, singular orientation of the field haveseldom been expressed as starkly and insistentlyas in the work of Michel Henry. Henry’s philos-ophy turns above all on the irreconcilable dual-ism between “life” and “world,” or betweenimmediate subjective reality and illusory objec-tive mediation. The most compressed version ofthe essential sequence runs as follows. Absoluteself-revealing and self-experiencing subjectivityis another name for God, and “God is Life.” Butsince “God’s revelation as his self-revelation owesnothing to the phenomenality of the world but

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rather rejects it as fundamentally foreign to hisown phenomenality,” so then “living is not possi-ble in the world,” “life is never shown in theworld,” and “as for the natural life that we thinkwe see around us in the world, it does notexist.”14

The world (as distinct from life) is the place inwhich objects appear to subjects who see andrepresent them as external to themselves, as “outthere,” illuminated by the light of the world. Thetask of worldly knowledges is to bring the great-est possible number of objects out from ignorantobscurity into the clarity and distinction of well-ordered representation. Likewise, the perspectiveof a (neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian) philosophythat is itself mediated by knowledge and theworld will be determined in terms of the progres-sive perfection of these knowledges or theprogressive completion of those processes of“objectification” through which spirit, mind orlife externalises itself in the world. The world isthe place in which what is revealed, in otherwords, are objects or things other than revealingsper se. Things appear and signify in the light ofthe world, but “things do not rise into the lightof this ‘outside’ except as torn from themselves,emptied of their being, already dead.” Andsince “time and the world are identical,” sincethings appear in the world according to specificdeterminations of place and time, so then timeis essentially destructive and the world essen-tially unreal. “Everything that appears in theworld is subject to a process of principled de-realisation […] – if there existed no other truththan that of the world there would be no realityat all anywhere but only, on all sides, death.”15

At an infinite distance from this morbidworld, however, the real ground of “being is life,the immediate internal experience of the selfexcluding all transcendence, all representation.”16

What is real is precisely that which appearsthrough “absolute self-revelation,” in which therevealing and the revealed, though not merelyself-identical, are nonetheless so indivisible thatno separation or distance can ever arise betweenthem. Life is defined in terms of its perfectlyself-reflexive experience of itself, its sufficiency,its immanence to itself: life is that which imme-diately undergoes, suffers, or enjoys itself, in the

absence of any mediation through object orworld. Life only lives, furthermore, throughsingular lives that are themselves unique andpersonal by definition. The self-revelation of Lifein individual lives is already the absolute differ-entiation of these lives, again in advance of anyrelation with the world. Life lives according tomodalities (anxieties, concerns, sorrows, joys,etc.) that are expressed in the world but whichare not themselves of the world. They are in theworld as so many imperceptible exceptions fromthe world. Nobody has ever seen life because lifeis exclusively subjective and the essence ofsubjectivity is affectivity as such.17 Life must befelt and suffered, it cannot (pace Heidegger, orWittgenstein) be shown or perceived.18 “Theabsolute revelation of the absolute,” life does notappear as a phenomenon according to the light ofthe world.19 It has never been and will never bethe object of scientific representations, howeveraccurate these might become – biology, forexample, exclusively concerned with materialand objective processes, knows nothing of life.20

The attempt to show, represent, objectify orotherwise “externalise” life amounts only to themurderous extinction or abandonment of life.

In other words, life is not something thatevolved in the world or that is in any wayadapted to the world. Life is the manifestation ofa principle entirely independent of the world.Life persists in the absolute sanctuary of its ownsufficiency. Wherever there is pure self-revela-tion there is life, but life never allows itself tobecome the object of a perception. Whateverlives is the manifestation, in short, of an absoluteLife, an absolute subject, or God. True reality isbased in God’s perfectly immediate but endlesslydynamic, endlessly creative (non-)coincidencewith himself as subject – which is also to say hisabsolute lack of coincidence with any sort ofobject, his absolute distance from “the barbarismof mindless objectivity.”21

Consider briefly the deployment of this singu-lar conception of things according to two ofHenry’s most thoroughly developed paradigms,which he associates with Marx and Christ, respec-tively.

As Henry reads him, Marx is the thinker whofirst developed suitably modern means of liber-

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ating an exclusively subjective conception ofpraxis from the forces that seek to trap andexploit it within the contemporary forms ofobjective alienation. Most of these forms, ofcourse, are economic – forces of production,patterns of consumption, divisions of labour,relations of exchange, etc. Marx’s great achieve-ment, according to Henry, was to realise thatpraxis or labour is not a commodity or any sortof an economic reality: subjective, invisible, andindivisible, labour is an aspect of life alone.Labour is the doing of things, and is as irre-ducible to the world as is, for example, the expe-rience of those running a race from those whomerely watch that same race.22 Far from devel-oping a science that attributes causal primacy toobjectively representable modes of production orclass struggle, therefore, Henry’s Marx movespast Feuerbach and Hegel precisely to the degreethat he subtracts life from objective mediation ingeneral and from economic mediation in particu-lar.23 Processes of objectivation always involvethe separating or distancing of a product froma producer, an object from a subject, a worldfrom a spirit – such is the essential basis of allalienation, and the crux of the various ideologiesthat seek to conceal it. What is truly real, bycontrast, is

whatever excludes from itself this distancing,whatever is subjective in a radically immanentsense, whatever experiences itself immediatelywithout being able to separate itself fromitself, to take the slightest distance with regardto itself, in short, whatever cannot be repre-sented or understood in any way at all.24

Marx realised, in the face of modern forces ofobjectification, in the face too of the variouslyscientistic versions of Marx-ism that would sooncome to occlude his philosophy, that such expe-rience is “the single origin, the single creativeprinciple [which] creates the conditions ofproduction, of classes and of ideas.”25 This prin-ciple, which is alone productive, is the concreteactivity and potential of individuals as they live,work and act.

When in his last books Henry makes the theo-logical orientation of his work fully explicit, theManichaean division between life and world

becomes still more insistent and allows for theclarification of a number of essential points. Firstof all, life figures here as a still more emphati-cally singular process. Christianity declares that“there is only one Life, that of Christ, which isalso that of God and men, […] this single andunique life that is self-revelation.” Life is whatengenders itself in the movement whereby aLiving being (a “Son”) manifests or reveals Lifeas such (the “Father,” who in himself, as pureLife, transcends any sort of living).26 Life is thatprocess of revelation that reveals only itself: “lifegenerates itself inasmuch as it propels itself intophenomenality in the form of a self-revelation.”27

Life is not only singular or unique; so are allliving beings, which are not particular instancesof a more general principle (variations on ageneric invariant) but directly individuatedselves. Life lives exclusively as self-affection, andevery living is thus immediately and originally adistinct self.

What individualises something like theIndividual that each of us is, different fromevery other – each “me” and each transcen-dental ego forever distinct and irreplaceable –is not found in the world at all […]. If by manwe usually mean the empirical individual, onewhose individuality relates to the world’s cate-gories – space, time, causality – in short, if aman is a being of the world intelligible in thetruth of the world, then we must come toterms with him: this man is not an Ipseity, hebears within him no Self, no me. The empiri-cal individual is not an individual and cannotbe. And a man who is not an Individual andwho is not a Self is not a man. The man of theworld is merely an optical illusion. “Man”does not exist.28

Instead, “I myself am this singular Self engen-dered in the self-engendering of absolute Life,and only that. Life self-engenders itself as me.”29

In this sense, “life is the relation that itselfgenerates its own ‘terms,’” and “it generatesthem as internal one to the other, such that theybelong together, one and the other, in a co-belonging that is more powerful than anyconceivable unity, in the inconceivable unity ofLife whose self-engendering is one with theengendering of the Engendered.”30 Our relations

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with other people are likewise independent ofour dealings with variously specified empiricalhuman objects, the bearers of characteristics thatare themselves empirical and worldly (matters ofculture, gender, ethnicity, etc.). We truly“relate” only with “Sons of life,” in whom “allempirical and worldly characteristics are imme-diately eliminated,” beginning with anythingthat arises from a family genealogy, a sexualidentity or a cultural inheritance. Living ethicalrelations presume the wholesale rejection of allvisible characterisation. “What is Identical ineach person – the self-giving of absolute phenom-enological Life in its original Ipseity – deter-mines in its entirety the Christian theory of therelation to another.”31

In the second place, while Christ’s own livingis purely self-activating or self-engendering,human life is engendered within this originalself-engendering. Like all life, we experienceourselves in a relation of radical intimacy orimmanence which knows no separation, whichpasses through no representation, but we aregiven to experience ourselves in this way by aforce in infinite excess of this experience. Life isone, there is only absolute life, which is given toeach self or ego just as it is given to itself: thisrelation, however, is not reversible or reciprocal.The ego receives its life from a principle thatremains immeasurably beyond it.

Such is the paradoxical condition of the ego:that of being wholly itself, having its ownphenomenological substance (namely, its ownlife as it experiences it), yet being nothing byitself, and taking this phenomenologicalsubstance (its self-affecting) from a phenome-nological substance that is absolutely otherthan it, from power other than its own, ofwhich it is absolutely deprived, the power ofabsolute Life to be thrown into life andliving.32

I affect myself, but I am not myself the sourceof this self-affecting. I am not the cause of myown condition. Instead “I find myself self-affected.” Hence the “passivity of this singularSelf that I am, a passivity that determines it fromtop to bottom,” its absolute and unavoidableexposure to the undiluted suffering of its life.33

Hence, too, the logic of that Passion which justi-

fies the conversion of absolute suffering into joy.The ceaseless inversion of suffering into joyproceeds on account of the fact that, whenpushed to its limit, the experience of our passiv-ity is simultaneously the experience of divineactivity: our total passivity or impotence is whatallows us to become an adequate vehicle of theabsolutely affirmative Life that lives through us.The more we suffer, the more we are exposed tothe “invincible and inalienable power of life […].At the summit of its impotence the ego issubmerged by the hyper-strength of life.”34

Suffering is both the experience of living andexposure to the absolute principle that expressesitself as livings.

The more life is caught up in the suffering ofits being as it is limited and tied to itself, andthe more it experiences as a burden theabsence and the impossibility of any transcen-dence, of any overcoming, the more this over-coming is realised, the more one can feel in andthrough this very suffering the emergence ofone’s own being, its silent advent and the expe-rience of its ultimate ground. In this way,Kierkegaard was able to conceive of theextreme point of suffering, despair, as leadingthe self to the most radical test both of itselfand of the life within it, to delve through itsown transparence into the power that hasposited it […]. In Christ’s passion and in hissacrifice the metaphysical law of life is revealedand is expressed, insofar as its essence lies inaffectivity […], insofar as suffering revealswhat it is that suffers at the very heart of thissuffering, the absolutely living being of life.35

The path of redemption leads all the morefirmly, then, out of a world that promises onlythe denial if not the extermination of life. “Ingranting values to Life, Christianity withdrawsthem from the world.”36 Christ does not offer anopportunity to revalue or elevate the things ofthis world so much as provide the basis on whichto ignore them altogether. “By defining man asson of God, Christianity rules out any form ofthought – science, philosophy, or religion – thatholds man to be a Being in the world, whether ina naïve or critical sense.”37 Ignorance and alien-ation arise precisely because we are led to thinkof ourselves as worldly beings, as concerned with

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whatever appears in the light of the world and asdependent upon objects and our representationsof objects. Because our experience is essentiallypassive, because we suffer our life withoutrespite, we are forever tempted to posit ourselvesas the source of our own life so as then to positthis life, in turn, as an object that we mightstudy, understand, and enhance. The “transcen-dental illusion of the ego” begins when the ego,rather than allow life and its powers (to act,think, move, create, etc.) to live through it,instead takes itself as the ground of its Being andin doing so commits itself to the mode of appear-ing in the world. The more vigorously an egoattributes its power to itself the more it forgetsthe nature of its life, the more it posits itself asan object – the more it identifies itself, in short,with the worldly cadaver that it will sooner orlater become. “The more the ego leans on itselfwith a view to elevating itself, the more theground disappears under its feet. But the morethe ego forgets itself and confides itself to life,the more it will be open to the unlimited strengthof that life.”38

As in Bergson or Deleuze, as in Corbin orLevinas, as in any configuration of thought thatidentifies reality with some absolutely creativeprinciple, the immediate consequence of thisidentity is an irreducible distinction between thecreating that is alone real and the derivative crea-ture that exists only as obscurity or illusion.Creative natura naturans is always liable toconceal itself through the creaturely naturatathat it generates.39 We can think of our body, forinstance, as a real channel of life’s auto-affectionor as a mere object that I posit as external tomyself. “Everything is double, but if what isoffered to us in a double aspect is in itself oneand the same reality then one of its aspects mustbe merely an appearance, an image, a copy ofreality, but not that reality itself – precisely itsdouble,” which is nothing more than a “trap,”the basis of “hypocrisy” and “duplicity.”40 As aresult, “the extraordinary event by which theego’s life will be changed into God’s” can beequally well considered either as the processwhereby this ego comes to forget itself throughthe literal elimination of its worldly self – as thebirth of an other-worldly self that “has no image,

no perception, no memory of self, that is notconcerned with itself, does not think of itself”and that has thereby purged itself of the verypossibility of duplicity – or as the processwhereby God alone comes to act through thevoid left by evacuation of this worldly self.41 OnlyGod allows us access to himself; only by living,i.e. by being-lived, can we know life.

Henry’s work thus culminates in a rejection ofthe way of the world as uncompromising as anyin recent philosophy. However it happens, once“my being is constituted as an object then it canbe taken away from me and handed over to thefate of the world,” and the world is essentiallythe place that leads us astray.42 The world is theplace of our doom. In the world that we know,the world known by science and mathematics,there is no place for life or self. Today’s anti-Christ is simply “the world itself,” the worldgoverned by the pursuit of profits and the ongo-ing sophistication of technology. Our worldreduces people to robots who programme andconsume mere simulations of life. Our worldbrings universal “desolation and ruin.” Reducedto our mere representation in the world, emptiedof sentience and sentiment, “counted likeanimals and counting for much less,” we surviveonly as degraded and despised, in despite ofourselves.43

III

Henry’s particular thematics (Christian, affec-tive, vitalist, etc.) are hardly typical, of course, ofall recent French philosophy. In particular, hisgenerally anti-modern stance is in stark contrastto those who seek, one way or another, toradicalise the projects of Enlightened modernity(Sartre, Lacan, Badiou, Laruelle, etc.). Theessential logic at issue in Henry’s work, how-ever – the singularity of its creative or produc-tive principle, the immediate and non-relationalprocess of individuation that it generates, theradical refusal of mediation or representationthat it implies, the redemptive struggle againstduplicity that it inspires – is indeed exemplary ofwhat I have called the “strong” pole of the fieldas a whole. Though there can be no questionhere of anything but the most cursory survey of

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additional examples, it may be worth runningvery rapidly through a number of these in orderto lend a little more substance to this preliminarycharacterisation of the field. Perhaps thesimplest way of presenting the material is toretain the traditional distinction of transcen-dence and immanence as the apparently oppositelimits defining the field of non-relationalthought. This will take us successively fromLevinas, Corbin, Jambet, and Lardreau toBergson, Deleuze, Rosset, and Laruelle, beforeleading us to that “third” position variouslyexplored by Sartre, Badiou and Derrida.

Levinas and Corbin propose the most radical(and no doubt the most ancient or archetypal)contemporary versions of transcendent singular-ity. Both work according to a broadly neo-Platonic outlook. Levinas orients thoughtentirely towards that which is absolutely otherthan being or transcendent of being, an infinite“creator,” so to speak, that is both the principleof all that exists yet infinitely distant from itscreatures and external to the domain of creationas such. “The great force of the idea of creationas it was contributed by monotheism is that thiscreation is ex nihilo,” notes Levinas, such that“the separated and created being is thereby notsimply issued forth from the father but isabsolutely other than him.” The creator isentirely separate, entirely other than creation.The essential characteristic of this extreme alter-ity is simply its axiomatic characterisation asabsolutely or infinitely other than all that can bethought or represented within the field of being,within the “totality” of creation. However inclu-sive or anarchic this totality might be, as a fieldof being Levinas confines it within the ontologi-cal category of the same. Infinite transcendenceor alterity, which is consequently “otherwisethan being,” thus has nothing to do with aneminent place or form of being: infinite tran-scendence qualifies only that which reveals itselfin being as an exception to being, as the tearingaway of being from being and towards the other-than-being. “The idea of Infinity (which is not arepresentation of infinity) sustains activityitself,” including the activity of be-ing.44 Bydefinition, infinite alterity is infinitely in excessof all knowledge, all mediation, all representa-

tion. “The Other comes to us not only out ofcontext but also without mediation,” and in theface of its “immeasurable excess” the world andits objects dissolve.45

As otherwise than being, infinite transcen-dence is only in these excessive revealings assuch. Alterity is revealed in the ways whereby weare oriented towards infinite alterity. Infinitetranscendence “only happens [se passe] throughthe subject who confesses or contests it” and“subjectivity” is itself nothing other than subjec-tion to alterity as such. “Responsibility for theother is the place in which is placed the non-place of subjectivity.”46 We are subjects to thedegree that we think the infinite alterity thattranscends and orients us or, rather, we aresubjects in so far as this alterity thinks throughus, in so far as we are thought by it. We aresubjects in so far as that which is otherwise thanbeing manifests itself through us as transcendentof us. No less than in Henry or Corbin, there isthus no relation between the subject and theprinciple that makes-subject. The subject issimply an instance of this principle, i.e. themanifesting of its transcendence of any manifes-tation. If we are then to be described as “respon-sible” to this principle, this responsibility willnot characterise our relation with an other orothers so much as express the very principle thatmakes us what we are. We are responsible to theother as a creature is responsible to its creator.Since the other person is only other (i.e. otherthan a mere creature or being, other than what-ever falls within the totality of the same) in so faras he or she is a manifesting or “trace” of theabsolutely other, so then my relation with theother can only be a “relation without relation.”47

In my relation “with” the other, therefore, “theother remains absolute and absolves itself fromthe relation which it enters into.”48 I only relateto the other as its “hostage,” through forms of“unconditional obedience” or “persecution.”More graphically: “I expose myself to thesummons of this responsibility as though placedunder a blazing sun that eradicates […] everyloosening of the thread that would allowevasion.” The subject of responsibility is aninstance of radical “denudation”: “he does notposit himself, know or possess himself, he is

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consumed, he is delivered over, he de-situateshimself, loses his place, exiles himself […],empties himself into a non-place.”49 He is evacu-ated of all creatural substance.

Since I remain I precisely in so far as I sufferthis evacuation, however, the latter must not beconfused with the mere dissolution of thesubject. It is above all the determination to avoidthis confusion that inspires Henry Corbin’s epicengagement with Islamic conceptions of“Creation as theophany,” i.e. creation as theimmediate revelation of God.50 In terms thatresonate closely with those of Michel Henry,Corbin conceives of a theophanic or “angelic”conception of divinity as the only adequatebulwark against contemporary nihilism, wherenihilism is defined as the belief that representa-tion of subjects and objects in the world exhaustswhat we can know of reality. Nihilism has its rootprecisely in our attempt (dramatised in theIsmaili account of the origins of humanity) toknow the absolute in-itself rather than for-itself,i.e. to know God as Ens supremum, as supremecreature rather than as singular creator (as asupreme being rather than as the “act of being”that makes all beings be).51 By attempting toknow God as an object while admitting the neces-sarily inaccessible transcendence of this object,orthodox monotheism prepared the way for itsown demise. Since nothing can be positivelyknown of such transcendence, since all that canbe predicated of the divine as such is simply theprojection of human or “creatural” qualities,there is nothing to block the eventual conclusionthat the absolute is itself nothing and that thecreatural is all that exists (or alternatively,though the result is the same: that we areourselves “divine” or transcendent).

Corbin’s defence of apophatic theologyprevents this disaster by (a) preserving the inac-cessible dimension of God as such, who remainsutterly impervious to any mediation throughcreation, history, or the world (i.e. impervious toany quasi-Hegelian conception of spirit) and (b)insisting, consequently, on the necessity ofanother dimension of God: the revealing of Godin the infinite variety of creation. Since any“Ens, any being, refers by its essence to thatwhich is beyond itself, to the act of being that

transcends it and that constitutes it as a being,”so each living soul is the direct and immediateexpression of this transcendent act, i.e. a suffi-cient facet of God’s self-revelation, a moment in“eternal birth of God.”52 Each of these soulsis absolutely unique but they all express andmultiply the same creative force. Infinitelymultiplied (1 × 1 × 1 × 1 …), the One remainsone. Apophatic theology prepares the way for theunlimited differentiation of theophanies or self-revealings of God.

Those who see only the creatural arecondemned to nihilism, those who look only forthe creator are condemned to blindness. The truetask is instead “simultaneously to see divinity inthe creature, the One in the multiple, and thecreature in the divine, the multiplicity of theo-phanies in the Unity that ‘theophanises’ itself.”53

In a crucial passage of Nietzsche andPhilosophy, Deleuze distinguishes Nietzsche’semphasis on creative individuation from theSchopenhauer who concludes that humans are“at best beings who suppress themselves.”54 Inmuch the same way, Corbin distinguishesbetween two mystical conceptions of creation:one that follows the path of individuation or“personality” (epitomised by Jacob Boehme) andanother that pursues pure impersonality ordetachment (epitomised by Meister Eckhart).For Eckhart, the effort to rejoin the Creatorrequires the dissolution of all particularity andall sense of personality or self.55 Boehme’s deep-est conviction, by contrast, is that though undif-ferentiated and inaccessible in himself, Godexpresses himself as “a personal Being, a livingperson, conscious of himself” through all theindividual consciousnesses that he creates.56 Godis precisely the creative movement that proceedsfrom undifferentiated abyss (Ungrund) to fullydetermined creatings or self-revelations; to try toreverse this movement is thus to work directlyagainst God. Understood along these lines,redemption has nothing to do with annihilationof the self through mystical fusion with thedivine; it is rather through “the realisation ofthat which is most personal and most profoundin man that man fulfils his essential function,which is theophanic: to express God, to be atheophore, a vehicle of God.”57

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In short: God as creator is forever unknowablebut his creatings are immediately knowable in sofar as the creatures to which they give rise arecapable of knowing themselves as these verycreatings. This process requires evacuation of thecreaturely as such, the conversion of materialcreatures into transparent prisms for the purelyspiritual light that alone sustains them.

The point I want to emphasise is that suchindividuation remains fully singular in that non-relational sense I am concerned with here. Anindividual does not become an individual as theresult of psychological development or throughrelations with other individuals, let alonethrough worldly interaction with various socio-historical forces: what individuates a particularcreature is exclusively that divine creating whichits existence reflects. In the Persian theologicaltraditions that most interest Corbin and Jambet,these creatings figure as “angelic,” i.e. as purelyspiritual forms that are directly expressive of thedivinity they contemplate. As an absolutelycreative force, God expresses himself in everypossible way, including ways that, like matter,are only passively expressive of him, i.e. waysthat are most obviously expressive of their crea-tural distance from God. Human creaturesappear, then, as ambiguous entities, part spiri-tual, part material, and only the spiritual compo-nent (the “creating”) is actively expressive ofGod. “A human person is only a person thanksto this celestial, archetypical, angelic dimension;this dimension is the celestial pole without whichthe terrestrial pole of his human dimension iscompletely depolarised, disoriented and lost.”58

Corbin’s major effort involves the “preservationof the spiritual from all the perils of socialisa-tion,” from its “subjection to time” and “histori-cism” – in short, the redemption of spirit fromHegelianism and its consequences.59 Today’sdespiritualised and depolarised world is a placein which people are manipulated as de-individu-ated objects, a place of devastation and death.60

For Corbin, as for Bergson, the worldly or mate-rial dimension remains forever undifferentiatedand resistant to all individuation: the door to therealm of the spirit opens only when the materialdoor is closed, through “suspension of the exter-nal senses and of all preoccupation with the

external world.”61 And since human beings begintheir lives plunged in the exile of material obscu-rity they will remain so unless they find ways to“de-materialise” themselves, to empty them-selves of all creaturely opacity and therebyrejoin, in a purely spiritual, purely theophanic or“imaginal” sphere, the angel who personifies thataspect of God which their existence reveals.

Working along paths opened in the wake ofCorbin’s work, it is Christian Jambet and GuyLardreau who, marked by their experience ofLacan’s teaching and Lin Piao’s CulturalRevolution, have since developed the most strik-ing variations of a transcendent conception ofsingularity. Lardreau’s primary inspirationcomes from those early Syriac ascetics who weremotivated by an absolute renunciation of theworld, of the body and of sexuality – “thissurreal crowd that swarms in the deserts of theOrient, these monks with wasted bellies, theirbodies lacerated with chains, these ruined figureswhipped by wind and rain, these worm-eaten butradiant stylites, these voluntary madmen.” Theyillustrate a logic (and a destiny) that would berepeated with equal enthusiasm in what Lardreautakes to be the climactic moments of Maoism,likewise motivated by a determination to purgerevolt of any objective mediation (any past, tradi-tion, familiarity, continuum, institution, order,etc.) so as to confront undiluted the irreducible“real of dualism” that divides those who workwith and through the world from those whoreject it altogether and who make of this rejec-tion, this antagonism, the exclusive “foundation”of thought.62 Lardreau’s subsequent work haspersisted in a starkly “negative” conception ofphilosophy, in ardent indifference to the world.

Following more directly in Corbin’s footsteps,Jambet’s work offers, all by itself, a sort ofcompressed microcosm of our field as a whole. Itexperiments with both poles of singular theo-phany, from the immanent pantheism affirmedby Mulla Sadra to that transcendent “creativeimperative” embraced by Ismaili thinkers likeAbu Yaqub Sijistani and Nasir ad-Din Tusi.63

What holds Jambet’s work together is again theessential unity of that “real act” that makes allbeing be and which we, as beings endowed withcreative speech, can articulate as the immediate

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revelation of God. As the super-infinite basis ofbeing, there is nothing “thinglike” about God.Though all that is is the expression of God, onlydirect illumination or inspiration allows partici-pation in the expressing as such.64 We grasp thepure appearing or manifestation of things to thedegree that we can see past (or dissolve) themerely manifested or apparent.

Like Corbin and Henry, Jambet everywhereassumes the radical “autonomy of spiritual mean-ings,” the non-relational isolation which enables“visionary assumption of the internal singularityof the spirit.”65 Nowhere is the affirmation of thisautonomy more striking than in the episodeanalysed in Jambet’s most remarkable book todate, La Grande Résurrection d’Alamût.Inspired above all by “the desire to experiencedivinisation here and now, by the determinationto interrupt the way of the world” once and forall,66 this exemplary eschatological sequence(which began in northern Iran in 1164 CE) isorganised entirely in terms of the consequences ofa “liberated” or “unveiled contemplation of thedivine unity.” Alamut is the privileged historicalmoment during which, to the exclusion ofany law-based representation of God, “humanfreedom experienced itself as the expression ofthe unconditioned liberty and spontaneousconstituent power of God.”67 Since an absolutecreativity must by definition be unlimited by themediation of being (or the world, or history, orsociety, or the self, etc.), it is only because we canembrace imperatives that cohere with a forcebeyond being and beyond the world that we can,exceptionally, act as absolutely and “unsayably”free. This is the point, Jambet implies, that Sartreand Deleuze fail to grasp even when they realisethat absolute freedom is indistinguishable fromabsolute necessity: the ultimate imperative “letbe!,” which is the “real of being,” the “making-be” which sustains all being, is not itself articu-lated from within being or indeed from withinany conception of “within.”68 The foundation ofbeing is itself without foundation. Radical libera-tion includes liberation from being itself.

Although Bergson and Deleuze seek to purgephilosophy of every trace of transcendence, theypursue an equally singular or non-relational

programme of creatural evacuation. Bergson’sguiding idea is precisely that living time (ordynamic creativity) is not itself directly mediatedby the world of matter or space. As a generalrule, “everything is obscure if we confineourselves to mere manifestations,” for instancemanifestations of society or intelligence; “allbecomes clear, on the contrary, if we start by aquest beyond these manifestations for Lifeitself,” i.e. that which actively manifests itself ascreativity.69 Living time is singular, self-generat-ing and self-sustaining, driven “in all places as atall times” by a “single impulsion […], in itselfindivisible,” that “makes of the whole series ofthe living one single immense wave flowing overmatter.”70 Life itself figures as a purely spiritualforce once “we understand by spirituality aprogress to ever new creations.”71

That life lives through matter does not mean,then, that it is mediated by matter in the sensethat relations between living objects, livingorganisms or species, might be directly constitu-tive of life. On the contrary, matter simply resistslife. Most of the time, life “cannot createabsolutely because it is confronted with matter,that is to say with the movement that is theinverse of its own.”72 Matter forces life to followdivergent paths of actualisation (vegetal andanimal, instinctual and intellectual, intellectualand intuitive). “Life is essentially a current sentthrough matter, drawing from it what it can.”This current is not itself weakened or altered,however, by what it traverses. Matter is theelement in which life is individuated in particu-lar organisms or souls; without dividing it,matter forces “the great river of life” into myriadand divergent channels. But “the movement ofthe stream is distinct from the river bed,” just as“consciousness is distinct from the organism itanimates,” and there is at least one channelthrough which life has indeed escaped materialmediation, the channel in which consciousnessfinally appears as “essentially free, as freedomitself.” If the story of evolution is the story ofcompromises life has been forced to make withand in matter, the climax or “end” of this storyis precisely the moment when, with humanity,life or consciousness invents a form that is finallycapable of bypassing all material, organic, social

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or intellectual obstruction, of advancing on apurely spiritual (or purely dematerialised) plane.“Everywhere but in man, consciousness has hadto come to a standstill; in man alone it has kepton its way. Man, then, continues the vital move-ment indefinitely.”73 We accomplish this everytime we transcend mere matter-oriented intellectin favour of life-oriented intuition.

As Bergson defines it, intuition is an immedi-ate participation in creativity as such, whicheludes any mediation of a space, object or thing.Static objects, or “creatures,” are mere illusionsof a mind that through pursuit of its creaturalinterests has become more comfortable with therepresentation of material things than with theintuition of spirit.

Everything is obscure in the idea of creationif we think of things which are created anda thing which creates, as we habitually do.[… For] there are no things, there are onlyactions […]. God thus defined has nothing ofthe already made; He is unceasing life, action,freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not amystery; we experience it in ourselves whenwe act freely.74

In other words, living time does not pass throughobjects in space, it creates and distributes themover the course of its own unfolding (just as spir-itual mind, or memory, is not mediated but onlyfiltered and limited by the organic functions ofthe brain). Our intuitive experience of time isimmediate, indivisible, sufficient, absolute. Itleaves no place for the concepts presumed by anyoperation of re-presentation–distance, nothing-ness, absence, negation, void, etc. Mysticism thusfigures as the logical culmination of Bergson’ssystem because

the ultimate end of mysticism is the establish-ment of a contact, consequently of a partialcoincidence, with the creative effort which lifeitself manifests. This effort is of God, if it isnot God himself. The great mystic is to beconceived as an individual being, capable oftranscending the limitations imposed on thespecies by its material nature, thus continuingand extending the divine action.75

The great mystics are people who becomeperfectly transparent vehicles for the singular

creative force that surges through all livingthings. By leaping across all social and materialboundaries, they achieve “identification of thehuman will with the divine will.” They “simplyopen their souls to the oncoming wave” andbecome pure “instruments of God,” such that “itis God who is acting through the soul in thesoul.”76

With Deleuze this creation-centred conceptionof things becomes more absolute, not less.77 Hisphilosophy everywhere relies on the point ofdeparture he adapts from Bergson in oppositionto Hegel: whereas according to Hegel “the thingdiffers with itself because it differs first with allthat it is not,” with all the objects to which itrelates, Deleuze’s Bergson affirms that a “thingdiffers with itself first, immediately,” on accountof the “internal explosive force” it carries withinitself.78 Fully creative “difference must relatedifferent to different without any mediationwhatsoever by the identical, the similar, the anal-ogous or the opposed.”79 But unlike Bergson,Deleuze seeks precisely to elaborate a singularconception of creation that might include matteritself – a creation unlimited by any mediumexternal to itself. Deleuze equates being as suchwith absolute creativity. To put things inunabashedly simplified terms, this equationagain implies: (i) that all existent things exist inone and the same way, univocally, as so manyactive creatings; (ii) that these (virtual) creatingsare themselves aspects of a limitless and conse-quently singular creative power; (iii) that everycreating gives rise to a derivative (actual) crea-ture whose own power or creativity is limited byits material organisation, its situation, its capaci-ties, its relations with other creatures, and so on;(iv) that the main task facing any such creatureis to dissolve these limitations, in order tobecome, broadly in line with Corbin’s “angelic”conception of things, the immaterial vehicle forthat virtual creating which alone individuates it.In the case of human creatures, this involves firstand foremost the dissolution of all those mentalhabits which sustain the illusion we have ofourselves as independent subjects preoccupiedwith the representation of other subjects orobjects; it also involves the dissolution of all thepsychological, social, historical, territorial and

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ultimately organic structures which enable thesehabits to continue. Rather than supervise therational coordination of representations, Deleuzeorients his philosophy in line with that immedi-ate, overwhelming participation in reality whichin Anti-Oedipus he and Guattari attribute to thefigure of the schizophrenic – a participationwhich “brings the schizo as close as possible tothe beating heart of reality […], to an intensepoint identical with the production of the real.”80

Absolute creativity can only proceed throughthe eventual evacuation of all actual or creaturelymediation. Purely creative thought can only takeplace in a wholly virtual dimension and mustoperate at literally infinite speed. Any particularcreature can reorient itself in line with the virtualcreating that it expresses through a series oftransformations or “becomings” directedtowards what Deleuze presents as their exclusivetelos: their “becoming-imperceptible.”81 Everyorganic creature, for instance, coordinates sensa-tions and reactions through some sort of sensory-motor mechanism and thereby subordinates theperception of movement to the creaturely inter-ests of that organism. However, “as soon as itstops being related to an interval as sensory-motor centre,” as soon as it escapes the media-tion of representation, then creative “movementfinds its absolute quality again” and returns tothe primordial “regime of universal variation,which goes beyond the human limits of thesensory-motor schema towards a non-humanworld where movement equals matter, or else inthe direction of that super-human world whichspeaks for a new spirit.”82 The question: how, ascreatures, “can we rid ourselves of ourselves?”83

thus finds an answer in the promise of

imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and imper-sonality – the three virtues. To reduce oneselfto an abstract line, a trait, in order to findone’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits,and in this way enter the haecceity and imper-sonality of the creator. One is then like grass:one has made the whole world into a becom-ing because one has suppressed in oneselfeverything that prevents us from slippingbetween things …84

In his determination to affirm the implacable“stony” presence of things,85 their cruel indiffer-

ence to all the various meanings or expectationsthat we project upon them, Clément Rosset takesthe critique of transcendence one step closertowards an integral materialism on the Lucretianmodel. Of all the thinkers under considerationhere, Rosset is the one who most emphaticallyrepeats the essential principle that polarises ourfield as a whole: the real, each real, is singular,unique, self-sufficient, and “the destiny of everyexperience of reality is to be immediate and onlyimmediate.”86 Since many if not most such expe-riences are unpleasant if not “hideous,” we spendmost of our time concocting ways of keepingthem at a safe distance. We protect ourselvesfrom the real behind suitably contrived illusionsor masks. Rosset conceives of his project as ageneralised unmasking or dis-illusionment(which clears the way, in turn, for an uncondi-tional affirmation of the real behind the mask).He denounces whatever pretends to mediate,distance or otherwise anaesthetise our access tothe real. The real is experienced immediately ornot at all. The real exists in the absence of anyprinciple other than itself, in the absence of anyrepresentation or image, any “double” of itself;our knowledge of the real is consumed in the(inexhaustible) tautology whereby the realsimply is what it ineluctably is, to the exclusionof any alternative mode or way of being. Everyreality is thus marked above all by its “idiotic”or “stupefying singularity,” and in so far as it isalways “singular, the real is that which authorisesno guarantee of its existence other than itself.”87

Relentless critic of that “metaphysical illu-sion” whereby (on the model of Plato’s allegoryof the cave) the real can only be recognised asreal if it expresses some higher or ideal realitywhich alone is authorised to explain it,88 Rossetmight seem at first glance to have nothing incommon with those who, like Corbin or Henry,preach renunciation of the world in favour of another-worldly truth. Obvious differences of prior-ity aside, however, this is not at all the case.Rosset’s primary principle is no less absolute, noless self-sufficient than those of Corbin or Henry.All three thinkers share an equally vigorousrevulsion for representation, i.e. the attempt toconceive of the real as an object which mightthen be doubled with an image and a meaning

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and thus with a recognisable place in a series ofrecognisable similarities and differences. Rosset’sreal, no less than Henry’s life, is precisely not anobject in the ordinary (i.e. representable or“creatural”) sense of the word. “The real is thatwhich, lacking any double, remains resistant toany identification […], foreign to all characteri-sation” or “description,” and the “more anobject is real, the more it is unidentifiable.” Themore “intense is the impression of the real [lesentiment du réel], the more it is indescribableand obscure.”89 Rosset is as disturbed as isCorbin or Henry by “that eminently terroristicidea according to which all persons are like oneanother.”90 No less than Henry’s Living, his realis so radically unique as to be essentially “silent”and “invisible.”91 Rather than some well-definedobjective thing, rather than “something thatpreserves itself, the real is instead that which ispresent at every instant, an offering [offrande] ofbeing against the ultimate backdrop of non-being, which is of value only in the instant inwhich it is.” Rather than a present or presenta-ble thing, the real consists, according to aformula that will reappear in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, in “the perpetually renewed gift ofpresence.”92

Less than a being, in other words, Rosset’sreal concerns what Corbin and Jambet call, afterMulla Sadra, the creative act of being or making-be. It is clearly the intuition of this act (ratherthan its result) that underlies Rosset’s secu-larised conception of beatitude or grace, whichhe names “joy [allégresse].”93 Joy is the experi-ence of the real as utterly sufficient in itself. Ifjoy is a “loving knowledge of the real” the differ-ence between joy and love is precisely the factthat love remains limited by its need to becomplemented by a direct object (its need for acomplément d’objet) whereas joy consists in anapproval “situated above and beyond all theperformances and possibilities of love.” Joy isabove and beyond every specifiable object. Loveis nothing more than “a little joy directed bychance to some particular object,” whereas joyembraces that “absolutely undetermined object”which is life in general. The object of joy isnothing other than “the fact that the real exists,that there is something rather than nothing,” i.e.

the act of being as such.94 In its non-relationalintegrity, in its absolute indifference to anyspecific object, “joy is an all-or-nothing proposi-tion” – this is what accounts for what Rossethimself is prepared to call its “totalitariannature.”95

Once again, then, what’s real is the dynamiccreating rather than its derivative creature. Thereal conforms to both a “principle of sufficientreason,” such that its attestation requires noreference to anything other than itself, and a“principle of uncertainty,” so that every real canappear as either substantial or “evanescent,” onthe model of love, which never loses the “doublepower to appear and to disappear, to be and notto be.” Such is “the ambiguity inherent in everyspecies of reality.”96 (Such too is the ambiguouspersistence of duality in philosophies directed tothe abolition of every figure of doubling or repre-sentation.) As a result, “the identity of the realcannot be known directly,” i.e. as an object, butonly in so far as it fails to coincide with anyduplication or representation of the real.97 Thereal is that non-coincident, non-identical thing towhich we can never become accustomed, whichwe will never be able to anticipate or recognise.“The real is nothing stable, nothing constituted,nothing that has been brought to a stop.” So weexperience the real when, negatively, all thatsolidifies or consolidates our (invariably futile)attempts to represent or escape it suddenlycollapse,98 just as we flee the real when we seekrefuge in a version of what Sartre calls bad faith,when we adopt a role or image which we hopewill provide (always ineffectual) security fromreal instability. As Oedipus comes to understandtoo late, the real emerges only amidst the ruinsof creatural illusions.99 The necessary price forany genuine “enjoyment of life” is a radical“indifference to yourself”: if you are to know andlove yourself as yourself, you must first “aban-don your image in favour of your self as such, i.e.yourself as invisible, as inestimable or impercep-tible [inappréciable].” It is only as inappréciablethat you can ever be worthy of love.100

“Romantic” is the label that Rosset assigns tothose who fail to understand this point. LikeGirard before him, what Rosset identifies as theRomantic delusion par excellence is the determi-

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nation to cultivate your identity or image assuch. But the truth is that as the bearer of anidentity you can never amount to anything moredurable than those identity papers which alonereliably identify you as this or that creature. Thecreature qua creature is no more substantial thanpaper itself.101

By the same token, however, we experiencethe positivity of the real when we ourselvesmanage to act as channels for a non-representa-tive or un-mediated creativity. If music figureshere as the “exemplary reality” this is notbecause it offers an especially appropriate oreminent image of the real but because it illus-trates “its principal and characteristic perform-ance, which is to exist on the basis of its ownauthority, independently of any origin or raisond’être.” The most obviously non-representativeof the arts, music is for that very reason free toexpress the real as such. Music is entirelyabsorbed in this particular real that it is. “Musicis creation of the real in its raw state, withoutcommentary or image [réplique]; it is the onlyform of art that presents a real as such,”precisely because it alone among all “humancreations” avoids duplication or imitation ofsomething other than itself.102

It is because he affirms the immediately singu-lar quality of the real, finally, that Rosset mustalso share Corbin’s ultimately apophatic orienta-tion. Since the real, “as singular, can never beseen or described,” so then, as Rosset is quitehappy to admit, “the ontology of the real canonly be a ‘negative ontology’” on the mysticalmodel, in accordance with Meister Eckhart’sprinciple that where God (or the real) isconcerned “we can see only when we cannotsee and understand only when we do not under-stand …”103 Singular in both occasion and moti-vation, “the intervention of joy is forevermysterious.”104

Perhaps the only feasible way to refer here tothe exceptionally abstract non-philosophy ofFrançois Laruelle is as a still more immediate,still more anti-relational variation on the patternthat has emerged thus far. His concern is againwith a principle that must be thought as self-sufficient, indivisible, as immanent and immedi-ate to itself, but thought now in such a way as to

singularise its singularity as such. If the singularalways involves absolution from relation,Laruelle aims to absolve from relation this veryabsolution from relation. He presumes that rigor-ous singularity can only be thought if it isposited in such a way as to withdraw it fromevery possible relation with another principle(being, life, difference, etc.), along with any formof “self-relation.”105 The One must even bethought in such a way that it remains unaffectedby this thinking itself. “The founding axiom ofnon-philosophy is that the One or the Real isforeclosed to thought.”106

Pushing past Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze,Laruelle wants to escape entirely from what hecalls the lingering “realist presupposition” ofcontemporary philosophy, its pretension toaccount for or describe what still figure,precisely, as accountable characteristics of thereal. He achieves this, quite simply, by positingthe real in such a way as to guarantee that it willremain forever stripped of every conceivablecharacteristic. What this means is that the real,or one, must be thought in an exclusivelyaxiomatic way, rather than as the object of anysort of intuition or experience (let alone any sortof representation or knowledge). Just as mathe-matics grounds the reality of its elementaryterms – an empty set, a geometric point – intheir exclusively axiomatic assertion as opera-tionally reliable but strictly undefinable or inde-scribable terms (thereby opening the door towholly unrepresentable, wholly unintuitableconfigurations of thought, on the model of non-Euclidean geometries and post-Cantorian settheories), so too Laruelle insists that the indivis-ible individual or one presented by a non-philo-sophical “science of man will be real becauseposited as irreducible reality.” What currently goby the (philosophically authorised) name of“human sciences,” by contrast, are not interestedin indivisible humanity as such but only in thedescription of those various “attributes that allowfor our division – man as speaking or sexualbeing, as social or economic, etc.”107

Whereas philosophy, including the philoso-phies of difference advanced by Deleuze andDerrida, always involves the combination of atleast two terms (the one and the multiple, or

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being and appearing, or presence and absence,etc.), Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” posits the indi-vidual or one as an identity without either sepa-ration or combination. His one is withoutmélange, it can only be thought in so far as it“knows itself immediately and without anydistance from itself.”108 As one of the clearestavailable introductions to his work explains:

this is an identity even more radical than theimmanent life uncovered by Michel Henry.The latter, precisely because of its in-visibility,is the result of a refusal of philosophy orphilosophy’s object, the world, and hence ulti-mately remains caught up within the philo-sophical web of combination or Difference.Instead of constituting an immanence or atranscendence that exceeds philosophy,thereby maintaining an ultimate relation to it,the One is a radically autonomous term: itimplies no relation whatsoever, not even oneof rupture or refusal, with philosophy or theworld. Laruelle breaks with philosophising,but if this break is not to remain illusory, ithas to be a consequence – and only a conse-quence – that follows from an identity-with-out-difference: the identity of the One which,since it does not refuse (or accept) anything inand of itself, determines man as what is radi-cally Immanent, without-time and without-space, simply because it is without-philosophy.And since it is radically autonomous andcannot be gauged either in terms of thoughtor language, the One is no more thinkablethan unthinkable, no more sayable thanunsayable.109

In other words, rather than think of the individ-ual in relation to some universal (being, nature,reason, etc.) that it individuates or transcends,Laruelle seeks to “think the individual directly,from itself.”110 Of all the thinkers under consid-eration here, Laruelle goes to the greatest lengthsto refuse thinking the individual as in any waymediated by anything other than itself, byanything that relates to society or history or theworld. Mediated by the world, the individualonly ever appears as a certain kind of individual,never as individual per se – it appears only as anorganic individual, a social individual, an histor-ical or psychological individual, etc., i.e. as aparticular kind of being qualified by particular

sorts of attributes. Laruelle asserts, by contrast,the empty and inconsequential individuality ofthe individual (and the consequently dispersivediscontinuity of multiple individuals, or “minori-ties”) as its singular and exclusive characteristic.

Particularly in his most recent work, Laruelleis careful to present non-philosophy as a theorydestined for philosophy (which means, in histerms, for the world).111 He adheres, nonetheless,to the essential principle polarising our field as awhole, whereby you are only truly an individualif you are so absolutely. “Man is only given asman to man insofar as he is given in his sufficienthumanity, rather than as a being of language,sexuality, power, and so on.” The sufficiency ofthis giving is simply a measure of its singularityas such, i.e. the immediacy of its own self-asser-tion as “already given,” as “donation immédiateou absolue.”112 That “the irreducible structure ofthe individual resides in its absolute and immedi-ate coincidence with itself” implies its equallyabsolute “indifference” to the world and thusits invulnerable resistance to any form of philo-sophical manipulation.113 In other words, whatindividuates the individual is again absolved fromany process that might mediate it through thecategories of knowledge, representation or theworld. It is as if Laruelle has decreed thatprospect of radical de-individuation so dreadedby Henry and Corbin impossible in advance.“Not everything is philosophisable,” Laruelletells us: “such is the good news I bring.”114

If Levinas and Deleuze have pushed a singularconception of thought to its opposing limits,Sartre situates punctual and contingent (andmutually exclusive) instances of the absolute ineach individual consciousness.115 Consciousness isprimary and self-causing, it “determines its exis-tence at each moment […;] each moment of ourconscious life reveals to us a creation exnihilo.”116 Pure creating without a creature,consciousness is not an object, it has no inside.Grounded in the power of imagination to negatethe world we observe, consciousness has nostructure or depth that might allow it to “digest”the objects it perceives. So although conscious-ness is always intentional, always conscious ofsomething, consciousness is doubly independent

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of any mediation through objects in the world.Lacking any inside, it is immediately exposed tothe (attractive, repulsive, fearsome, etc.) qualitiesof the object, such that “if we love a woman it isbecause she is lovable.”117 For the same reason,consciousness remains forever free to decide onhow it is to be conscious of its objects (aspassionate, or jealous, or indifferent, etc.). It isalways a subject who invests obstacles or misfor-tunes, for instance, with their adversity. Strictlyspeaking, “a meaning can only come fromsubjectivity itself.”118

A situation of consciousness, in other words,is precisely not constituted as relation of “knowl-edge or even an affective understanding of a stateof the world by a subject,” but is immediatelyconstituted as an immediate “relation of beingbetween a [conscious] for-itself and the [objec-tive] in-itself that it negates.”119 So althoughconsciousness is always conscious of something,these somethings remain merely the occasions ofconsciousness: they do not mediate or otherwiseaffect the way consciousness is conscious ofthem. Since the “self” of self-consciousness isnothing more than another object of conscious-ness, consciousness as such is grounded only inthe “nothingness” of an objectless or non-theticbeing for-itself. If I take myself as the object ofmy consciousness, for example, I may know that(as an object) I am happy or sad; my knowingthis, however, is not itself happy or sad. Thisknowing, this non-thetic or pre-reflexiveconsciousness, can never itself be taken as object.It eludes all identity and all description. It is onlyas nothing for itself that it can be truly for itself,i.e. pure evasion or flight from itself.

The elusive logic of Sartre’s for-itself thusconforms in most respects to the more generaldifference between an (objective) creature and a(subjective) creating: if a creature is defined byits nature, by what it is in-itself, a creating isprecisely never identical to itself. The negation ofany identity or “self,” the for-itself never coin-cides with itself, it is nothing other than freedomor creativity as such.120 Just as from a theophanicperspective there is no relation between thesubject and the thinking that thinks through thesubject, so too Sartre’s pour-soi is thoughtthrough by a self-positing consciousness to which

the categories of relation do not apply: in eithercase there is no “outside” the subject, or rather,the subject is nothing other than a vehicle for theprocess that constantly displaces it outside itself.Creator of the meanings that I attribute tothings, responsible for the very fact “that thereis a world,” accountable for its every subjectivequality (including those I am obliged to suffer,receive, or inherit), it can make no more sensefor me to complain about what happens to methan it would for God to regret what happens onearth.121 By the same token, my world remainsexclusively mine. Though I can only justify whatI do in terms that apply in principle to whateveryone should do, this is precisely because Iam not constrained by relations with others thatmight limit my responsibility for what I do (orwhat everyone does). Absolute, singular andimmediate, consciousness persists by definitionin a “primary absence of relation.”122 Anothersubject can only be an object for me, or viceversa: it is impossible to think of two absolutesubjects together. It is impossible, in otherwords, to relate to a nothingness.

Absolute freedom and universal responsibilityare points of departure for Sartre, grounded inthe self-causing operation of consciousness aspure subject (or pure non-object). Very roughlyspeaking, we might think of Alain Badiou’s proj-ect as an evolving effort to reconceive thesepoints in terms of processes that occasionallycome to pass. What Badiou calls “truths” aresingular procedures that take place from time totime in situations governed by a given regime ofrepresentation; subtracted from the grip of thisregime, truths generate un-representable state-ments which eventually come to acquire auniversal subjective validity. No philosophercould be further from Henry’s vitalist theologythan Badiou. It is all the more striking, then,that, no less than Henry (or Laruelle), Badiougrounds his project on the integrity of a “subjectwithout object.”123 No less than Sartre (orJambet), this primacy is itself grounded on theliterally foundational role played by that whichfigures as void in the situation, i.e. that whichcannot be counted or represented as an object ofany kind. By grounding, in turn, the truths ofontology upon the object-less or void-based oper-

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ations of elementary mathematics, Badioufurther evacuates being itself of that opacity andinertia which continue to characterise Sartre’s in-itself – in this sense we might say that Badiou isto Sartre somewhat as Deleuze is to Bergson. Onthe other hand, by thinking of the subject asabruptly “induced” by a truth that is itselfsparked by an exceptional and ephemeral event(a revolution, a mobilisation, an invention, anencounter, etc.), Badiou insists on the rarity ofthe subject in terms that break decisively not justwith Sartre’s early conception of absolute free-dom but equally with Sartre’s later, more dialec-tical conception of relative emancipation (i.e.Sartre’s insistence on the fact that, thoughcircumstances beyond our control largely makeus what we are, “we can always make somethingof what we are made to be”124).

Sparked by an event that occurs at the “edgeof the void” of a situation, a truth proceeds asthe universalisable collection of elements of thesituation according to initially unrecognisablecriteria that are consistent with the anarchicbeing of these elements themselves, i.e. with“being in its fearsome and creative inconsistency,or in its void, which is the without-place of everyplace.”125 Despite his emphatic distance from thetheophanic perspectives embraced by Jambet orCorbin, say, Badiou would at least agree that“creative inconsistency” can only be thought bya subject whose principle of subjectivation issubtracted from mediation through the world aswe know it. Inconsistent or creative being canonly be thought through the affirmation of atruth as it “bores a hole” in the forms of knowl-edge and representation that sustain a world.126 Inevery case, “the truth is not said of the object,but says itself only of itself.”127

Of all the thinkers at issue here, JacquesDerrida is the most notoriously resistant to rapidcharacterisation, but since no survey of this kindwould be complete without some reference to hiswork we might at least suggest that he is bestread in terms of a more occasion-dependentconception of transcendence than the versionaffirmed by Levinas. No less than Levinas(indeed no less than Sartre128), Derrida orientsthought to the purely elusive or non-identicalwork of a “creator” utterly beyond creation and

thus purged of any presence or proximity, anytacit complicity with its creatures – purged, inshort, of that whole thematics of intimacy, home,dwelling, and so on, that Derrida discerns inHeidegger’s work.129 But he accepts the fact thatwe can only so orient thought from the occasionsoffered by readings of particular texts orinstances of thought. A logocentric text isprecisely a creating that seeks to establish itselfas an independent creature, one that, on themodel of Plato’s conception of authoritativespeech, attempts to grasp itself as present andautonomous, in denial of the evasive dynamismof writing or signification which in fact sustainsit. Derrida “define[s] writing as the impossibilitythat a signifying chain might come to a stop witha certain signified”130 before immediately startingoff again in an unending sequence of supple-ments and substitutions. Writing, or différance,is nothing other than the infinitely non-identicalproliferation of creatings that only ever appear tocome to stop in the textual creatures to whichthey give rise. “It is the determination of beingas presence or as beingness that is interrogatedby the thought of différance,” since différancethinks only creatings as such. It is because themovement of creating per se can never presentitself as a creature (however eminent) that wealready know that différance must always remain

unnameable, because there is no name for it atall, not even the name of essence or of Being,not even that of “différance,” which is not aname, which is not a pure nominal unity, andwhich unceasingly dislocates itself in a chainof differing and deferring substitutions.131

Stretching things a little, we might say thatDerrida writes a version of Bergsonism adjustedto the (considerable) consequences of the linguis-tic turn.

The point is, again, that the singular produc-tive principle at work here is not itself essentiallymediated by the unstable, if not illusory, objectsit creates. “Since being has never had a ‘mean-ing,’ has never been thought or said as suchexcept by dissimulating itself in beings, thendifférance, in a certain and very strange way, (is)‘older’ than the ontological difference, or thanthe truth of being,”132 and it remains so all

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through the infinite play of differences to whichit gives rise and whose deconstruction it antici-pates. There is nothing particularly strange aboutthis priority in a theophanic context, however: if“nothing precedes différance,” this is againbecause no more than Bergson’s creator isdifférance a thing standing outside of otherthings. “Différance is the structured and differ-ing origin of differences […], the difference thatproduces differences,” which is also to say that itfigures as non-origin, or as pre-original.133 Theplay of différance is “unlimited” preciselybecause it precedes the question of the world assuch and transcends, in its anarchic creativity,any limitation by an Ens supremum or transcen-dental signified:

One could call play the absence of the tran-scendental signified as illimitation of play, thatis the crumbling of onto-theology and themetaphysics of presence […]. This play,thought as absence of the transcendental signi-fied, is not a play in the world, as it has alwaysbeen defined, for the purpose of containing it,by the philosophical tradition […]. To thinkplay radically the ontological and transcenden-tal problematics must first be seriouslyexhausted.134

Différance leaves traces in being (in creation), inother words, because it meets the condition thatLevinas sets for any such tracing: “only a beingthat transcends the world, an ab-solute being,can leave a trace.”135

Similarly, the general effort of Derrida’s morerecent reflections on friendship, ethics, forgive-ness, the gift, and so on, is perhaps best summedup as an attempt to preserve the creative “unde-cidability” that is at work in any genuinely ethi-cal decision, and thus to keep every suchdecision open, elusive, non-identical. Everythingturns on “the decision of the absolute other inme, the other as the absolute that decides on mein me,” but “since each of us, each other is infi-nitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessi-ble, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest,” so thenmy relation to the other develops in keeping withthat paradigmatic “non-relation” of creatureto Creator dramatised in Abraham’s relation toGod – a relation to the other as absolutely other(tout autre).136 Every true decision must proceed,

in other words, as a vessel for that unconditionaland ultimately “secret” undecidability thatworks through it.

The crucial experience of the perhaps imposedby the undecidable – that is to say, the condi-tion of decision – is not a moment to beexceeded, forgotten, or suppressed. It contin-ues to constitute the decision as such; it cannever again be separated from it; it producesit qua decision in and through the undecid-able.

Hence the undecidable inconsistency characteris-tic of any creating suitably oriented to thatabsolute (i.e. absolutely non-identical) creativitywhich alone sustains it, i.e. that elusive inconsis-tency which appears as the complement to anycreaturely consistency and which “alwaysconsists in not consisting, in eluding consistencyand constancy, presence, permanence orsubstance, essence or existence, as well as anyconcept of truth which might be associated withthem.”137 Sartre and Badiou could only agree: forall the obvious differences between their work,the articulation of inconsistency and decision isessential to all three thinkers.

IV

Such is the inconsistent consistency of the waysin which recent French philosophy has tended toorient itself towards a singular conception ofindividuation. Needless to say, this review is farfrom complete: a more inclusive introductionmight include reference to Bataille, Blanchot,Girard, Althusser, Baudrillard, Serres, Lyotard,along with certain aspects of the work of Lacan,Barthes, Kristeva and Foucault; it might alsoventure comparisons with Negri, Agamben andZizek. This clearly is not the place to hazard asubstantial explanation of why versions of thisconfiguration of thought should have inspired somany French thinkers during the twentiethcentury. By way of a conclusion, however, it maybe worth returning briefly to Michel Henry’s ownsuggestive account. Corbin again anticipates theessential point: by definition, “history is not theplace in which supreme divine consciousnessdevelops.” On the contrary, “history as such

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dissolves or vanishes” in the face of theophany.138

In equally adamant opposition to the Hegelianconception of things, Henry likewise insists thatthe absolute “does not produce itself in history”and remains independent of historical develop-ment. “The idea that the absolute might revealitself progressively, bit by bit, is absurd.”139

Absolute immediacy excludes historical orworldly mediation as a matter of course.Variations on this principle have been endorsedby all of the thinkers we have reviewed thus far,including the most emphatically atheist amongthem – Badiou, Deleuze and the early Sartre.

Unsurprisingly, then, Henry identifies thecrucial philosophical error with mediation itself.The error, he says, is to believe that the absolutecan only express itself through relative means,that being must reveal itself through appearing,that absolute subjectivity can only know itself inso far as it externalises and distances itself overtime in a world of objects. Apart from a fewexceptional thinkers (Meister Eckhart, JacobBoehme, Maine de Biran, etc.) who recognisethat living self-revelation owes nothing to time orto its manifestation in a world and who insistinstead that we are ourselves the immediateincarnation of timeless creativity, the entireWestern philosophical tradition, Heideggerincluded, is marked by its persistence in thisfalse conception of manifestation as visible exte-riorisation-temporalisation. For obvious reasonsit is the modern phase of this tradition, the phasethat begins with Kant and that revels in its grow-ing mastery of objects and its unchecked domi-nation of the world, that is most grievously guiltyof the charge. Kant’s critical idea is that thoughtavoids delirium only in so far as it is mediatedthrough that which is other than thought, i.e.through the categories that allow for our knowl-edge of objects. Thought will advance as it devel-ops more reliable means of representing thatwhich appears as “external reality.” As far asHenry is concerned, Hegel simply confirmsKant’s essential principle when he conceives ofthe absolute as the historical process of its ownself-externalisation or self-objectification, suchthat spirit only becomes one with itself by pass-ing through the mediation of the world. Thatspirit is itself the principle of this world leaves

the basic error intact, namely the understandingof creation as mediated by the objective qualitiesof its creatures rather than as immediatelyexpressed in the subjective sufficiency of itscreatings. By obliging spirit to work through theworld Hegel completes the secularisation (orannihilation) of spirit. This is the long error thatHenry’s Marx finally corrects when, in his Theseson Feuerbach, he

moves from an intuitive subjectivity thatestablishes and receives the object, an “objec-tive” subjectivity, to a subjectivity that is nolonger “objective,” to a radical subjectivityfrom which all objectivity is excluded […].Reality, that which up to the present has beenunderstood as the object of intuition, that is,as object, as sensuous world […], is originallynothing of the sort.140

We might say then, very approximately, thatFrench philosophy from Descartes toBrunschvicg tended to adhere to versions of themodern objectivist paradigm, whereby rationalprogress coincides with the development of evermore adequate forms of representing the worldand ever more universally acknowledged formsof resolving conflicts and dilemmas in the world.During the nineteenth century, in particular, theworld remained a tolerable partner for thought,or at least offered no significant “objection” tothought. The world seemed to make itself avail-able to rational observation and administration(to say nothing of exploitation, commodification,colonisation, etc.). But from Bergson to Badiou,the most forceful French philosophers of thetwentieth century would decide, in effect, thatthe world had become essentially intolerable.The gap that Levinas opens at the beginning ofhis Totality and Infinity locates the philosophi-cal space he shares with the majority of hiscontemporaries: “‘True life is absent.’ But we arein the world.” Our contemporary world, Badiouwill conclude, is organised as an “obstacle to thedesire for philosophy.”141 This world invitespassive complacency at best, barbarism ordespair at worst. Recent French philosopherscame to embrace a singular conception ofthought to the degree that they judged the worldincapable of redemption.

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This judgement is not itself an undifferenti-ated one, of course. It ranges from contempt ifnot hatred for the world (Corbin and Lardreau)through a somewhat gentler compassion for theworld (Bergson, Levinas) to a rigorously dispas-sionate indifference to the world (Badiou andLaruelle).142 It may well be that this judgementwas, for a time, the condition of philosophy’ssurvival. Perhaps it remains so to this day.Today’s world is one in which judgement is evermore coercively aligned, one way or another,with the prevailing way of the world as such, inkeeping with the global movement of “invest-ment” and privatisation, the global coordinationof communication, the global dynamic ofsystemic exploitation, i.e. in keeping with themovement that tends to inhibit genuine forms ofintervention in the world – it is for this reasonthat Badiou declares that today “there is noworld” at all.143

In such circumstances it is certainly essentialthat philosophy do something other than merelyreact (or resign itself) to the world, even a non-existent one. During the 1980s and 1990s, yearsin which many thinkers, French included, madea positive virtue of such resignation, our anti-worldly philosophers allowed philosophy itself tocontinue. It is hard to think, today, of a philo-sophical project worthy of the name that does notcontinue in this continuation.

We will never change tomorrow’s world,however, on the basis of a non-relation.

Many of the contributions to this issue ofAngelaki will demonstrate, I hope, the enduringdepth and provocative power of a non-relationalconception of thought. About half of the contri-butions will also indicate divergences, resist-ances, complications, more or less explicitreactions against it. By reading them together wecan begin to consider, above and beyond thepersistence of certain familiar themes common tovirtually every thinker in the field (the affirma-tion of the open-ended destiny of thought, of thatwhich is to-come (à-venir), of the generic or anti-communitarian address of philosophy, its unclas-sifiable im-propriety, its complex universality,and so on), how far these divergences might bethought as variations on a non-relational logic, asreactions against this logic, or as neither one nor

the other. Indeed, so long as such questions areposed in terms of one or the other – pure singu-larity or pure alterity – then the non-relationalorientation common to both will persistunchanged. Something different may begin whenwe start to rethink what is involved in the and of“one and the other.”144 Tomorrow arrivesthrough its relation with today, and the task ofchanging the world will only proceed throughforms of militant mediation that involve bothterms: change and world.

Today’s French philosophers have developed aconception of singular or non-relational thoughtas varied and ingenious as any in the history ofphilosophy. The task of tomorrow’s generation ofthinkers may be to develop an equally resilientrelational alternative.

acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Françoise Anvar, AmandineSossa and Julie Poincelet for transcribing someof the interviews, to Antoine Hatzenberger,Sinéad Rushe and Sarah Hirschmuller for help-ing with several of the translations, and aboveall to Alberto Toscano, RayBrassier and Bruno Bosteels forengaging, with their usual bril-liance and enthusiasm, withmany of the most challengingaspects of this project.

notes

1 I would like to thank Ray Brassier, BrunoBosteels and Christian Kerslake for their helpfuland incisive readings of an earlier version of thisessay.Where a reference contains two page numbersseparated by a forward slash, the first numberrefers to the original edition and the second to thetranslation listed in the bibliography; “tm” standsfor “translation modified.” When no note accom-panies a quotation, the reference is included in thenext note.

2 For example, Gary Gutting concludes his usefuland substantial history of twentieth-centuryFrench philosophy with an emphasis on pragmaticpluralism and fatigue. Now that the distinctiveeffort of this philosophy – its elaboration of

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competing accounts of radical freedom – seemsto be “essentially exhausted,” it is apparentlyeasier to realise that “experience can be read inmany different ways, each with its own plausibil-ity, self-consistency, and limitations […].Philosophies are like novels, not alternativeabsolutes among which we must choose the ‘rightone’ but different perspectival visions […], all ofwhich have their relative values and uses”(Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century385–86, 390). Exceptions to this trend includeMichel Haar’s Heidegger-inspired critique of themetaphysical tendencies in the work of Sartre,Levinas, Henry and Derrida (Haar, La Philosophiefrançaise entre phénoménologie et métaphysique)and Judith Butler’s suggestion that for Lacan andDeleuze, along with other thinkers marked by a“residual Hegelianism,” “a version of absolutepresence, albeit internally differentiated, is thefinal aim or telos of desire” (Butler, Subjects ofDesire 216). I presented an initial characterisationof the singular orientation of the field in my “TheSingular and the Specific: Recent FrenchPhilosophy” (2000).

3 Although the editorial priorities behind thepresent issue are perfectly transparent, the readerwill appreciate, I hope, that not every major figurein the field was willing or able to participate in aproject of this kind. The original list of invitationsalso included Juliette Simont, Jacques Derrida,Pierre Macherey, Julia Kristeva, Jean-ClaudeMilner, Michèle Le Doeff, and Barbara Cassin.

4 Eriugena, Periphyseon III 681A.

5 Eriugena, Periphyseon III, 678C, V, 982C.

6 Eriugena, Periphyseon II, 528B.

7 See, in particular, Jambet, La Logique desOrientaux 118, 224–25.

8 Corbin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique 357;Corbin, Philosophie iranienne 118; cf. Jambet, LaLogique des Orientaux 38. Or, as Michel Henrywould put it: rather than initiation through a text,an image or a representation, it is “Truth andTruth alone that can offer us access to itself […].More radically, divine essence consists inRevelation as self-revelation, as revelation of itselfon the basis of itself. Only one to whom that reve-lation is made can enter into it, into its absolutetruth.” And then there is “no separation betweenthe seeing and what is seen, between the light andwhat it illuminates” (Henry, C’est moi la vérité

17/9–10, 36/24; cf. Henry, L’Essence de la manifes-tation 69).

9 Descombes recognises a version of this point inhis critique of the Nietzsche-inspired movementsof the 1960s and 1970s – “French Nietzscheanismclaims to overcome the subject when in fact itsuppresses the object,” i.e. the referent of thetext, the fact behind an interpretation, the eventbehind an historical account, the world behind aperspective (Descombes, Modern FrenchPhilosophy 189). Though more daring and inventivea field than Anglo-American analytic philosophy,French philosophy is thus also in a sense moreconcentrated in its approach: its subtractiveorientation tends at least towards the evacuationof any object external to philosophical thinkingitself, whereas Anglo-American philosophy ismore directly caught up in problems of scientificmethod, in the real practice of experimentation, inquestions concerned with cognitive and psycho-logical development, with neurology and biology,with empirical language analysis, with appliedmathematics, and so on.

10 Deleuze, Logique du sens 208/178; Deleuze,Cinéma 1 80/54.

11 Eriugena, Periphyseon V, 977A–978B.

12 Cf. Lardreau [originally published as anony-mous], Vive le matérialisme!

13 Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme 117/111.

14 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 40–70/27–52.

15 Ibid. 27–30/17–20. “For any living being, tocome for good into the world, and to no longerbe anything other than what is exhibited in theworld as such, amounts to being offered as acadaver. A cadaver is just that: a body reduced toits pure externality” (79/59).

16 Henry, Marx 162.

17 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 36/25, 104/81; Henry,L’Essence de la manifestation 595.

18 As far as Henry is concerned, Heideggerremains very much a thinker of the world ratherthan of life, a thinker for whom being is whatappears in the light or clearing of the world. Henryreads Heidegger’s conception of the sacred asthat which illuminates being as nothing more thana denial of the sacred, and he reads his attempt toconceive of life in the form of a being-in-the-worldas little short of its attempted murder (Henry,C’est moi la vérité 198/157, 62/46).

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19 Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation 860.

20 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 52–53/38–39.

21 Henry, Marx 32.

22 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 303–04/243.

23 “Considered in itself, reality is nothingeconomic,” and the economy acts precisely as“the mask of reality” (Henry, Marx 224, 228; cf.C’est moi la vérité 304–09/244–47).

24 Henry, Marx 160.

25 Henry, Marx 171. Communism figures here,then, as the moment when, “with the abolition ofall mediation, subjectivity will be restored toitself” (199).

26 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 49/36; cf. 128/101.

27 Ibid. 75/56.

28 Ibid. 156–57/123–24.

29 Ibid. 133/104. Against Schopenhauer, againstthe Romantic affirmation of an anonymous powerof impersonal life, Henry insists that “the individ-ual can be identified with universal life only on thecondition that an essential Ipseity does not disap-pear but is maintained – in the individual as well asin life itself” (153/121).

30 Ibid. Hence the

relation between Individual and Life isprecisely not a relation in the ordinary sense,that is, some sort of link between two sepa-rate terms each of which can exist withoutthe other. Nor is it a “dialectic” relation, asdefined by modern thought: a relationbetween two terms in which the one couldnot exist without the other […]. The rela-tion between Individual and Life inChristianity is a relation that takes place inLife and proceeds from it, being nothingother than Life’s own movement.(150–51/119)

31 Ibid. 309–17/248–54.

32 Ibid. 263/210.

33 Ibid. 136/107.

34 Ibid. 263/209.

35 And Henry goes on, in terms that spell out theimmediate link between Marx and Christ:

as has been rightly said: the proletariat isChrist. The proletariat is the one […] who

must go to the very limit of suffering and ofevil, to the sacrifice of his being, giving hissweat and blood and ultimately his very life,in order to reach – through this completeself-annihilation, through this self-negationwhich is a negation of life – the true life whichleaves all finiteness and all particularitybehind, which is a complete life and salvationitself. (Henry, Marx 73–74)

36 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 247/197.

37 Ibid. 123/97.

38 Ibid. 177/140, 264/211.

39 As Deleuze admits, creative “difference isexplicated in systems in which it tends to becancelled” (Deleuze, Différence et répétition293/228). Unlimited creation cannot proceed with-out generating creaturely limitation, if onlybecause it cannot itself be limited by anything atall. Though perfectly dynamic in itself, “life asmovement alienates itself in the material form thatit creates; by actualising itself, by differentiationitself, it loses ‘contact with the rest of itself’”(Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme 108/104). Or as Levinasputs it: “it is certainly a great glory for the creatorto have set up a being capable of atheism” (Totalitéet infini 52/58).

40 Henry, C’est moi la vérité 245/195.

41 Ibid. 214/169, 210/166.

42 Henry, Marx 60–61.

43 Henry, C’est moi la vérité, 337–41/269–71.

44 Levinas, Totalité et infini 58/63,13/27. “The ideaof Infinity is revealed [se révèle] in the strong senseof the term,” and “the absolute experience is notdisclosure but revelation: a coinciding of theexpressed with him who expresses, which is theprivileged manifestation of the Other” (Totalité etinfini 56/62, 61/66).

45 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” in BasicPhilosophical Writings 53. Most famously, as Levinasdescribes it “the relation with the face [of theother] is not an object-cognition. The transcen-dence of the face is at the same time its absencefrom this world into which it enters” (Totalité etinfini 72–73/75).

46 Levinas, Autrement qu’être 244, 24.

47 Levinas, Totalité et infini 79/80.

48 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height” in BasicPhilosophical Writings 16.

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49 Levinas, “Truth of Disclosure and Truth ofTestimony” in Basic Philosophical Writings 104;“Transcendence and Height” in Basic PhilosophicalWritings 19–20; Autrement qu’être 216.

50 Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme 17.

51 Ibid. 11, 84–85. Cf. Jambet, L’Acte d’être.

52 Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme 12, 193.

53 Ibid. 17.

54 Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie93–94/83–84; cf. Deleuze, Différence et répétition,332/258.

55 Meister Eckhart, Vom Abgeschiedenheit (OnDetachment) in Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises III,117–29.

56 Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme 315,quoted in Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme197. More frequently in Corbin’s work a similarcontrast is made between the generic or non-indi-viduated conception of creation he associateswith Averroes (in rationalist form) and al-Hallaj(in mystical form), on the one hand, and the singu-larising or immediately individuating theophanicconception he associates with Avicenna andSuhrawardi, on the other (Corbin, Histoire de laphilosophie islamique 343; Corbin, Avicenne et lerécit visionnaire 84; cf. Jambet, La Logique desOrientaux 130–32).

57 Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme 200.

58 Ibid. 203. The Angel is “the form under whichthe Absconditum is revealed to you according toyour own essential being” (89). According toSuhrawardi’s conception of things, the angel isthat fully (divinely) individuated spiritual or celes-tial person from which the material creaturalperson “proceeds in a theurgic manner. All thenatural relations and proportions that we mightascertain of the bodily entity are the shadow,image or icon of the spiritual relations and modal-ities of light that constitute the angelic hypostasisand its noetic activity” (50–51).

59 Corbin, Histoire 58; Corbin, Philosophie irani-enne 16, 130–31.

60 Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme 126.

61 Ibid. 147. Hence Ibn al-Arabi’s conclusion thatit is in fact “our world that is hidden and whichnever appears, whereas it is Divine Being that ismade manifest and which can never be hidden”(quoted in Corbin, Le Paradoxe du monothéisme 18).

62 Lardreau, “Lin Piao comme volonté etreprésentation” in L’Ange 109, 153. For these“souls purified of this world and wholly directedto the other” there is no greater vice than that“duplicity” or “hesitation” (89) which consists intrying to make of any activity in this world, includ-ing the most “liberated” forms of desire and jouis-sance, the means of an eventual redemption – avice incarnated, in L’Ange, by Sade and Lyotard.

63 Jambet, La Grande Résurrection d’Alamût 179.

64 Jambet, L’Acte d’être 10–11; Jambet, La Logiquedes Orientaux 38; Jambet, La Grande Résurrectiond’Alamût 81, 197. Cf. Corbin, Histoire de la philoso-phie islamique 78–79.

65 Jambet, La Logique des Orientaux 265, 82; cf.Jambet, La Grande Résurrection d’Alamût 104.

66 Jambet, La Grande Résurrection d’Alamût 11.

67 Ibid. 139, 143.

68 See, in particular, Jambet, La GrandeRésurrection d’Alamût 143–44, 175–85. As Jambethimself observes, the most pertinent contempo-rary point of comparison for this conception of acreative event that is itself founded on the void ofbeing and prompted by something other-than-being is the (radically secular) work of AlainBadiou (192, n. 228).

69 Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de lareligion 103/101.

70 Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice 271/271, 251/250.

71 Ibid. 213/212. On the spiritualist orientation ofBergson’s work see, in particular, Jankélévitch,Henri Bergson 86, 95, 247–52.

72 Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice 252/251.

73 Ibid. 266–70/265–70.

74 Ibid. 249/248–49.

75 Bergson, Deux Sources 233/220–21. The mysticis that person to whom “creation will appear asGod undertaking to create creators, that He mayhave, besides Himself, beings worth of His love”(270/255).

76 Ibid. 242/229, 101/99, 332/311, 245/232.

77 I have developed this reading of Deleuze in my“Deleuze and Redemption from Interest” (1997);“Deleuze and the World without Others” (1997);“The Limits of Individuation” (2000); and‘“Everything is Real’” (2003).

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78 Deleuze, “La Conception de la différence chezBergson” 96/53, 93/51. Henry again offers anotheruseful point of comparison, in so far as “the reve-lation of absolute being is not separate from it, isnothing external to it, nothing unreal, is not animage of being but resides in it, in its reality asidentical to it, as being itself” (Henry, L’Essence dela manifestation 859).

79 Deleuze, Différence et répétition 154/117.

80 Deleuze and Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe 26/19 tm,104/87.

81 “The imperceptible is the immanent end ofbecoming, its cosmic formula” (Deleuze andGuattari, Mille plateaux 342/279; cf. Deleuze,Dialogues 56/45). The crucial thing is always “finallyto acquire the power to disappear” (Deleuze,Cinéma 2 248/190).

82 Deleuze, Cinéma 2 57–58/40.

83 Deleuze, Cinéma 1 97/66.

84 Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux342–43/279–80.

85 Rosset, Le Réel 43–44.

86 Rosset, Le Principe de cruauté 31. Every refusalof the real is precisely a refusal of its “immediacy,”its “presence,” its self-signifying sufficiency, itstautological redundancy – hence a major differ-ence with Lacan’s conception of the real as thatwhich is “missing from its place,” or that whichsignifies only through a register other than itself(through the symbolic or, rather, through gaps inthe symbolic) (Rosset, Le Réel et son double 61,75–76).

87 Rosset, Le Réel 41; Rosset, L’Objet singulier 34.When Rosset comes to respond directly to thosewho accuse him of always saying essentially thesame thing he makes no effort to evade the charge:it is instead those false or pseudo-tautologicaldiscourses (lapalissade, pleonasm, truism, redun-dancy, and so on), discourses which seem to saythat A is A but that in fact provide a double of Awhich they then employ to indicate some addi-tional, albeit redundant, information about A, thatare limited to an impoverished verification of theidentity of A (the mere equation of A with A). Asfor tautology proper, which restricts itself to theaffirmation that A is A (to the exclusion of any rela-tion of A with A), Rosset maintains that it alone isadequate to the inexhaustible depth of A as such(Rosset, Le Démon de la tautologie 12, 33, 48).

88 Rosset, Le Réel et son double 60.

89 Rosset, L’Objet singulier 33.

90 Rosset, Joyful Cruelty 10–11.

91 Rosset, Le Réel 42.

92 Ibid. 79–80; my emphasis. For Rosset, as forDeleuze or Corbin, then, experience of the realinvolves a kind of dematerialisation, the “dissipa-tion of ordinary forms of representation” and theevacuation of all “weight,” all “intellectual orpsychological heaviness” (L’Objet singulier 34, 97).

93 Rosset identifies his allégresse with Pascal’sgrace (Rosset, Le Principe de cruauté 23).

94 Rosset, L’Objet singulier 95, 101–02; Rosset, LeRéel 76.

95 Rosset, Joyful Cruelty 3.

96 Rosset, Le Principe de cruauté 55.

97 Rosset, L’Objet singulier 20–21. The ontologicalprofile of Rosset’s real, in other words, is muchcloser to what Sartre describes as the for-itselfthan to what remains simply (identically or objec-tively) in-itself.

98 Rosset, Le Réel 21, 45.

99 As a general rule, you trap yourself in the crea-tural by trying to avoid the creating that you aregiven to express. “It is by refusing to be thatwhich you are […] that you become preciselythat which you are”; it is precisely by trying toavoid seeming undesirable, for example, that youcome to seem undesirable (Rosset, Le Réel et sondouble 99, 101). You will be what you must be,whatever happens, such is the inescapable crueltyof the real. But by trying to escape yourself (bytrying to maintain a certain “image” of yourself inthe eyes of others) you simply return yourself toyourself in the mode of creatural passivity, i.e.deprived of any possibility of joy. Such is thelesson incarnated by Oedipus in many of Rosset’sbooks: it is by trying to avoid that which he iscruelly destined to become that he becomes it inthe cruellest possible way, i.e. in such a way as toallow for no other way out than self-inflictedblindness (see, for instance, Rosset, Le Réel et sondouble 28–41). It is by trying to be other thanwhat you are that you confirm yourself as merelythis particular creature or object, and therebylose any chance of affirming the creative singular-ity to which your existence attests.

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100 Rosset, Le Réel et son double 112–14.

101 Ibid. 116–18; cf. Girard, Mensonge romantiqueet vérité romanesque (1961).

102 Rosset, L’Objet singulier 59–63. Likewise, agenuine metaphor deserves recognition as an effetde réel in so far as it indicates “the thing itself” butas something hitherto unrecognisable, somethingseen afresh, as part of a world that has itself been“made anew” (Rosset, Le Démon de la tautologie43).

103 Rosset, L’Objet singulier 28–29. “Deprived ofall ground,” “indifferent to every objection,”unable to account for itself, joy remains an “inex-pressible hypothesis.” By insisting on the “incom-patibility between joy and its rational justification,”Rosset implies that it is precisely the fact that joycannot explain or justify itself that makes it trulyjoyful rather than simply pleasant or agreeable.“There is no true joy unless it is simultaneouslythwarted, in contradiction with itself […]. Thereis no joy which is not completely mad [folle]”(Joyful Cruelty 4–5, 16–17). There is indeed littlethat might distance Rosset from Corbin’sacknowledgement of the ultimate transcendenceof the Absconditum once he concludes that “themost direct relation of consciousness to the realis one of ignorance pure and simple” (L’Objetsingulier 23).

104 Rosset, Joyful Cruelty 19.

105 Cf. Laruelle, Le Principe de minorité 125.

106 Laruelle, Principes de la non-philosophie vi.What Laruelle calls the process of non-philosoph-ical “unilateralisation” involves the abrupt andunconditional isolation of an identity from anyrelation in which it might be (philosophically)implied, i.e. the invention of ways of “thinking thatallow us exclusively to think the terms of a rela-tion without reference to their relation itself”(Laruelle, En tant qu’un 217).

107 Laruelle, En tant qu’un 213–14. It is thanks toits strictly axiomatic basis, the fact that “the one isnot a self-affecting logos,” is not caught up in anysort of self-reflection or relation with itself (orwith whatever might be other than itself), thatLaruelle declares the “real and absolutely indivisi-ble immanence of the One to be undecon-structible” (231). It is this same axiomaticdetermination that aligns non-philosophy withwhat Laruelle describes as the essentially“passive” relation of science to the real, i.e. the

sort of “naivety, the unnoticed and opaque imme-diation through which science relates in the lastinstance its procedures, equipment and theoriesto a real that figures as its required point of refer-ence yet which is nevertheless never present assuch” (237).

108 Ibid. 244.

109 Hugues Choplin, “François Laruelle”; I amgrateful to Ray Brassier for providing me with thisreference. Given the uniquely daunting scope anddensity of Laruelle’s work I limit my few refer-ences here to the most accessible of his presenta-tional texts; for a more substantial and morereliable introduction see Brassier’s recent article“Axiomatic Heresy” (2003).

110 Laruelle, En tant qu’un 208.

111 Cf. Brassier, “Axiomatic Heresy” 33.According to Brassier, “Henry’s work still effec-tively mediates between non-relational life andworldly relationality: it relates relation and non-relation. Laruelle’s non-philosophy exemplifies aquite different logic: that of the non-relation ofrelation and non-relation” (Brassier, correspon-dence with the author, 9 September 2003; cf.Brassier, “Axiomatic Heresy” 27).

112 Laruelle, En tant qu’un 229.

113 Ibid. 211, 237. The individual as such is “reallydistinct from the world” (Laruelle, Une biographiede l’homme ordinaire 7). What Laruelle calls “ordi-nary man” as opposed to “generic man” refers “tothe essence of the individual insofar as this doesnot belong to the world.” Non-philosophy thusleads directly to “a sort of ‘dualist’ thesis: on theone hand there is [individual] man and on theother hand there is the World with all its attrib-utes, its great characteristics, Language, Sexuality,etc.” Purged of every organic or social attribute,sustained in his “absolute sufficiency,” “by his veryexistence the individual holds the world at adistance in an irreversible or ‘unilateral’ way”(En tant qu’un 221, 210, 219). Laruelle makesno secret, meanwhile, of his interest in themore extreme forms of heretical mysticism andgnosticism; his current cycle of publications,beginning with Le Christ futur, is organised aroundthe forthcoming treatise Théorèmes mystiques.

114 Laruelle, En tant qu’un 246.

115 “Consciousness is its own foundation, but itremains contingent that there be a consciousness,

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rather than purely and simply the in-itself, adinfinitum” (Sartre, L’Etre et le néant 120).

116 Sartre, Transcendance de l’ego 79/98–99.

117 Sartre, “Une Idée fondamentale de laphénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité” inSituations philosophiques 12.

118 Sartre, L’Etre et le néant 538, 597.

119 Ibid. 607.

120 Ibid. 114–17.

121 Ibid. 612–13. “There are never any accidentsin life” (613). As Michel Haar observes, Sartre is atevery point determined to preserve an absoluteor “sovereign” conception of the subject: “man ascause of himself occupies entirely the place ofGod.” Sartre is determined to avoid bothHeidegger’s cooperative and enabling conceptionof being-with others (along with his conception ofan authenticity that emerges from its initialanonymity among the “they” of ordinary socialexistence) and Husserl’s tendency to “make senseof the relation consciousness-world primarily interms of the relation of knowledge” (Haar, LaPhilosophie française entre phénoménologie et méta-physique 63, 39).

122 Sartre, L’Etre et le néant 275.

123 Cf. Badiou, “On a Finally Objectless Subject”(1989). Bruno Bosteels draws attention to impor-tant differences between the quasi-dialecticalconception of event and intervention that Badioudevelops (particularly in the work up to andincluding Théorie du sujet) and the more absolute,more all-or-nothing “speculative leftism” Badiouassociates with Jambet and Lardreau (cf. Bosteels,Badiou and the Political, forthcoming). I wouldargue, however, that these differences are internalto the broadly singular or non-relational concep-tion of thought common to all three thinkers; Idiscuss the non-relational aspects of Badiou’sphilosophy in my Badiou: A Subject to Truth (24–28,271–91) and “Consequences of Abstraction”(forthcoming).

124 Cf. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique 76;Sartre, Situations IX 101–03. As Sartre becomesprogressively more concerned with the practical-ities of “changing the world,” so too does his laterwork attenuate his initially absolute (and initially“imaginary”) point of departure with variousforms of mediation in the world. It is perhaps no

accident that Badiou himself, as he has shifted hisphilosophical conception of change from thecircumstances of generalised war to the circum-stances of an uncertain “peace,” has directedmuch of his recent work to a new conception of“worlds” (cf. Badiou, Logiques des mondes, forth-coming; Hallward, Badiou, chapter 14).

125 Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire 200.

126 Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie 60; cf.Badiou, L’Etre et l’événement 365–77.

127 Badiou, “Saisissement, dessaisie, fidélité” 21.

128 Christina Howells has long drawn attentionto the similarity of both Sartre and Derrida’srefusal of self-coincidence or self-presence (see, inparticular, Howells, “Sartre and theDeconstruction of the Subject” in CambridgeCompanion to Sartre).

129 See, in particular, Derrida, “Les Fins del’homme” in Marges de la philosophie148–61/124–34. “L’être est depuis toujours sapropre fin, c‘est-à-dire la fin de son propre”(161/134).

130 Derrida, Positions 109–10.

131 Derrida, Marges de la philosophie 22/21, 24/23.Despite Derrida’s (qualified) denial of the nega-tive-theological resonances of his argument here,much of what he associates with différance fitssmoothly with the apophatic-theophanic tradition,starting with the fact that “différance is not. It isnot a present being, however excellent” (22/21).

132 Ibid. 23/22.

133 Derrida, Positions 40; Marges de la philosophie12/11 tm.

134 Derrida, De la grammatologie 73/50 tm.

135 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” in BasicPhilosophical Writings 63. Like any creating, thetrace is forever non-coincident with itself, neverpresent to itself: “always differing and deferring,the trace is never as it is in the presentation ofitself. It erases itself in presenting itself” (Derrida,Marges de la philosophie 24/23).

136 Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié 87/68; Derrida,“Donner la mort” 76–77/78.

137 Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié 247/219, 47/29.

138 Corbin, Histoire 58; Corbin, Le Paradoxe dumonothéisme 55. Cf. Corbin, Corps spirituel 8–9;

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Corbin, Philosophie iranienne 16. According toJambet’s terse summary, “Corbin thinks of thetearing away from history as the true meaning ofhuman existence” (Jambet, La Logique desOrientaux 17). And Levinas: “when man trulyapproaches the Other he is uprooted fromhistory” (Totalité et infini 45/52).

139 Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation 203–04,859.

140 Henry, Marx 144–45.

141 Levinas, Totalité et infini 21/33 tm; Badiou,Infinite Thought 40–42.

142 This is a point made forcefully by Brassier,who insists on the difference between “two verydifferent kinds of anti-relationality: the religious,archaic refusal of relation or the world, à laBergson, Henry, Corbin, and Levinas; and theradical enlightenment, anti-phenomenological,ultra-modernist indifference to relation or theworld peculiar to Badiou and Laruelle” (RayBrassier, correspondence with the author, 9September 2003). I accept that the thematicexpression of this difference is readily apparent;the question is whether the slender resources ofanti-relationality themselves allow, in the end, formuch more than an apparent distinction between(“progressive”) indifference to the world and(“reactionary”) denial of the world.

143 Badiou, “The Caesura of Nihilism” (2002).

144 This and is qualitatively different from thatdifferential multiplication of the one affirmed byCorbin or Henry (1 × 1 × 1 × 1 …) or that univo-cal repetition of difference affirmed by Deleuze(AND AND AND …).

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Peter HallwardFrench DepartmentKing’s College LondonThe StrandLondon WC2R 2LSUKE-mail: peter.hallward@kcl.ac.uk