“System of Pleonectic”: Interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (Part 2)
PART 2
BR: This is a topic, like that of sacrifice, that is rarely thematised in philosophy. It’s more the domain of theology.
MBK: That’s true. But since I myself haven’t thematised it... I mentioned it a long time ago in order to question, in a rather “provocative” manner, the notion of sacrifice in Heidegger.[1] A notion developed across some rather significant dates: 1936–45. Among Heideggerians, it’s hush-hush. As you might guess, I have my own thoughts about the precise significance of this theme...
But in my actual work, no, I don’t give much consideration to the notion of sacrifice. I should reread René Girard. One thing is clear: I’ve always been cautious about this subject. From this perspective, I’m more aligned with Agamben than with Jean-Luc Nancy, meaning that Jean-Luc—rest in peace—was a bit of social-democrat about it (I told him this once, and he didn’t even take it badly): sacrifice no longer makes sense for us, life is “unsacrificable,”[2] life is about sharing and coexistence, etc. There was a side to Jean-Luc that was a bit too “soft.”
First of all, it’s not true. We’re conducting this interview in Tunisia, it’s Ramadan, and a lamb is sacrificed for Eid, the Abrahamic sacrificial ritual. I quite enjoy it, grilled lamb (laughs). I’m not at all vegan—I think a lamb or a chicken do not have the same ontological status as a human being, because what is an anti-speciesist and vegan philosopher like Frédéric Neyrat going to do? Send these animals, domesticated for tens of thousands of years and, therefore, incapable of surviving on their own in the wild, to be devoured by the first passing canine? Is that more desirable than being well-treated all their lives and then slaughtered in a matter of seconds? Ending up torn apart by a wolf or a fox after improbably surviving in a nature they haven’t been accustomed to for tens of millennia—is that the progress advocated by vegans, who are mostly well-off Westerners? All this to say that, in many traditions, not just monotheisms, the notion of sacrifice has meaning. What about sacrifice among Hindus, among the Chinese or Japanese, among various hunter-gatherer tribes? And even today, politically, sacrifice for a good cause has meaning.
It’s a realization shared with a number of philosophers (Agamben, Dugin, etc.), that we have never really moved beyond the theological-political. Marx and Nietzsche, for me proposed religions of replacement, with “really existing socialism” against fascism; but very quickly, by the end of World War II, while everyone was still focused on the struggle between communism and capitalism, in reality it was the theological-political that was leading the dance. There was a somewhat psychotic Protestantism of the Americans, the birth of the State of Israel, the Third World, and decolonization which, in many cases, meant a return to religion (and not just monotheistic religion, I’m also thinking of India), etc.
And today, we find ourselves in a political landscape marked by the collapse of the West, due to the collapse of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism after the fall of Catholicism in Europe, and the emergence of Orthodox Russia, Iranian Shi’ism, the Muslim world more generally, Hindu theology, and Chinese thought as eloquently explained by Yuk Hui, among others. This is where I would add to the “exit from modernity” that he promotes: by focusing on the sore spot for much of modern continental philosophy, namely that, in reality, we never truly moved beyond the theological-political, as we might have thought with Marx or Nietzsche. Which, incidentally, would have been the fulfilment of philosophy’s oldest (Platonic and even Heraclitean) ambition: the belief that it was destined to replace religion, pure and simple. That’s what Plato was professing in The Republic. I delve into this point in depth in Système du pléonectique, but I can’t go into it in detail here.
Let’s reflect a little longer on the question of religions of replacement, Marx and Nietzsche: there was indeed a communist messianism, with the theme of the “bright future [lendemains qui chantant]” as the redemption of the proletariat. And I’ve just published this book on Nietzsche, which aims to change the narrative surrounding him. One of the points I raise is that there is, nevertheless, an explicit theology in Nietzsche, which had a determining influence on Nazi doctrine. This point has not been emphasized by any, I mean any, of the major philosophers who discussed Nietzsche: neither Heidegger (who himself developed a fair amount of theology, that was also neo-pagan), nor Deleuze, nor Nancy, nor Lacoue-Labarthe, nor anyone else.
So, with a few exceptions like Agamben or Dugin, philosophers (Badiou, Zizek, Rancière...) don’t want to engage with this theological-political dimension that sets the tone everywhere in the world today, while sticking to Marxist principles and thus condemning themselves to the most glaring political impotence. This is, in a way, refreshing, because this condescending indifference of leftist intellectuals to the theological-political or simply spiritual content found in Asia and other radically different civilizations still reflects the ingrained cultural supremacism of the West over other cultures. This is what I think, for example, about Marxism and Leninism: they were the last avatars of Western intolerant universalism (today, in the name of mere verbal “tolerance,” never translated into action). This logic is now running out of steam.
BR: My question was, in fact, an indirect way to address the issue of the theological in thought, which is, as you said, greatly underestimated in contemporary philosophy. It’s a way to question the limits of philosophy which, by habit or by tradition, avoids dealing with certain topics, especially that of Evil, which is predominant, and we could even say central, in your work...
MBK: It’s actually more like the starting point. That is to say, a pre-conceptual, pre-philosophical intuition, a pure psychological “shock,” a fundamental and primal evidence: Evil is what sets things in motion. I have suffered for a long time, as a human being, since the age of nine, to be brutally precise, from the existence of Evil.
In my preface to Système du Pléonectique, I quote the mathematician Grothendieck, who ended up isolated from everything and everyone in a cabin, living as a consistent anarcho-primitivist for the last thirty years of his life, even though he was the most creative mathematician of our time. His parents were Russian-Jewish anarchists who had fled the Bolshevik persecutions. And one of his closest friends said about him that she eventually understood what was wrong with him: his problem was the existence of Evil, and the fact that he couldn’t stand that most people were aware of it yet did nothing to address it.
So, here’s the thing: let’s start with the hypothesis of Evil, of the hegemony of Evil, with its dimension that is both more primordial and more fundamental than that of the Good. Primordial, because the existence of Evil is chronologically first, as what the Bible aptly called “original sin.” And fundamental, because the phenomenological experience, the most mundane aspects of our daily lives, consist of a constant encounter with Evil, not Good. If I get on a bus, I mostly see unhappy and mad people, especially in the West; happiness or well-being are really exceptions. I’m writing a rather innovative book on this, posing the same question from another angle: what if madness, in human experience, was much more primordial and fundamental than Reason, which would be a late, precarious, and always hard-won victory over the hegemony of madness in human experience? Everyone knows the quote from Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” So... my work, following a few precursors in this regard, like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, some of Heidegger, Adorno, Günter Anders, Schürmann, or Lacoue-Labarthe, aims to break with the positivism that has dominated philosophy too easily since Plato, which insists on placing Good first. It is Evil that comes first, and in the West, it’s religion that said it, not philosophy: it’s Tragedy among the Greeks, it’s Christianity, and thus a certain form of Judaism, it’s Luther’s Protestantism, it’s Shi'ism among Muslims.
So, yes, that’s indeed the initial impulse behind my work—the haunting sense of Evil. For a long time, I was plagued by absolute despair and negativity, to the point that I often felt like giving up, convinced there was no way out and that it was pointless to resist the inevitable. But for the last three or four years, I’ve managed to overcome this very negative view to some extent, and I’m now driven by a desire, let’s say, to propose something positive, albeit on the very basis of a phenomenological canvas entirely painted black. Once you’ve accepted, as Adorno put it, the unvarnished negativity of existence, once you admit that this is the reality and nothing else, then an ethic of the Good can emerge from this underlying negative background.
BR: Is it purely emotional, or are you able to translate it into philosophical terms?
MBK: No, for now, it’s purely empirical. It’s the result of meeting a number of people who are fearless, who aren’t intimidated by the Terror that prevails in the West, who dare to act and speak against the tide: people who simply, and concretely, do Good, unlike Badiou, who merely lectures about the philosophical Good but doesn’t practice it, and even often defends phenomena that I consider to be radical Evil. These people, in addition to being ethically heroic, are often very intelligent, and some are even geniuses in their fields: I’m thinking of Vincent Pavan, a high-level mathematician with whom I’m preparing a book,[3] or Tristan Edelman, an extraordinary total artist (music, writing, choreography, martial arts... and also with an impressive philosophical background, like Vincent). Doctors, psychiatrists... not just the narrowly endogamic world of philosophers (laughs). People who concretely do Good around them. This has truly changed my life, and yes, I realise that I couldn’t have encountered this solely among philosophers or intellectuals, who generally merely promote the Good in a purely discursive way without accompanying it with actual deeds. These are people who, when it comes down to it, are willing to sacrifice themselves for others.
To expand on the question of the Good-Evil, or rather Evil-Good, relationship in my work, I can make a remark that is very important to me: I don’t claim a pure and simple reversal. I think that’s one of the major weaknesses of Marx or Nietzsche: the prosopopoeia of a tabula rasa, from which Lenin or Hitler derived all the implications; the Promethean idea of “let’s overturn everything from top to bottom,” the claim to an absolute beginning, that “the world will change its foundations.” With this kind of reversal, not only do you often end up encountering exactly what you intended to overturn, but you also give birth to something even worse. Badiou never really got over his Marxist-Leninist episode, and his concept of the event is a sublimation of the ideology of the tabula rasa. The event, for him, is an absolute beginning, nothing precedes its phenomenality.
For me, it’s an aberration, even if it took me years to understand and demonstrate it—and deconstruct it. I show in my work that the event always occurs based on what came before, using the material that pre-existed: it’s a transformation, not a transubstantiation. This aligns with Heidegger, for whom the event brings into being what, in the archived past, remained unmanifested, for example, the Greek origin. Further back, there’s the young Hegel’s idea of Aufhebung: the event is both a negation and a preservation of what preceded it. Once again, this could be my contribution to Yuk Hui’s reflection on the exit from modernity, in the sense that a certain modernity was indeed a certain ideology of the tabula rasa which can be traced back to the French Revolution, at least in the Western context. My concept of the event is undoubtedly closer to the spirit of the Renaissance or the Reformation: every event is, in fact, a re-creation of the past, if you will, an “improvement” on it. A reinvention, at least.
It's all connected, since Luther’s revolt against the Vatican, mediaeval scholasticism, and the theology of his time is a rejection of the dilution of the radicality of original sin. The Catholicism of his time, which culminated in the sale of indulgences, treated sin like a stain on a shirt, something to be removed with detergent. The confessional of the time had become a washing machine. Luther’s revolt was about returning to the Catholicism of the origins, that of Paul and Augustine: we are irredeemably sinful, marked by Adam’s sin as if by an indelible seal. It is only on this basis that one can claim to think and do Good. And indeed, Paul and Augustine say nothing other than this.
During a symposium dedicated to my work in Lausanne in July 2023, where there were some truly remarkable presentations, someone compared me to a “Teilhard de Chardin of Evil” (laughs). And his talk made me suddenly understand the phrase from Paul, which had been so mysterious to me: “…where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” This phrase clearly indicates that things start with sin, not with grace. Augustine says nothing else: his Confessions are a colossal exercise in self-flagellation—there’s no greater sinner than him. Grace is wrested from the omnipresent predominance of sin through sheer force of will.
But that’s why it’s essential to defend rationality. Not just deconstruct it, as Heidegger did; that’s almost too easy. Evil, as aberrant as it may seem at first glance—atrocious abuse, torture, senseless war—when you study these types of phenomena closely, you always end up finding a rationality, an order of reasons. As Spinoza said, you recover much better from a negative phenomenon by uncovering its causes than by ignoring them. If you deconstruct reason to the point of saying: well, this terrible crime is inexplicable, it’s purely contingent... you give up on thinking, you renounce thought. I’ll give a very concrete example from my recent life: the suicide of someone very close and dear. As long as I don’t understand, or only partially understand, why they did it, I’m obviously very shocked and unhappy. But by investigating, like in a detective novel, to trace the threads of causes that led this person to such a horrific act, and by finding, as they say, all the pieces of the puzzle to reconstruct the whole picture, the mourning becomes much easier to handle. You remain sad, of course, to stay within the Spinozist framework; you’re still in a state of sadness. But it’s a much more stoic, serene sadness, much less tormented and suffering. And it’s this work of Reason that Heideggerian-Derridean deconstruction, or Meillassoux’s idea (“everything is contingent!”), can sometimes deprive us of. As Kant brilliantly said: if suicide were an arbitrary act, not determined by intelligible reasons, no order of nature could subsist; everything would collapse around us immediately.
BR: When you say, borrowing Hegel’s words, that all that is real is rational, it seems to suggest that every event can be traced to a cause. I’d like you to clarify this idea, as you also claim that madness precedes reason, in other words, that in a sense, the irrational precedes the rational...
MBK: Not at all, because it’s not the same thing, there’s what Kant would call an amphibology in what you’re saying. Madness (and thus reason) is a subjective category; irrationality (and thus rationality) is an objective category, which pertains to the order of things. When I say that madness is primary, it concerns only and solely the human phenomenon; there’s no madness in animals, except metaphorically, or because of things we subject them to. The irrational, on the other hand, simply doesn’t exist. But your question opens up a whole field of fascinating investigation.
My argument about madness is as follows: if we mentally observe the original human phenomenon (Cro-Magnon) solely in terms of animality, we are forced to see that this phenomenon has something literally insane, thus, if you like, “irrational.” But this “irrationality” exists only at a subjective level, it does not concern the functioning of things and living beings. So, it’s a very tense dialectical argument: the emergence of what qualifies the human as such and differentiates it from all other animals, technological virtuosity (hunting, fishing, agriculture, drawing, clothing, writing...), is something that we must find perfectly absurd. If we saw another species, let’s say a simian species, beginning to spear its prey to cook it over a fire, and the fire itself, which requires knowing not to light it, something no animal can do—we’d be stunned. Imagine if we saw an animal other than ourselves riding on another animal to move faster through nature: we’d be utterly terrified by this animal, we’d say something was wrong with it... we’d see ourselves reflected. Our own madness. This is the extreme dialectical tension of my argument: the birth of rationality itself has something insane about it and is therefore the condition of possibility for all the phenomena we later categorise as “madness.”
And so, we return to the question of science: you can describe, from the outside (an indispensable condition for any science), the behaviour of tigers, caribou, rats, etc. You can give a nearly exhaustive description, which is why biology or ethology are indeed sciences. They operate in certain ways, within well-defined and unbreachable limits, they can perform certain actions and not others. The human being, as Heidegger aptly noted, transcends these limits precisely because they are capable of science, that is, describing the limits of other beings. Humans are the only animals that occasionally transgress such boundaries, capable of doing things that are not hardwired in their genes, not atavistic or solely tied to evolutionary laws like other animals (Darwin never said otherwise, despite what is often attributed to him). And this, another crucial dimension of my work, has everything to do with sexuality. What do I mean by that?
I often say that my philosophical work consists of “secularising original sin.” I’ve already given several examples. But for a long time, I couldn’t answer the question: why is it that, in Genesis, in the biblical description of Adam and Eve’s sin, the transgressive appropriation of the tree of knowledge is so eroticised, with Eve, the serpent, then the fig leaf covering the genitals of the two sinners after their crime, etc.? For years, I struggled with this question. Why is the appropriation of knowledge, thus the birth of science, explicitly gendered, sexualised? It was while reading palaeoanthropology that I finally found the answer. Because paleoanthropologists tell exactly the same story as the Bible, without realising it. It’s the philosopher who makes the connection (laughs). As Althusser said, philosophy is the only field of thought that doesn’t have its own proper domain. The philosopher establishes links between different regimes of thought that would otherwise remain forever separate.
Paleoanthropologists all say —and I mean, all—that if humans were not capable, at their origin, of completely “cheating” with their sexuality, they would not have been able to develop the skilled discipline required for practices like hunting, fishing, agriculture, etc. Clothing—the biblical fig leaf—which is itself a sophisticated technology, serves to completely conceal the reproductive instinct. The human mammal is the only one capable of this—that’s why there’s psychoanalysis, for example, which isn’t a science but a way of exploring sexuality that largely escapes scientific description, unlike all other mammals, not to mention other animal species, where reproductive cycles are monotonously mechanical. It’s precisely because human sexuality is not susceptible to scientific description that humans are susceptible to science; and it’s because humans are susceptible to science that by mastering the instinctual, inherently uncontrollable aspect of their sexuality—in other words, controlling the uncontrollable—they can engage in those archaeo-sciences like hunting, agriculture, etc. All other animal sexualities can be described. With our closest relatives, the simians, there’s varying capacity to control sexuality—it would take re-reading some books to get the exact figures—but it’s never 100%, and so technological virtuosity isn’t possible either.
And that’s what’s fascinating about paleoanthropologists: each one has a different hypothesis on the subject, but they all converge—without a single exception—on the same conclusion: if humans weren’t capable of completely concealing, manipulating, or lying about sexuality, technology and science wouldn’t be possible. So, it’s through deception, in this specific sense, that truth begins, not the other way around, just as Evil precedes Good, madness precedes reason, and so on. Among paleoanthropologists, you have all the nuances, I’d say, of meta-politics: you have the right-wing macho who’ll say that, among the Cro-Magnons, it was the males who imposed on the females to keep their sexuality in check so they could go hunt mammoths or train elephants without being disturbed. On the diametrically opposite side, you’ll have the far-left feminist who’ll explain that, no, it was the women who voluntarily chose to conceal their reproductive cycles because childbirth was painful, so they wanted to reduce it to the bare minimum. When, in the Bible, it’s said to the woman, “You will give birth in pain,” it’s literal, because before the invention of modern obstetrics, many women died during childbirth. A chimpanzee gives birth to her baby like a hen lays an egg. With plenty of more moderate hypotheses between the two meta-political extremes. But in all cases, the concealment of sexuality, observed in all cultures without exception—the Kama Sutra, Taoist teachings, unique conventions among hunter-gatherers—is the condition for technological virtuosity, and thus science. Other mammals, including simians, can always be taken by surprise at some point by an instinctual surge they cannot resist, with females in heat and males vying for “favours.” They cannot, therefore, coordinate their efforts to hunt animals physically stronger than they are; they follow the “order of nature,” as it’s commonly said. Only humans, by neutralising the possibility that reproductive instincts could catch them off guard, can ensure that all male members of a tribe of Cro-Magnons can coordinate their efforts to hunt or tame animals a thousand times stronger than themselves, whether mammoths, aurochs, elephants, or horses. This is a unique dialectical reversal in the entire animal kingdom, and thus a unique event in the history of life itself, therefore of being.
And here’s another striking dialectical paradox: it’s precisely because humans completely control their sexuality, entirely concealing the “mechanical” nature of reproductive cycles, no longer being bound by them, that human sexuality is also the most disordered of all, hence the need for psychoanalysis. We’ve seen that the difficulties of obstetrics are an aberration, an Evil, in the context of mammalian norms; but even more obviously, it’s the entire spectrum of what is commonly referred to as “perversions,” all forms of human sexuality clearly linked to Evil, such as sadism, pedophilia, bestiality... In the Western religious tradition (even before monotheism, in Attic Tragedy), sexuality has always been associated with Evil. And nothing has changed in this regard, because even atheists like Sade, or Bataille, or Genet, or Burroughs, as well as many others—resolutely anti-religious minds—continuously affirm in their writings that if there’s a region of phenomena more closely linked to Evil than any other, it’s sexuality. This is clear with Sade, the greatest philosophical apologist for Evil there ever was: for him, the ultimate Evil always manifests sexually. The more sophisticated the perversion, the more satisfied the Sadean hero is. So, these “atheological thinkers” of Evil... still think exactly as Western religion has thought about sexuality: that there is an inextricable connection between it and the question of Evil. You could even say, with Sade as an example, that the more atheistic you are, the more you end up corroborating the biblical diagnosis, simply by maximising and hyperbolizing it: sexuality is Evil.
BR: I’d like to approach another topic, in both senses of the word, since I’d like to ask how your friendship with David Graeber developed? You have mentioned anthropology quite a bit. What was the focus of your discussion? The question of the West, precisely?
MBK: It was a mutual friend, Christophe Petit, a brilliant and slightly eccentric economist, unfortunately not well-known to the public, who appreciated our respective works and introduced me to David’s work. I read it, and I was highly impressed. Christophe then organised a meeting between us, which went extremely well—David was an extraordinary person, both on a personal level and in terms of his creative genius, both in thought and political action. To my great surprise, the admiration was mutual; I quickly became one of his bedside philosophers (he read French), even though I wasn’t exactly a star—since my work has been gaining attention over the past few years, but when David discovered me, I was really a marginal intellectual, whereas he...
I learned a lot from him. We made a book of interviews together about anarchism[4]—not a dialogue, as I don’t speak English well enough, I would ask him questions, and it was mostly him talking, brilliantly and eruditely. It’s a book I would really like to reread at this moment. It’s dense and contains so much, but I don’t yet have the means to ship my library back to Tunisia.
One of the things I admired most about him was that he was truly the counterexample to those intellectuals who say one thing and do the opposite: they claim Marxism-Leninism and denounce the bourgeoisie, but live and behave like perfect bourgeois conformists. They call for revolution but back off when a real revolution appears, as happened with the Yellow Vests—and when David came to Paris during the movement, he was one of the few intellectuals who marched with the Yellow Vests, while the so-called “radical” French intellectuals stayed at home, terrified by media intimidation, which slandered this movement beyond measure, creating an unbridgeable chasm between the politico-media sphere and a large part of the population, including myself—I’ve completely boycotted French media ever since.
Badiou, Zizek, and many far less brilliant than them, the so-called “leftist” French intellectuals, it’s all just talk, petitions, and wishful thinking. These are people who talk, talk, but never put their words into action. The rare times they engage in real activism, like Badiou’s visits to factories in the 1970s or helping undocumented workers for thirty years, it’s more like scouting, just a way to feel good about themselves, but it doesn’t serve anyone or anything politically, it’s entirely sterile. David was someone entirely different. Besides being an immense thinker, the main theorist of anarchism today, and an extraordinary human being, he was a real political activist. He was the main organiser behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was as significant in the U.S. as the Yellow Vests later were in France, and it really shook the system, the IMF, etc., to the point that David had to exile himself from his own country.
So that’s what David represents to me, someone I think about every day—I miss him, and he died scandalously young. I try, in my own modest way, to follow his example, which means not just being an abstract and verbose thinker but accompanying my thought with praxis. In my mind, I often compare David to someone else who means a lot to me, the greatest political thinker of our time (at least for the Western situation; elsewhere, it’s different people), Guy Debord, who was also someone who consistently put his words into action. May 1968 was largely his doing, just as Occupy Wall Street was David’s. It’s a welcome change from all those armchair Marxists or anarchists...
BR: With your return to Tunisia, you seem to be initiating a kind of decentring from this old Europe, particularly France, where you have lived almost exclusively since the age of thirteen. And, by extension, from a certain perspective on the world. Are you able to translate this biographical movement into intellectual terms?
MBK: I was recently talking to Vincent Pava, this great mathematician and thinker friend; he said what many on the left are saying, that since the fall of communism, there’s nothing left to give collective life any meaningful drive, that nihilism reigns supreme in France and the West, and that there’s nothing to hope for. I told him that’s why I left: because of the total despair of the situation in France, whether politically, intellectually, or morally... But it’s also because things are happening elsewhere, and if you change your perspective, a major geopolitical event is taking place: the final collapse of five centuries of Western hegemony over the world and the emergence of what the great geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar calls “the Global South.” This is where my biographical choice aligns with political commitment: I no longer wanted to be among those French protesters and dissidents who spend their time lamenting or railing against the French and Western situation, as if it would change anything, as if there was anything worth saving from a complete breakdown. Returning to Tunisia, beyond the conveniences and even personal hedonism—I feel simply much more fulfilled here—is about aligning with this massive event happening all over the planet, under the noses of the vast majority of the Western population: the rise of the “Global South,” the practical realisation of the old French slogan, “U.S. go home” (laughs).
I have excellent readers all over the world; those in France are like I was when I was there—strangers in their own country. Publicly, due to my stances, I’ve ceased to exist on the public scene in France for a long time, even though millions of people know me worldwide, and sometimes I’m recognized on the street, even here in Tunisia. I’m one of the three or four most-cited French philosophers in Anglo-Saxon academic literature; there are symposia and articles on my work... In France, to the media, it’s as if I no longer exist. I have the same status that Agamben now has in Italy: an omertà, a conspiracy of silence by the official media. There’s no longer any democracy in France. There can’t be democracy in a country where the media is completely locked down and constantly feeds lies to the population. France likely has the most corrupt, deceptive, and omnipresent media in the world—it’s really like George Orwell—I couldn’t breathe intellectually in that country. I had nothing to lose by leaving, and everything to gain, starting with something I had practically never known before, due to poverty: well-being. For my whole life I’ve worked in adversity, which probably explains the darkness and violence of my work. It feels good to discover a different ecosystem. Here, everything is softer, calmer, much slower, which suits me; philosophy doesn’t mix well with speed, it’s incompatible with contemporary technological “accelerationism.” For about fifty years, from Bataille and Sartre to Stiegler and Badiou, there was a great philosophical moment in France. Today, there’s nothing left because the “philosophers” are completely immersed in the amniotic bath of Western propaganda, in American ideology. They don’t even realise how much they’re ventriloquized by the United States. France is nothing more than an American colony now.
There’s no more possible freedom in a country like France. The only freedom you can still find in the West, I’d call it a transversal freedom, a freedom to move through walls, a transnational freedom. You have to leave France to be reborn and start living again. That’s what I tell all my friends who stayed there, and they agree, they want to join me, but for obvious professional and family reasons, they haven’t taken the step yet. Unlike you (laughs).
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[1] L’esprit du nihilisme (Paris, Fayard, 2007).
[2] Une pensée finie (Paris, Galilée, 1991).
[3] Mathématiques, philosophie et politique (Guy Trédaniel, Paris, courant 2025). Forthcoming
[4] L’anarchie, pour ainsi dire, Berlin, Diaphanes, 2021.
