General Theory of Victims

François Laruelle

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745679617, 9780745679600
• eBook ISBN: 9780745691459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The most accessible expression of François Laruelle's non-philosophical, or 'non-standard', thought, General Theory of Victims forges a new role for contemporary philosophers and intellectuals by rethinking their relation to victims. A key text in recent continental philosophy, it is indispensable for anyone interested in the debates surrounding materialism, philosophy of religion, and ethics.

Transforming Joseph de Maistre's adage that the executioner is the cornerstone of society, General Theory of Victims instead proposes the victim as the cornerstone of humanity and the key figure for contemporary thought. Laruelle condemns philosophy for participating in and legitimating the great persecutions of the twentieth century, and lays out a new vision of victim-oriented ethics. To do this, he engages the resources of both quantum physics and theology in order to adapt a key concept of non-philosophy, Man-in-person, for a new understanding of the victim. As Man-in-person, the victim is no longer exclusively defined by suffering, but has the capacity to rise up against the world?s persecution. Based on this, Laruelle develops a new ethical role for the intellectual in which he does not merely 'represent' the victim, but imitates or 'clones' it, thereby assisting the victim?s uprising within thought.

1
The Victim-in-Person

The axiom of man as victim

Our ethics is based on a theology of the Good and the hierarchy it forms with Evil. Exhausted, deconstructed, driven to extremes by the clashes of history and the variations of philosophy combined, it is a survivor ethics for Survivors, who have shaken off all norms and hopes and are backed into their entrenchments, be it a relativist ideology of the limit and forced retreat, or an apology for a purifying terror, or even a chaos of “human” considerations. We intend to draw out the final consequences of this situation. Our conjuncture has two features. In the first place, the heritage of a century that was quantitatively more criminal than others (now a technological possibility), inscribing it in the depths of consciousness and in the mass graves of memory. But of this century it will surely be said that it legitimated crime with all the rationales of culture and with philosophy’s congenital impotence, which warrants philosophy’s resignation, and a hijacking of its mission, who knows? Then, an excess of means could just as well be the means of criminality as those of justice or defense. Obviously, it is possible to take up the “modern” defense of this century against its “renegade” denigrators and to celebrate its “passion for the real”; the only problem is that, as is customary with philosophy, we are dealing with the operation of self-defense and denial. More serious than the collapse of humanism with feet of clay is the immense philosophical self-justification and the denial of its participation in evil. We are not drawing a contrast between the great lost figure of Man and the small differences of contemporary nano-humanism, nor do we attempt to bring it back once more and put it back on stage and back in the saddle. It will certainly be a question of “humans,” but in an expanded and focused concept, the “Humans-in-person,” and under their figure the “Victim-in-person,” both of which are generic rather than philosophical symbols.

If man disappeared with humanism, it is foolish to want to go backwards by reforming the same concepts, reformulating a new humanism under the same conditions as the old, that of a “homodicy” crowned by a theodicy or a justice of the Good. To give a certain right to the reality of evil, let us introduce it into the concept of man. But in what form? Not that of the criminal – that would be too easy – but that of the victim as the non-good that the Good needs, in the same way Being needs non-being to exercise all of its possibilities. We are not going to declare in frustration that man is inherently an evil and criminal being, a new version of sin, but rather that he is at least a victim, the recipient, bearer, and displayer of evil. This is certainly not the same thing as the front and back of a two-faced being, even though the two sides are linked and man can thus appear as Janus-faced, because that would yield to an overly simple unitary and dialectical causality. To want to define man by the predicates of Good or Goodness, to place ethics directly in man’s essence, and to be surprised by history’s ironic and cruel refutations is to expose oneself to a vicious circle. Our thesis is that man is “fundamentally” a victim or an “object” of evil, and occasionally a criminal, that it belongs to his essence to be virtually a victim, and that his criminal effectiveness is contingent and cannot be used to define him. It is a question of getting rid of the duality of Good and Evil that holds man in its forceps. He belongs to the sphere of evil rather than to the non-human world only by virtue of being a victim, the addressee of persecution – this is the non-active but nonetheless real manner of participating in evil without doing it, by submitting to it par excellence. This is not an obvious thesis for philosophy. It is of course not a question of simply inverting the hierarchy of Good and Evil, but of inverting it in the name of this non-acting, the real, which predisposes man to victim status, and of putting evil in prior-priority instead of in priority. We will not say that humans are passive and allow themselves to be defeated by complicity, because it is in the non-acting of the victim that the resistance to the criminal is manifested, and from this resistance the act and the very person of the criminal are deduced. For its part, resistance to evil is no longer the occurrence of a native and immediate goodness. In-prior-priority of Good and Evil as transcendentals of philosophy, there is a generic non-acting, or passivity, and resistance, which come from further away than from these transcendental characters.

One of the means for extracting the problem of man from its humanistic, and furthermore, philosophical, rut is to consider that man’s real potency [sa teneur en réel] expresses itself in his victim status, in particular through the expanded concept of “crime against humanity” which distills his entire problem. Furthermore, it is important not to think in too linear and determinist a fashion that a crime against humanity constitutes anything more than the occasion for victim status. Between the crime and the victim there is the problem of its real, if not its reality, which the crime lets pass in silence, of which it makes a “blank,” or which it understands sordidly as complicity or cowardice. The victim is one of the great theoretical inventions of the twentieth century, but one that, as is often the case, does not find its thought or its concept right off the bat. For our part, we formulate it as a “conjecture” destined to force the hesitating and unclear discourse of philosophy. The twentieth century contested the concept of man by struggling against it universally and by every means possible. Philosophy having accomplished a critique of humanism, the human sciences took over and hurried to destroy not only humanism but man himself. His essence and his existence were contested at both extremes by animality, divinity, and a third term, technics. They were put into play in a gigantomachy that even Plato could not have foreseen, between man’s reduction to the vital space on the one hand and, on the other, the infinite transcendence of his relation with the one God. Anthropology, molecular biology, and paleontology dissolve man into sequences and reticular effects, into genetic and cultural bifurcations, multiplying and juxtaposing human families. Biotechnologies no longer know where to set the limit of the beginning or of the completion, or the death, of the human species in the animal kingdom and in relation to itself. This transparency of man – the loss of his opacity and his dissolution in chemistry, biology, and physics, in all the possible histories and cultures – reduces him to the state of vanishing traces. Contested as well by biotechnological cloning, man was brought to his final limits. The rational animal was dismembered – no longer anything but a system of effects and dimensions – systemism and complexity being among the final efforts to recapture the exhausted paradigm on the edge of the abyss. The idea finally emerges of the possibility of quantitatively or industrially destroying or producing him.

However, it is not for philosophy to content itself with a statement of a phenomenon’s occasions and from that to induce generalities, but rather to seek if nothing else its real possibility or its principles in the depths of the human being rather than in extraneous causes. For this reason, we no longer have any other solution in the desert that man has become but to put him forward as the object of a prior-to-the-first axiom for a theory of the victim and a deduction of the intellectual’s acts of protection. But this understanding of man as an axiomatic entity, free from cumbersome and indistinct predicates, certainly cannot stop at this formalism following which it would side with a final philosophical decision, hoping to escape into the clouds of an idealism or the effects of a materialism. It is doubtless necessary to recognize that it is as much an axiomatizable material as the real of a subject that holds this axiom under its proper condition, as if it were a formal materiality without at all being a philosophical auto-position or a topological torsion, which would only record and repeat the problem. Let us advance as a suggestion the term “oraxiom” to describe our non-humanist method of access to humans. Why?

On a theoretical plane, three current solutions make it difficult to approach the problem of man and victim without misunderstanding. Having become dominant conjuncturally, they should be indicated by their symptomatic character: (1) the creationist reaction as a symptom of a lost paradigm, without a doubt the most dangerous regression, but interesting for its permanent and hallucinatory confusion of the radical axiomatic identity, which makes up the essence of the human-in-person, with the unity of a creative transcendence; (2) the diehard imagination of science fiction that creates a putative human in yet a different way, confusing the vanishing-being of the subject with that of man, which it reduces to android and humanoid states. The hypothesis proposed here, of the duality of Man-in-person and the subject it clones non-biologically, recognizes in the human the necessity of an Indivisibility-without-unity, which it extracts from creationism, and of a being-vanished, more than absent, vanished-without-vanishing, which it extracts from science fiction. However, the solution is not in the synthesis of creationism or intelligent design, even the most well-informed, and science fiction: that would still be a philosophical artifact, but in a duality or a complementarity that we call “unilateral”; (3) finally, the politico-historical model of the victim, the defeated of the local revolt, the one crushed by repression, the excluded or the illegal immigrant of contemporary societies doomed to migratory flux, anguish, and the porosity of borders. This is certainly the most extensive and the most diversified historical material of the current century following the great persecutions of the previous, a persecution that itself has become multiple. Hence the emergence of philosophies of the “event,” which took the place of thought concerning the victim and contributed to its forgetting or its abandonment to the human sciences. Two of them made history in the twentieth century and record – as always with philosophies, after the fact – in opposing ways, but not without affinity, the uneven and terrible course of the previous century. Heidegger, on the one hand, calls for and celebrates the advent of the principle of the German people as order and will on the spatio-historical stage. Badiou, on the other hand, at the end of the twentieth century, reinstates the Maoist order in conceptual philosophy by a resurrection of dialectical materialism, which is accompanied by a philosophy of the decision and an ethics of fidelity restricted to the trace of the event. These are both obviously thoughts of force – the one a totalitarian force in the vital space-time, the other the force of authoritarian exception in the modern space-time of knowledge. They admire only the founding heroes and legislators of cities or of worlds, and have nothing but scorn, denial, or at best indifference for democracy and victims. In these ways of thinking Being, nothing is demanded of the subject but to walk in already worn tracks. They cannot render justice to victims because their context is too narrow and reduced to the enclosure of the world, indeed of worlds, as if the multiplication of worlds truly changed the dimension of thought and opened onto anything other than a supplement of transcendence. Only a non-philosophy of humans as immanent victims, not as all-victim, can oppose the ontological anonymity of things, of bodies, and of historical events. Obviously, the disadvantage of appealing to victims is the possibility of creating a misunderstanding and leading philosophers “into the temptation” of dissension. But we have no other vocabulary at our disposal.

How can we still think “Man” in spite of everything, in spite of the collapse of humanism, followed by the vanishing of “Man” amid modern sciences [savoirs], science fiction, and theories of the event? And in what sense is Man, who no longer has objectivity and is dissolved in mixtures of knowledge and concepts, still thinkable? This dissolution is for us a symptom to be interpreted. We need a thought that retains Man, but as having lost all his attributes. Let us then write this hollow man with axioms: Man is no more than the first term, indeed prior-to-the-first and thus indefinable naturally or philosophically; he needs axioms that are undoubtedly special, ones that testify if not to his reality then to his real potency, “oraxioms.” However, axiomatization is here that of the field, postulated as a new empirical experience [empirie], of anthropology and the human sciences. Moreover, the problem does not amount to an absolute void of philosophy. There is indeed a reality or a conceptual materiality of Man, but a generic or reduced one. Man’s disappearance is not relative or absolute; it is, as we say, radical: he is withdrawn into himself, into his radical immanence this is his non-consistency or his In-person insistence. It is necessary to accept the thought that Man is vanished [évanoui], radically lost (in his own identity) but not absolutely lacking “to” his representation, and to say this according to this being-disappeared [être-disparu]. He doesn’t exist anymore in the sense that one could attribute to him visible and itemized properties, his representation having been destroyed, but he insists by his effects, like a black box that only signals by its inputs and outputs. It is neither an object nor even an anonymous for-itself, but a generic Identity separated unilaterally, a without-relation including a relation that participates complementarily in it without damaging it.

The defense of humans

It seems it is not only God who has abandoned us, or history and the ideologies it has carried along, it is also philosophy, insofar as it has always been a masked theodicy, its preparation or its consequence. Philosophy has become insufficient – it had to recognize or deny this – through an excess of “sufficiency” to ensure that which seems to us to be the first task of an ethics: the defense of humans divided up or divided against themselves. Formulating this axiom of the human immanence of ethics is enough to require defining their a priori defense against their own natural or spontaneous usage, their “in-world” usage of their means, for example that of the old legislative Reason, which was itself one of the ethical and anti-ethical means of human existence. Ethics requires an internal reorientation of means and their usage according to the safeguarding of life. Even the hierarchy of Good and Evil will have been only a means to oppress and threaten human life. Thus, it does not “suffice,” when it is not contradictory, to want to recapture this disaster of an ambiguous thought or of a compromised subject incapable of a stable ethics by gods less cruel or less barbarous as spectators, by means of a will submitting itself to the transcendence of Reason, or by a “modernized” dialectical materialism, when it is not a supplement of conscience or memory, as if any of them had any effect on the scourge of History, which ceaselessly beats them back. As inefficacious a procedure as calling to a God even more silent than “hidden.” Philosophy teaches us that there is nothing but bodies, languages, and truths, and is happy to discover that they are multiple, except that there is the human exception, as ordinary as it is (and because it is ordinary), whose effects on the whole extent of creation will have to be re-evaluated.

We already knew from the cries of victims and from the courage of certain heretics – perhaps without quite knowing it because of a sanctifying philosophy – that in God was concealed the Grand Persecutor. The true atheism is not as simple as philosophy imagines it to be. It occurs in two stages: the banal refusal to believe in a God is self-contradictory and satisfies those who think little, but the refusal to believe in a good God is the true rebellion. There is always a God lying in ambush, preparing his return in whatever negation is made of his existence, even a materialist one, but it is important that it be a malicious God, a thesis that only an “ultra”-religious heresy can face. The atheism of indifference is weak and lays down its arms along with its speech to philosophy; the second is a strong heresy, the “non-” theological radicalization of a malicious God, his extension to every divinity that would appear as One or Multiple, as Sole and Great or even as natural and pagan.

We no longer want to be Survivors of the philosophical disaster. Why survivors of philosophy? Religions are the matter of the world, its dark depths, but philosophy is its spokesperson and its form, the thought-world par excellence. We cannot handle the two separately as if religions were self-sufficient without the philosophical apparatus, as if philosophy could be independent of the attraction of religions. When it is understood that philosophy is a rational mythology become indispensable and planetarily hegemonic, a thought that never admits to being outdated [dépassée] because it is racing ahead [dépassante], that it is made to resist all counterexamples and refutations as if it were a reasoning and perhaps rational hallucination, that it i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Translators’ Introduction
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Victim-in-Person
• 2 Media Intellectual and Generic Intellectual
• 3 The Injustice Done to the Victim
• 4 Deduction of Murder and Persecution
• 5 Insurrection and Resurrection
• 6 Our Ordinary Messiahs
• Index
• End User License Agreement