Part Two
Lines

Heritage and Singularity

Before we step into your philosophical edifice, we'd like to ask you if you now see it as sitting within a tradition of the history of thought. Do you acknowledge any ancestors? Deleuze talked about a Spinoza-Nietzsche lineage; Foucault accepted his debt to Nietzsche and Heidegger. But you don't seem to claim a line of descent for yourself. Schiller returns, perhaps, Flaubert too, but that constitutes more of a broken line .

I don't think my work can really be included in a specific tradition of thought. After all, my trajectory has been a little bit different from others. I spent a certain number of years saying goodbye to philosophy, and so I no longer had to worry about being in any philosophical tradition - I felt I was doing completely different work. That's one point. Another point is that at a given moment, certain individuals influenced me, people I can see myself as related to. I think there are really several strata; there are the philosophers I've known and who I can say influenced me at a certain moment, like Sartre when I was seventeen, Althusser when I was twenty-five, Foucault when I was thirty. I could do an inventory of what I owe to them: Sartre meant distance in relation to psychological and sociological analyses; Althusser meant a certain undermining of the idea of history, as well as adherence to a certain idea of the multifaceted nature of the times, and, in a sense, I feel like I've been more faithful to that idea than Althusser was himself. Foucault meant an attitude that consisted in asking yourself not what you had to think, or what to base thinking in general on, but what made a particular thing thinkable, what made a particular utterance sayable. What I've retained of Foucault is the idea that what's interesting is the thinking at work within practices and institutions, the thinking that's part of the landscape of what is. And I've also kept a certain disjunction between what's known as theory and practice, the idea that things are not structured based on a theory which you then apply or knowledge about society which will then be transformed into action on that society - they're more like encounters between forms of discourse and practices that are developed within two different spaces. Those are philosophical influences you can spot.

Otherwise, in my method, there are things that stem more from literature: a certain attention to what we might call all the micro-events, a way of relating the issue of the event, of what happens, to a transformation in the landscape of the sensible. That's something I owe much more to Flaubert, Conrad or Virginia Woolf than to a philosopher like Deleuze. All the focus in my work on the way events are firstly transformations in what is perceived and in what is thinkable - I get that from literature. But I also get that from the conjunction I've been able to establish between forms of literary narration and what I discovered by working in the workers' archive. There are a certain number of conjunctions specific to my work, such as having gone off to look at correspondence between workers with my head filled with the music of a phrase from Flaubert or Virginia Woolf, or certain expressions that might have come from Rilke, or then again, on the other hand, a certain number of philosophical formulations that might be in Plato. A whole knot of material has been elaborated in a relationship that's somewhat complex, completely specific and not shared, between philosophical utterances, literary utterances and the utterances I stumbled upon in the workers' archive. That is a second layer.

The third layer would be different philosophical and theoretical references that cropped up at one point. You mentioned Schiller and the moment when my reading of his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man suddenly coincided with what I'd learnt from the workers' archive. That then allowed me to come up with the idea of a transformation in forms of sensible experience that was completely at odds with all the discourses on ideology and misunderstanding, reproduction and distinctiveness that ultimately capitalize on the vantage point of the inhabitants of the intelligible world over the unhappy prisoners of the 'cave' of the sensible. There's also the fact that at a given moment, I might have seen myself in a certain approach, might have decided that, after all, everything I was doing had something to do with criticism in the Kantian sense, the sense of 'how is this possible' - except that it's no longer 'how this is possible' from the vantage point of knowledge in general. It's now how is it that this was thinkable and how was this thinking about to be displaced, how was this mode of perception able to be displaced historically. There was also a moment when I saw myself in a certain line of descent from Hegel, in the sense in which Hegel is for me the classic example of a philosopher for whom the question of thought processes is not distinct from the question of their objects and results. However far I am from that speculative universe, there remains something fundamental for me, namely, that thought can't be separated from what it's working on, that thought is present in any given and in the transformation of its own given - and not in the fact of uttering theses about the world or about history in general; the fact that thought is transformed endlessly in tandem with its objects. I can see a sort of debt to Marx in the fact of always thinking from the standpoint of division, and feeling that a given, or an alleged given, is always based in reality on a division of givens.

But none of all that makes for a tradition. This broken line of connections marks more of a distance in relation to the idea that there's a school to which you belong, and masters who pass something on. That doesn't in any way mean I think of myself as someone who invented himself without having a master, not at all. Just the opposite: I think of myself as someone who's had twenty, thirty, a hundred masters, not just one. After all, that's the normal image of the transmission of thought: you have a master and then after that you become a master in turn. For me, the purpose of a master is to be the one who, all of a sudden, suggests an unusual subject, or a slightly mysterious landscape, or a question that hits us in the face and that we have to react to. Basically, anything that provokes us is a master, as is possibly anything that whispers answers to you in relation to the provocation. This twin function of provoking you and whispering the answers to you works through a host of texts that might go from children's prayers to Kant and Hegel, and it also works through all sorts of encounters offered by people as much as by texts. In the end, you could say that reading Gauny or Jacotot was more important to me than reading Heidegger or Lacan.

We weren't simply putting a question about debt in actual fact but also about originality in philosophy. In that sphere of activity what are the conditions for the new? It's a problem we'll come back to for other spheres of practice. It remains the case that there are philosophers who need to invent a tradition for themselves to give themselves a boost, and also to give themselves stature. A person who claims Plato as a master or as a cipher of his own thinking is bolstered by several millenia. Doesn't every philosopher invent a tradition for himself, no matter what the actual influences or debts he's incurred?

I don't need to invent a past tradition for myself, except possibly a historico-political tradition, which would be one of emancipation. And if I speak in terms of debt, that's also precisely because of the fact that a singular history - new or not, that's not for me to say - is made up for me of a whole host of encounters and provocations that mean that all of a sudden something appears that didn't exist anywhere else before. That's sort of what I said once in a debate with Badiou at the Collège de philosophie over Disagreement. Badiou had attacked me for having pinched the ideas of the Organisation politique,28 which he was a member of, for my own account. But I stressed that the issue at the heart of the book was how to reconcile Gauny with Jacotot, and that that particular question is one that I can say I really am the only person in the world ever to have asked. You could not reject my paternity of that kind of issue. In fact, the questions I asked myself were linked to the peculiar circumstance of having been for a very long time immersed in the workers' archive, with possibly at the back of my mind a certain number of philosophical references or literary refrains to approach those questions with. When I say 'refrain', it's not just a metaphor; it's tied to a whole image of thought. In thought, there are also things such as that - phrases that make you what you are and that you use to develop something that you then put together with other phrases gleaned from somewhere else. Little by little, based on these refrains that you can't get out of your head, a certain form of intelligence builds, whether in politics, literature, cinema or whatever.

Anti-Systematic Systematicity

For this interview, we'd like to pursue the idea of decompartmentalizing your work, which is often divided into an...