This post is a translation of Erik Bordeleau’s ‘The Transindividual and the Demonic according to Bernard Aspe’i. Erik Bordelau is a postdoctoral researcher at the Free University of Brussels. We met at Gestes Spéculatifs (a colloquium with Stengers, Latour, Harraway and others) in France last year and discovered some strong political and philosophical resonances. I posted a translation of his presentation from Gestes Spéculatifs entitled ‘Dreaming the dark: Speculative presence and the politics of contraction ‘ several months ago on this blog – worth checking out again if you haven’t seen it already. You can also find various articles by him on his Academia.edu page (here), including an English translation of an interview by him with Bernard Aspe (here). For me, the translation process has presented a welcome opportunity to be introduced to the work of Bernard Aspe as well as Simondon’s work beyond ‘On the mode of existence of technical objects’.

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The Transindividual and the Demonic according to Bernard Aspe

A revolutionary war against the modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.

Nick Land

What appeared as politics and imagined itself to be so, will reveal itself a religious movement

Søren Kierkegaard

Bernard Aspe, so far relatively unknown in the English speaking world, is one of the most interesting emerging figures in contemporary French political philosophy. Born in 1970 and agrégé in philosophy, he is the author of L’instant d’après: projectiles pour une politique à l’état naissantii(La Fabrique, 2006) and Les mots et les actesiii (Nous, 2011), and collaborated in various publications such as Alice, Persistances, Chimères et Multitudes. He is part of the group Collectif pour l’Intervention, to whom we owe Communisme: un manifeste (Nous, 2012), a proposal for the renewal of forms of struggle and revolutionary political organization which echos l’Appeliv(‘The Call’), an anonymous text of Tiqqunian inspiration from 2003 which has had a significant impact in militant milieus. More recently, he published a collection of articles called Horizon Inverse (Nous, 2013) and Simondon, politique du transindividuel (Dittmar 2013), which constitutes a reworked version of his doctoral thesis conducted under the direction of Jacques Rancière and defended in 2001 before a prestigious jury composed of Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Isabelle Stengers.

The work of Bernard Aspe is characterised by the acuity of his theoretical positions and the remarkable coherence of the ensemble. It is founded on the idea of individuation and the transindividual (of Simondonian inspiration), but resists all solutions based on philosophical continuity and affirms the irreducibility of political subjectivations to speculative thought and ontology. Aspe elaborates this constitutive distinction through the works of Foucault, Badiou, Marx, Rancière and, most of all, on the spiritual side, Kierkegaard. One finds a first expression, no doubt too schematic but illuminating nonetheless, of his programme of thought in the first pages of his thesis:

“Ontology is not up to the task of providing a complete account of what is contained in the idea of a politics of truth. It is a dimension that the philosophical point of view, characterised by the real inclusion of the subjective in the effectiveness of thought, cannot confront directly. Once this dimension is forgotten, idealism appears, that is, a perspective capable of resolving the sole point of view of the thinking subject, to which what is known as ‘political philosophy’ has held. [There is] a necessity in order to think politics, to think the ‘presupposed real’ (Marx) in its concreteness and to envisage the acts that it requires.”v (emphasis added)

Aspe takes as a point of departure for his analysis the fact that philosophy and politics’ subjective modes of implication differ essentially from one another. In contrast with the pragmatist and speculative turn found in contemporary French thought under the influence of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, or else with the ‘monadological jubilation’ (which he doesn’t miss stigmatising amongst certain Deleuzians), Bernard Aspe’s approach is characterised by a certain sense of the tragic, employing himself in “marking the heterogeneity of saying and doing” and “grappling with [faire l’épreuve de] the gulf that separates them”vi. His thought is entirely strung upon this primordial question: what is a political act? Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, and in opposition to what he considers the “philosophical temptation” of the speculative, Aspe would say: “How is the path from saying to existing made: this does not tell itself, it shows itself; we cannot theorise this passage”vii.

This “mystic” tension – in the Wittgensteinian sense of that which arises and can be shown only on the indirect mode of example and affinity – animates political subjectivations and assures their inscription in the real. All the works of Aspe tend, thus, to demonstrate a spiritual component inherent to the modes of subjective implication which define collective militant engagement. Critically, his thinking portrays, with admirable clarity and confidence, the way in which collectives – those “groups in fusion” as Sartre called themviii – place their stakes intensely and irreversibly, risking themselves on the “infernal” threshold of what Aspe, following Kierkegaard, calls the ‘demonic’. Transindividual experience is what allows life to gain amplitude; the incandescent intimacy gives affective and effective consistency to collectives, and particularly those revolutionary collectives which are “sincerely ready to put the world on fire so that it shines brighter.” Nothing can a priori protect such groups from the danger of self-combustion in the intensity of a present with no return, as captured in the tragic Latin palindrome celebrated by Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (we turn around in the night and are devoured by the fire).

Communist incorporation

For Aspe, Communism constitutes itself as a political option in as much as it operates as a “subjectivating scission” whose associated partiality is the guarantee of its effectiveness. “We must relearn to hate”ix, he writes with great caution, in order to establish [instaurer] a dividing line that simultaneously binds the community and differentiates the adversaries. Against the disarticulated subject of the economy, neutralised in larval scepticism and reduced to being “nothing other than one’s own trajectory“, the political subject makes the choice of incarnating a truth on the basis of which he is able to constitute himself collectively and “effectuate the work that connects thought and existence”x. In this, Aspe shows himself loyal to the Badiousian conception of political incorporation. For the latter, in effect, the authentic revolutionary subject is the one who realises this imaginary operation by means of which the truth of communism integrates itself with the individual and becomes a subjective “body of truth”. This militant conception of truth, modelled on the Paulinian profession of Christian faith that Badiou takes as a model, demands to be declared on a mode that is at once public and performative. Thus, for Aspe as for Badiou, political revolutionary subjects “litteralise discourses of truth by inscribing them in the world through their acts.”xi

Meanwhile, and differently from Badiou, Aspe envisages this decisional and rather voluntarist element of political subjectivation in close relation with what he calls, following Simondon, the transindividual experience. We can define the transindividual in a number of ways. Primarily, for Aspe, the transindividual is that from which flows the possibility of a full and accomplished life, a life that is worthwhile. It is in this sense that Aspe says: “there are not atomised individuals, but mutilated transindividual consistencies.”xii On a more technical level, the transindividual concerns the affective-emotional dimension of the process of collective individuation. In her influential work, Simondon, individu et collectivité: pour une philosophie du transindividuel, Muriel Combes – who not only shared her life with Aspe for several years but also a common basis of thought – defines the transindividual as the intimacy of the common thus:

“intimacy arises less from a private sphere than from an impersonal affective life, which is immediately in common […] The transindividual ultimately refers just to that: an impersonal zone of subjects that is simultaneously a molecular or intimate dimension of the collective itself.“xiii

In this impersonal and pre-individual affective dimension, emotion serves as a force of individuation. Emotion unifies and polarises diffuse affectivity; it converts affective plurality in a unity that operates a signification. In this sense, it is emotion which, in Simondon’s eyes, constitutes the veritable foyer of transindividual experience, in that it coincides with the effective structuration of a collective. Conversely, the collective is necessary for emotion to actualise itself and resolves itself with action: “For there to be a resonance of action and emotion, there must also be a superior individuation that encompasses them: this individuation is that of the collective.”xiv Surprisingly, Simondon calls this transductive relationship between action and emotion “spiritual unity.” And it is thus, as Aspe observes it, that for Simondon “spirituality and the instauration of a collective appear as two aspects of the same process,”xv transindividual emotion incorporating itself in the learning and transmission of gestures that fabricate forms of life.xvi

Incandescence or the good usage of the negativity-that-consumes

Aspe’s interest in the question of the transindividual is rooted in a profound concern for the challenges and obstacles that are faced by collectives trying to constitute themselves as political forces. The Simondonian frame is supple and dynamic; it sensitises us to the impersonal and pre-individual dimension of collective life and, moreover, enables us to collectively incorporate the unassignable affects of the various agents of metamorphosis that transit between individuals. But, and this is an element that a number of commentators on Simondon have the tendency to pass over too quickly, it equally permits us to think the subjective necessity of closure and the production of a common interiority (Simondon speaks of “group of interiority”) in which the link between action and emotion operates effectively – “the effectiveness of a divide that assumes the existence of a real inseparation between a number of beings.”xvii

It is in Aspe’s affirmation of the reality of relations and the radical contingency of any political leap that the tragic inflection of his thought is most poignant, finding its fullest expression in his most recent work Horizon inverse. Allergic to the “subjectivities sunken in the comfort of multi-relational solipsism”xviii, Aspe revitalises the work of dialectics in order to better expose us to the “possibility of the abyss”. He asks, following René Char, how revolutionary politics can muster up poetry in its task of “expanding the blood of gestures”. It is unsurprising, then, that his dramatisation of political existence ends up in the domain of theology where the questions of freedom and radical evil are posed with the greatest intensity. It is here that, following Jacob Taubes, but also Marx, he interrogates the manner of linking forces of interiority (religion) and exteriority (politics). For as with Simondon, access to the presence of the transindividual relation is understood as being intimately linked to crossing the threshold of anxiety and solitude, to the point of identifying religion as the privileged domain of the transindividualxix.

If, therefore, the confrontation with the religious option is so crucial for Aspe, it is primarily because he is not content with thinking communist politics as a simple redistribution of riches. Rather, it is bound to the criteria of the transindividual, and thinks political life as the carrier of a promise of happiness. The process of politicisation is thus conceived as a leap of secularised faith. It is in this enlarged theological context that the question is posed, for Aspe, of what I have earlier called the incandescent intimacy of revolutionary political collectives; an intimacy which activates the potentially destructive force of their charge of negation and which, when they turn themselves away from the dramas of private interiority, drives them to give way to sensual immediacy and “the enthusiasm of revolting crowds”xx. Marx described this revolutionary process as a manner of turning the flame of religious fervour toward the outside in order to consume that which, though of this world, deserves to be destined to destruction. To this characterisation of the revolutionary force as a “spark of spirituality that the bourgeois world is unable to put out”, is opposed Kierkegaard’s analysis, for whom “the force of communism is visibly the ingredient of religiosity and even Christian religiosity”, while it presents itself in the opposite manner, which is to say, contained in a “demonic” mannerxxi. In the last instance, Kierkegaard sees in the revolutionary adventure an escape before the trial of solitude and interiority, a movement of revolt that misrecognises the religious nature of its being-against and betrays its latent hopelessness. Whichever way we look at it, the politicisation of the suffering of being-in-the-world – founded on the passion for totalisation and related to an ultimate political antagonism – cannot escape from the spiritual question of how to make the best use of the negativity-that-consumes.

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“I return here to the question left in suspense: does something like a transindividual collective really exist? The structural inconsistency of collectives, no doubt, has psychological, or rather subjective, reasons. They condense in what we could call the desire for deception, the need to be disappointed and to assure that our initial mistrust had its reasons; in the anticipated nostalgia of what would have been important ‘despite everything’ in such and such experience (which is to say in that which is reduced to being nothing but ‘experience’); in the jouissance which finds itself in the fact of knowing too well the limits of some other people, and of being able to foresee their errors; in the jouissance, as well, of undoing what we had constructed ourselves; in brief, in what Kierkegaard called “the demonic”, the anxiety one faces before the good. What the demonic refuses, is what it foresees as being able to give it a good that is too great, something that would oblige it to stretch its limits, to live more fully, be more full of life, and, for the same reason, be more exposed. We have been educated to want to always return to familiar structures that have already been explored, already known (even if of a knowledge that is unknown). But, the return to structures is the return to the already individuated, to the ‘purely’ individuated – and as Simondon says, the only ‘pure’ individual is death.

Anxiety in the face of ‘the good’ is, thus, nothing more than the anxiety in the face of freedom. “The demonic does not enclose itself with something. It encloses itself alone. And it is here, in the depths of existence, that non-freedom makes itself prisoner.” (The concept of anxiety and other texts, Paris Gallimard, “TEL”, 1990). The demonic wants to redouble non-freedom, as if to guarantee that no escape will be possible – that one wouldn’t even consider hoping for it. If freedom is what expands, the demonic is what, in us, desires the return to narrowness and the locking down in this narrowness. This is not to be confused with folding back on individuality: it can just as well experiment – and it is generally the case – in the very centre of collectives, so long as the transindividual relation no longer transits or transits all too rarely.

The challenge is on for revolutionary collectives – which is to say those that would be prepared to risk themselves to take up anew that word ‘revolution’ so often destined for disuse – to find the way to struggle against the demonic.”xxii

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Endnotes

i A shortened version of this text was published in Spirale, N.54, Montréal, printemps 2014.

ii Translates as: The instant After: projectiles for a politics of the nascent state.

iii Translates as: The Words and The Acts.

iv The text is available at the following address: http://www.bloom0101.org.

v Bernard Aspe, Simondon, politique du transindividuel, Éditions Dittmar, Paris, 2013, p.25.

vi Bernard Aspe, Les mots et les actes, Nous, Caen, 2012, p.17. Or on a more technical mode: “It has been a question of considering speculative thought as that with which a distance must be marked in order to adequately carve out the dimension of the act.” p.181

vii Érik Bordeleau, « Le temps de l’œuvre, le temps de l’acte : entretien avec Bernard Aspe », Inflexions N.5, available at: http://www.inflexions.org/n5_t_Aspe%20Bordeleau.pdf

viii “Struggle requires new agents to arise with hitherto unknown powers. In Sartrian logic, it can only be a matter of individual acquiring a different status: Sartre calls those actors capable of tearing men out of the hell of inertia and to hold, if not to exorcise, evil, groups in fusion.” Bertrand St-Sernin “Pouvoir et figures du mal chez Sartre”, 1983, available at: http://1libertaire.free.fr/SartrePouvoirMorale.html

ix Bernard Aspe, « Notre part de violence », Grumeaux, N.3, Nous, Caen, Novembre 2012.

x Les mots et les actes, p.76, 44.

xi Bernard Aspe, “Notre part de violence”. “What have the contemporary thinkers of the revolutionary event discovered really? They discovered, first of all, a new concept of truth: one that does not refer to the necessity, for a subject, to accomplish in the real what has been thought. What has been thought is true only on the condition that it passes from the order of thought to the real.” Bernard Aspe, Horizon inverse, Caen, 2013, p.28.

xii Bernard Aspe, Horizon inverse, p.37.

xiii Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual translated with preface and afterword by Thomas LaMarre, MIT, Massachusetts, 2013, p.51. The French original Simondon, individu et collectivité : pour une philosophie du transinsdividuel, PUF, Paris, 1999, is available at:

http://www.cip-idf.org/article.php3?id_article=4433

xiv Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective, Aubier, Paris, 2007, p.108.

xv Simondon, politique du transindividuel, p.208.

xvi “All forms of life define themselves through the ensemble of gestures, corporeal or incorporeal, that animate them. In this sense, all forms of life are transindividual; they are, so to say, the mark of transindividuality in each of us.” Bernard Aspe, Horizon inverse, Nous, Caen, 2013, p.29

xvii Bernard Aspe,Horizon inverse, p.20.

xviii Bernard Aspe, Horizon inverse, p.55. “The spontaneous ontology of the contemporary human, in the most modern societies, is an ontology of singularities. We accept to mourn the old ‘Me’, but on condition that there is nothing else besides trajectories, comparable to monads that would consist of nothing but their unfolded selves, with no internality.”

xix “The true transindividual relation only begins beyond solitude; it is constituted by the individual who has put him/herself in question, and not by the convergent sum of inter-individual relations” Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective, p. 154-155.

xx Bernard Aspe, Horizon inverse, p. 28.

xxi Bernard Aspe, Horizon inverse, p.26, 25.

xxii Bernard Aspe, « Notre part de violence ».