Philosophizing is to resist

Sophocles, Melville and Gracq as a triptych. More specifically: Antigone, Bartleby and Aldo as faces of the Resistance. In this very surprising book, despite the almost “ agreed From her title, Véronique Bergen questions three possible modes of extraction of a neoliberal order which tends, surreptitiously, to impose itself well as an inevitable reality than as a simple possible, overwhelming and refutable model. The question here is not that of the vitality, efficiency or sustainability of the capitalist system. It is even less that of the legitimacy or the merits of the opposition. It is rather that of forms, lineaments, borders, postures and figures of the resistance. Véronique Bergen immediately places herself in a “ other part »Traditional analysis. She deforms, dismember and relocates questions ; crosses the descriptive and prescriptive horizons ; Innerve his study with a reshaped material.

The work addresses the question of resistance according to several issues, each of them being scrutinized, analyzed and recomposed through three prisms: dialectic, vitalist and axiomatic. The first is carried by the figures of Hegel, Marx, Sartre and the School of Frankfort. The second is embodied by Deleuze and, to a lesser extent, by Bergson and Negri. The third is almost exclusively represented by Badiou. However, the approach is not just taxonomic. The conceptual modes that Véronique Bergen summons within each series participate in a striking renewal of their resonance fields. Unexpected scenarios, discrepancies and decadrages that roam and underlie the discourse help to open unexpected gaps. Systematic inconvenience and design to phagocyter the causal mechanics on the market. By wondering about knots, joints, operators, postures, impacts, states of things, faces, animal animals, situations, times and limits of the three resistance schemes considered, Véronique Bergen The structural differences of approaches as well as their often implicit connivances underlines as much. They intertwine in the insurrectional gesture. They draw opposition plans that interfere in worldly magma to enhance the relentless causality. According to the famous aphorism of Deleuze, the resistance is here played in the mode of creation. Each form of extraction of the oppressive field is meticulously scrutinized, unfolded and re-founded around its conceptual nucleus. The work addresses the resistance against the tide, that is to say according to a counter-logic which territorializes it far from its usual forms, occasionally reterritorializes it and sometimes deterritorializes it radically. In a non -linear relationship to the text, image – no doubt – from a non -chronological relationship to time, argumentation walks between the pitfalls and revolves around an authentic thought of the disasterof “ reversal », Absolutely unexpected and radically unpredictable.

The first path analyzed, the dialectical approach, poses an interior otherness to the same. The dialectic is driven by contradiction. It is articulated on a disjunction between thought and the world. She operates by “ negativity », In internal contradiction. Resistance manifests itself in a warlike way, as a frontal opposition. History is thought of there as alternation between periods where dominate praxis totalizing and time of lull and passivity. The dynamics of dialectical resistance adopts the figure of the taupe: it attacks foundations, maneuver in the dark, clandestine core. It works by reactivations and repetitions, sometimes differential, sometimes identical.

The second diagram considered, the vitalist posture, thematizes, unlike the previous one, a relationship between the same and the other out of all negativity. The status of otherness becomes intensive there. Fundamentally continuing, vitalism considers thought as a “ fold In the world, an extension of matter. It operates by affirmation, according to a strict antithesis of dialectical operators. No more confrontation between consciousness and the world but raised from thought to “ chaos of the being who engendered her ». The vitalist route screened by Deleuze operates according to a guerrilla logic: neither militant activism nor withdrawal in the cult of interiority, it is not confined to the current one but explores a field of virtualities. Associated ontology is deployed according to a leak line. No more molar (hard segments), nor molecular (oscillating around the previous one), the deterritorialized leak line absolutely resistance and thus premunicates it against systemic reabsorptions. The associated animal-totem would be the serpent: in the in-depth digging of the mole, surface shifts are replaced. Temporality becomes that of persistence, of the persistence of a virtual value. Being missed, the revolutions remain-regardless of their consequences-valid as gestures and potential.

The third mode mentioned in the work, the axiomatic path, erects mathematics to the rank of thought of being. Badious ontology is vertebrate by the nine axioms of set theory, while the event is defined by the suspension of one of these axioms. It separates from the laws of being and transgresses the foundation axiom which, precisely, prohibits such property. The deployment takes place in discontinuity, according to a disjunction between the world and the thought which conquers itself by causing itself. Resistance is a matter of logic. The rupture, the secession with the state of things happens first in the field of thought. The posture is that of dropping out. As an exception to the laws of the situation, it is a question of revealing what was relegated in the nonexistent, of “ Turn out the impossible in the register of the possible ». The truth of the act of resistance East loyalty to the event. It is the bird that stands out here from the philosophical bestiary because it proceeds by “ A double movement of withdrawal and arrangement, rupture with the course of the world and of reimmersion in a state of reconfigured ». Neither reactivation nor persistence, the time of the axiomatics is that of the start of the beginning: the event is worth as it can be absolutely and eternally re-on-mounted.

Throughout the book, attention is polarized on the immeasurability associated with the rupture. The resistant (or resisted) world is no longer scrutinized in the continuity of the order deconstructed or disorganized. The new state of affairs was not a possible evolution of the previous one. Whether dialectic, vitalists or axiomatic, resistance routes deconfigure the arrangements of the old substrate. Something can no longer be understood according to the same stratification, the “ hard line »Molecularizes and takes value in another space. The meaning turned away and returned: it questions more than it explains.

The resistance creates more than astonishment: it updates what was not even virtual, it opens the potentialities A posteriori. It is placed beyond or below the horizon. Something absolutely escapes determinism. By a radical form of systemic subversion, the consequences are decorated with causes. The resistance position is structured around a tension between deep isomorphy with the total situation and heterogeneity with its possible forms. To operate a lasting reconfiguration of reality and identify the “ insessimable From an era, the land must be meticulously surveyed and explored in order to ward off the response. The gesture of resistance is that of leaving a world without outside. It is a question of inventing the exteriority, hitherto unthought, of a totalization.

The book scrutinizes with surgical precision the forms of resistance implemented by the philosophical currents considered (war/guerrilla/dropout, negation/affirmation/caesura, contradiction/continuity/discontinuity). However, the approach is not simply descriptive, far from it. The resonances, dissonances and echoes that the author deploys between the methods of destructuring of the established system do not go without saying. It draws a new philosophical map whose complex topology connects disparate and hitherto independent places. It creates causal associations, galleries, passages. It is less a question of redefining the landscape than of producing shifts or scree: Véronique Bergen plays with surfaces, pierces volumes and shapes the philosophical material by digging improbable tunnels. It interferes in the roughness of the texts to print streaks which deviate from the dominant flow. As a turbulence at the heart of the textual cataract. Hegel, Deleuze and Badiou splash out of their respective oceans and become the substrate of a heterogeneous opposition entity.

Approaching poetic and romantic forms as well as properly philosophical, the work of Véronique Bergen is quite singular in the contemporary landscape. Like a counterpoint, each voice has a remarkable autonomy without neglecting the complex harmonies it contributes to deploying during its meetings between the different lines of fugue. In a relation to the text which sometimes merges with an authentic “ become word The author explores innovative modes of writing that grasp the feeling of necessity that surrounds them. Demonstrating a rare rigor, Véronique Bergen works on thengetic material with exemplary precision, each twist, compression, stretching, tearing, amputation or completion is essential-by his relentless evidence. With a creative freedom and courage including philosophy “ institutional »No longer always demonstrates, this daring and erudite thought reshaves with humility and inspiration major concepts – and minors – of recent decades. Far from the common places and free boldness, Véronique Bergen plays in spaces with multiple and branched dimensions which bind and unfold according to a path that is both oriented and erratic. She shapes bridges and sets up unprecedented meshes. Pointed, sometimes disturbing, always offbeat, playing with the limits and the inaccessible, this unlikely essay forms a new singularity on the frame of resistant thoughts.