<color><param>0000,0000,FFFF</param>Deleuze wrote (in his book
"Foucault"):
If the fold and the unfold animate not only Foucault's ideas but even
his style, it is because they constitute an archaeology of thought. So
we are perhaps less surprised to find that Foucault encounters
Heidegger precisely in this area. It is more an encounter than an
influence, to the extent that in Foucault the fold and the unfold have
an origin, a use and a destination that are very different from
Heidegger's. According to Foucault they reveal a relation between
forces, where regional forces confront either forces that raise to
infinity (the unfold) in such a way as to constitute a God- form, or
forces of finitude (the fold) in such a way as to constitute a
Man-form. It is a Nietzschean rather than Heideggerean history, a
history devoted to Nietzsche, or to life:
"There is being only because there is life [. . .] The Experience of
life is thus posited as the most general law of beings [. . .] but this
ontology discloses not so much what gives beings their foundation as
what bears them for an instant towards a precarious form." [10]
/// Towards a Formation of the Future?
It is obvious that any form is precarious, since it depends on
relations between forces and their mutations. We distort Nietzsche when
we make him into the thinker who wrote about the death of God. It is
Feuerbach who is the last thinker of the death of God: he shows that
since God has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold
and refold God. But for Nietzsche this is an old story, and as old
stories tend to multiply their variants Nietzsche multiplies the
versions of ihe death of God, all of them comic or humorous, as though
they were variations on a given fact. But what interests him is the
death of man. So long as God exists - that is, so long as the God-form
functions - then man does not yet exist.
But when the Man-form appears, it does so only by already incorporating
the death of man in at least three ways. First, where can man find a
guarantee of identity in the absence of God? [11] Secondly, the
Man-form has itself been constituted only within the folds of finitude:
it places death within man (and has done so, as we have seen, less in
the manner of Heidegger than in the manner of Bichat, who conceived of
death in terms of a 'violent death'). [12] Lastly, the forces of
finitude themselves mean that man exists only through the dissemination
of the various methods for organizing life, such as the dispersion of
languages or the divergence in modes of production, which imply that
the only 'critique of knowledge' is an 'ontology of the annihilation of
beings' (not only palaeontology, but also ethnology). [13]
What does Foucault mean when he says there is no point in crying over
the death of man? [14] In fact, has this form been a good one? Has it
helped to enrich or even preserve the forces within man, those of
living, speaking, or working? Has it saved living men from a violent
death? The question that continually returns is therefore the
following: if the forces within man compose a form only by entering
into a relation with forms from the outside, with what new forms do
they now risk entering into a relation, and what new form will emerge
that is neither God nor Man? This is the correct place for the problem
which Nietzsche called 'the superman'.
It is a problem where we have to content ourselves with very tentative
indications if we are not to descend to the level of cartoons.
Foucault, like Nietzsche, can only sketch in something embryonic and
not yet functional. [15] Nietzsche said that man imprisoned life, but
the superman is what frees life within man himself, to the benefit of
another form, and so on. Foucault proffers a very peculiar piece of
information: if it is true that nineteenth-century humanist linguistics
was based on the dissemination of languages, as the condition for a
'demotion of language' as an object, one repercussion was none the less
that literature took on a completely different function that consisted,
on the contrary, in 'regrouping' language and emphasizing a 'being of
language' beyond whatever it designates and signifies, beyond even the
sounds. [16] The peculiar thing is that Foucault, in his acute analysis
of modern literature, here gives language a privilege which he refuses
to grant to life or labour: he believes that life and labour, despite a
dispersion concomitant with that ot language, did not lose the
regrouping of their being. [17] It seems to us, though, that dispersed
labour and life were each able to unify themselves only by somehow
breaking free from economics or biology, just as language managed to
regroup itself only when literature broke free from linguistics.
Biology had to take a leap into molecular biology, or dispersed life
regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to regroup in
third-generation machines, cybernetics and information technology. What
would be the forces in play, with which the forces within man would
then enter into a relation? It would no longer involve raising to
infinity or finitude but an unlimited unity, thereby evoking every
situation of force in which a finite number of components yields a
practically unlimited diversity of combinations. It would be neither
the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism, but
something like the Superfold, as borne out by the foldings proper to
the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in
third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in
modern literature, when literature 'merely turns back on itself in an
endless reflexivity'.
This modern literature uncovers a 'strange language within language'
and, through an unlimited number of superimposed grammatical
constructions, tends towards an atypical form of expression that marks
the end of language as such (here we may cite such examples as
Mallarme's book, Peguy's repetitions, Artaud's breaths, the
agrammaticality of Cummings, Burroughs and his cut-ups and fold-ins, as
well as Roussel's proliferations, Brisset's derivations, Dada collage,
and so on). And is this unlimited finity or superfold not what
Nietzsche had already designated with the name of eternal return?
The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the
outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic
components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which
supersede the signifier. In each case we must study the operations of
the superfold, of which the 'double helix' is the best-known example.
What is the superman? It is the formal compound of the forces within
man and these new forces. It is the form that results from a new
relation between forces. Man tends to free life, labour and language
<italic>within himself.</italic> The superman, in accordance with
Rimbaud's formula, is the man who is even in charge of the animals (a
code that can capture fragments from other codes, as in the new
schemata of lateral or retrograde). It is man in charge of the very
rocks, or inorganic matter (the domain of silicon). It is man in charge
of the being of language (that formless, 'mute, unsignifying region
where language can find its freedom' even from whatever it has to say).
[18] As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the
disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept: it
is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it
is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms.
-k
x
x</color>
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