[H.]: In "I have nothing to admit" Deleuze speaks of his initial confinement to the 'buggery' of other proper names before acquiring, through his (late) encounter with Nietzsche, "the desire for everyone to say simple things in his own name, to speak through affects, intensities, experiences, experiments". Of late you yourself seem to have made a similar transition, from speaking through other 'proper names' (Nick Land, Mark Fisher) to speaking in your own name—with not one but three texts on the horizon.
How have you experienced this transition, if it's fair to attribute it to you at all?
A particular virtue of Fisher was an awareness of the work required to translate the personal (and impersonal) into the political— and the demonstration of the capacity for such in his discussion of work as an educator, his experience of depression, etc.
Your upcoming text with Repeater Books, Narcissus in Bloom, likewise uptakes a personal impetus (the accusation of Egress as 'self-indulgent') to explore the broader topic of narcissism-as-folk-psychopathology, and excavating via counter-history a new sense of narcissism. What would this new sense speak to, given accusations of our age (or rather youth) as shallowly self-invested (the worn stereotypes of selfie-culture, 'virtue signaling', and 'performative activism')?
I should say that, whilst my forthcoming book is an indirect reflection on my first book's preoccupation with an "I", it is also a topic I've thought about for a long time. In many ways, it is a return to the first topic that interested me: photography.
As an undergraduate, I first studied photography in Wales and quickly became aware of the medium's uses and abuses. Much like the printing press, it was first made readily available to a particular class — the middle class — who were able to see themselves in a new way. If the working class ever encountered photography, it was as a new administrative process in an emerging society of control.
Over the two centuries since, things have changed. Photography is ubiquitous and more or less accessible to all. But there remain questions of power within how it is used; there remains a tension between seeing and being seen. The myth of Narcissus, though ancient, nonetheless makes this explicit. The hunter is trapped in a feedback loop between the two and cannot bear it. He becomes desperate for release and for transformation. That's not something you see in our average selfie — although I'd argue there's a hint of it there perhaps. This is a narcissism you instead see in something like Black Lives Matter — a social movement defined by its self-image and the horror experienced by Black people when they see themselves murdered again and again on their television or computer screens.
So there is no one narcissism — that is my argument. There is a narcissism that shows those in power affirming their own position, but there is another narcissism that reveals our persistent desire for self-transformation — for new selves and new worlds. Our self-concern is warranted, in that regard, but it takes a particular kind of work to transform that concern into political action and social change.
So would you consider a 'truly' revolutionary strategy, as opposed to the reactivity of those who instigate Nietzsche's 'slave revolt', something like Negri's 'exodus', or even an 'egress' of some form?
There are so many different terms we could deploy or use to describe this sense of exit. If there is no one narcissism, there's certainly not one exit either. And so I'm not sure I have any desire to attach a specific name to the kind of breaking of habits, orthodoxies or oppressions I'm interested in. Revolutionary strategies come and go, precisely because each one must respond to a given present. In writing my own book, I became aware that many books have also been written recently (both published and soon-to-be) that ask questions of our subjectification and the new sense of ourselves that will be central to any post-pandemic politics. Benjamin Bratton, in his post-pandemic book, The Revenge of the Real, describes the social and political necessity of getting beyond our current penchant for individuation, because during the pandemic, we've seen how deadly and discombobulating our uncritical attachment to individualism can be in an increasingly unindividuated world. He describes how people are "frozen in place by the impossibly contradictory demands of being both embedded inside a planetary society that mediates itself through vast physical connections of information, energy, and matter, and simultaneously asked to realize their potential as a self-sovereign autonomous agent with all the associated identities that Western liberalism demands as the precondition of personal actualization. No wonder people think the 5G cell towers are melting the boundaries of their egos." Others have written on this topic recently as well. There is clearly some new sense of strategy in the air, which considers how we might deal with this disparity between society's liberal ideals and the realities of living in an increasingly global community, both of which are threatened by something like the coronavirus. My ambitions aren't so lofty as that. I'm more interested in what that process looks like and how art history prefigures our contemporary concerns. The self-portrait, as we know it today, precedes the first modern conceptions of the self (Cartesianism, liberalism) by about a century, for instance. And there are lots of examples of art from the 20th century that give unruly form to our contemporary fragmentation. As someone who broadly believes that culture prefigures politics, I'm curious how representations of ourselves as barely held-together individuals might inspire us anew today. I'm interested in this because I don't think there's a word or strategy that responds sufficiently enough. We've pictured it, but I'm not sure we're distilled it into a viable strategy yet. That's part of the work still to be done.
The question of collectivity—and even that of the elusive 'collective subject'—looms.
As opposed to the most impotent uses of 'collective' (I'm thinking particularly of the Jungian 'collective unconscious')—the collective as something acting a tergo ('from the back')—your work appears to pursue the Bataillean trajectory of dis-individuation and the interrogation of sovereignty as such— what influences, encounters, etc. lead to this problematic taking on such a stark importance?
I see it everywhere. It runs through every aspect of life. For me, it is the key battleground of our age, and has been probably for a few centuries. The disparities between individual and collective have defined us since the Renaissance and history reveals a disjointed to-ing and fro-ing between the two.
The Jungian notion of the collective unconscious is a funny example, actually. What is this collective unconscious if not culture individuated? Which begs a further question: what use is reimagining society as a self, constituted by a structure that mirrors the individual mind? It shows how easy it is to get distracted with questions of which came first, or which should come first: individual or collective. But for me, the very motor of culture and politics is the relationship between the two, which is always in tension. I think that's why I like diarists and poets and photographers. These are arguably some of our most self-centred mediums -- and I mean that quite literally, in that they are centred on the self -- but each form of expression nonetheless emerges from a desire to dissolve oneself into the social. This is how Ben Lerner views poetry, for instance, and it's something I'd extend to all of the very best art: its production is driven by "the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence."
Bataille was certainly an important influence on me in that regard. My interest in him was primarily as a diarist and a poet, and for that reason I always liked his book On Nietzsche the best, for all the ways he embodies this same poetic impulse despite Nietzsche's reputation and use at the time.
Bataille infamously wrote the book whilst living in Nazi-occupied Paris, which you could say was a form of living under Hitler's supposedly Nietzschean belief in the will to power. And this (somewhat perversely) prompted Bataille to write his Sur Nietzsche -- meaning, in the French, not just "on" but also "through" and "above", as in surrealism. He reclaims from Nietzsche an almost Stoic orientation, transforming the will to power into the will to chance, narrating, in diary form, his readings of the German philosopher and his posthumous friendship with him as he tries to maintain his composure under occupation through a provocative reading of Nietzsche's amor fati, or love of fate. It's an utterly mad project, given the circumstances, but it is all the more affecting for that. We often do strange things, in our most abject isolation, to feel some sense of community with others.
When I was writing about Bataille in my first book, it was informed by a similar sort of malaise. We'd just voted for Brexit and the US had just elected Trump. We were living in a new world that was supposedly driven by lonely men on the internet, living in basements, shitposting their lives away. Nietzsche and Bataille loomed large for me then, as did a figure like Nick Land, heavily influenced by both, who was shrouded in (ultimately warranted) suspicion as the most dangerous thinker of that moment. Despite that, I felt a similar desire to engage with him and others, trying to pull on that collectivist thread within their thought, which Land later abandoned utterly, and which I believe came to fruition in the thought of his former student, Mark Fisher, instead.
Today, the world has changed again. I'm not sure these figures are as useful now as they were then. Today we see this sort of politics abused, as the right begin affirming the joys of collectivity and togetherness if only to embolden their own individual sovereignty, expressed through a distinct lack of care for or awareness of others. In this way, they appropriate the language of refusal and protest but the ideals they are defending are ultimately Protestant in nature and, as a result, mind-numbingly liberal and familiar -- their social protest holds up the individual above all else. Still, it is the individual in chorus that they try to defend, as collectivity is problematised as a petri dish for viral contagion, but that doesn't undo this kind of thinking. To reiterate, the best philosophy and politics on this subject has always recognised that the individual and collective are not in a war of supremacy but in a persistent relation, with power blowing like an erratic and changing wind between the two. It's almost like every crisis sets in motion the flipping of a coin, its two faces representing the individual and the collective, determining which essentialised form the status quo is going to affirm this time. But a philosophy like Bataille's or Nietzsche's affirms the result either way. It welcomes change and can adapt to the contingencies of the present whilst staying on course towards a better future. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed to us that many other philosophers, both at home and abroad, are incapable of such a thing. Frankly, we don't need them.
A beautiful tension between this virulence and the 'self-sovereign individual' (to use Bratton's phrase) is found in the work of the Marquis de Sade: the espouser of 'isolisme' will nonetheless pen "La mère en prescrira la lecture à sa fille" as the epigraph for La Philosophie dans le boudoir.
We are utterly alone, yet the work is a vector of (inter-generational) transmission— writing, literature, necessarily enmeshes us in the collective sphere.
Bataille's uptake of this Sadean tension culminates in a definition of sovereignty as the capacity to affirm the instant (beyond the 'ruinous' perpetual negation of the communal sphere that structures life), something close to the temporality of Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence'— though in many ways such lies in tension with their pre-occupation with futurity.
Some would claim that such temporality, as translated into political action, is insufficient when approaching the complexity and vast temporal-scales that issues such as climate change, global-pandemics, etc. necessitate in their navigation.
What can philosophy, even the philosophers/theorists mentioned above, assist with in navigating issues at such scales?
A philosophy of the instant sounds liberating on paper, but the question left to be answered is: an instant of what? Deleuze sometimes calls it "the event" — that which lingers before and after now.
It is easy to think of the event in terms of historical events — 9/11 was a single day, an instant, but in changing the course of history, it continues to reverberate down the decades as a kind of shock wave, now long detached from the instant itself. Instead, we now use it as a measure, reflecting on how much time has passed and how much it continues to change us. But from this perspective, the instant is no longer the event at all; rather, the event is the passage of time itself and the effect of 9/11 on our sense of past and future. With this in mind, Deleuze divides time in "Aiôn" and "Chronos". Chronos is a kind of phenomenological time, the all-encompassing present, upon which the past and future exert a kind of forceful presence. But he argues that, according to the Stoics, these three temporalities were not entangled layers. Their aiônic sense of time reveals how the present is wholly separate from past and future, which exist on the other side of time as we experience it.
What is useful about this perspective is that we may no longer see ourselves at the mercy of the past and future. As Deleuze writes, it is "no longer the future and past which subvert the existing present; it is the instant which perverts the present into inhering future and past." Though we may have a "destiny", it doesn't unfold behind and in front of us like a set of train tracks. We can lose sight of it -- indeed, we may never gain sight of it in the first place. But it is our task to stay true to it nonetheless and, indeed, figure out what our destiny is. This is not a God-given destiny but rather a sort of natural destiny; even nature's destiny itself. (Deleuze's Spinozism lingers in the background here -- Spinoza who likewise argues that we must live in accordance with "God or God's Nature".)
A philosophy of the instant remains useful here, but only when it alerts us to our place in the universe. For example, when we appreciate how insignificant an instant is, we may start to feel ourselves within the universe and within nature, within this vast process that far exceeds us. In fact, it is precisely remaining enthralled with a universe that is indifferent to us that we find out how we should act. It is here that narcissism comes back into play. Freud talks about the narcissism of children or animals, who are indifferent to us, but their indifference also enchants us and makes us love them. Deleuze, writing on Proust, discusses how this gives form to an unconditional love, which does not mean that I will love you no matter what you do, but rather “to love without being loved, because love implicates the seizure of these possible worlds in the beloved, worlds that expel me as much as they draw me in”. But this is very different to being led by an indifferent nature. Though not to diminish nature itself, only a fool lets themselves be led blindly by the will of animals or children. Still, you try to let a child live its own life and life in accordance with itself, doing what you can to allow it to fulfill its dreams and desires. In much the same way, it is necessary that we take care and respond with compassion to nature, even when it hurts us or when accidents happen. In this sense, a certain adaptability is important, as Bataille demonstrates. The will to chance is an affirmation of a power that far exceeds you; the simple recognition that there are always things beyond our control. But that's not to say we have no influence. The task at hand is that we must try to exercise our own will in accordance with nature's, which, as Bataille noted, could be wholly perverse in light of the moral ideals of the day. Nature does not act in accordance to our laws, after all, but that doesn't mean we should force it to bend to our will. We've done enough of that already and we've seen what happens.
This is how a Stoic view of the world is far from a kind of moralism. Destiny is not prescribed. Past, present and future are not interlinked. It is necessary we test the limits of things and explore other paths rather than follow our self-determined destiny blindly. This is what is perverse about Stoicism. Sometimes it is necessary to change the course of one's life to bring it in accordance with Nature. As Epictetus writes: "Even should I resist, in the spirit of perversity, I will have to follow nonetheless." And the etymology of perversity is notable here, as Ryan Johnson explains in a recent book on Deleuze's Stoicism. Per + vertere literally means "to turn through". To pervert something is to turn something over, consider it from all angles, even if it means changing its meaning or course of development. Stoicism advocates a kind of perversion of the self in this regard.
This can be a very difficult thing to do. To consider all sides of a situation might lead us to uncover painful contradictions and injustices. By way of an example, we might consider how philosophers explored this sentiment during the AIDS crisis — Foucault especially and Deleuze in chorus as a way to support his friend. Consider the questions asked of that moment, by those who both despised queer communities and those who lived inside them. Within and without, the world wondered: Are we to understand AIDS as a sign from nature that homosexuality goes against its will? And what about the "nature" of gay people themselves? What of their desires? To survive, must gay people deny their own nature? To continue to live in accordance with themselves, is it necessary to deny the indifferent nature of the virus itself? A Stoic philosophy does not necessarily provide us with a clean answer to these questions; instead, it embraces the perversity of asking both simultaneously and necessarily, as we wrestle with our place within the world and our impact upon it.
We might extend such questions to the coronavirus pandemic. Is coronavirus a sign from nature that we're doing something wrong? Should we really deny our own social nature in order to resist the virus? Of course, it is telling that Covid libertarians (both the crazies on the street and those in government) have responded to this present crisis without any dignity or resolve. They believe the individual must prevail über alles, and have caused untold harm in doing so. (With regards to the UK government, it seems they have mistaken the will of nature for the will of the market.) At the same time, many who believe firmly in the collective weathering of this crisis may inadvertently let Draconian measures become established, as Covid passports and other such measures set dangerous precedents, even if they claim to make us more free more quickly. But I'd argue both sides focus too much on the present, rather than the impact of now on our wider socio-cultural sense of ourselves. As ever, it is not a case of individual versus collective, but rather a sensitivity to their relations and the myriad ways that power flows through them, for better or worse. There is no universal right answer, and so a certain adaptability, a certain sensitivity to the instant and its potential impact on the past and future, remains essential. And it is our understanding of the past and future that make this possible.
To paraphrase the Stoics, we are free to choose our own lives and live as we want to live, but there is no guarantee that nature will bend itself to our will. If it doesn't, and if things go awry, the good Stoic, in Deleuze's words, "makes themselves worthy of the things that happen to them." You adapt to new feelings and put reason to work. You stay true to your nature but you also recognise the vibrant multiplicity of nature around you, in its totality — the vibrant multiplicity of life itself. This can take you to some weird places, and put you in opposition to society around you, but you must nonetheless "abide by what seems best", to once again quote Epictetus — "the crisis is now... and waiting is no longer an option... the chance for progress, to keep or lose, turns on the events of a single day. That's how Socrates got to be the person he was, by depending on reason to meet his every challenge."
