What Does It Mean By Living: Deleuze, Henry, Badiou

 生命意味著什麼：德勒茲、翁希、巴迪烏 

Chen-Han, Yang sivaluke@yahoo.com.tw

Doctorial Student, SRCS, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan

版權所有 © Chen-Han, Yang楊成瀚

Outline

Introduction: Negating The Real Living As Present

Deleuze: Pure Immanence as A Life and Homo Tantum (Biranism I)

Henry: Life as Auto-Affection and Pathos-With (Biranism II)

Badiou: Life as Subjective Faithful Formalism and “To Live Is To Be Faithful To The Eventual Present”

Conclusion: Immunity, “Welding Rod” and the Politics of Living

摘要

如同許多當代思想家所指出，現代性的一個重要特徵乃是其抗拒死亡或否定真正的「生�命」的能力。就如同法國哲學家儂希在《閒散的共同體》和義大利思想家阿岡本在《剩人：主權力和裸命》中所直指，在當代的情境中，我們已經看到許許多多個人的自然生命和共同體的政治生活的那災難性的疊合。在一篇名為〈絕對內在性〉的文章中，阿岡本提到，「生命」的概念不但將成為某種未來的哲學的重要主題，且我們也應對「生命」這個概念的系譜學進行追索。因此，為了能重拾德勒茲和傅柯的思想遺產並且，進一步地，挖掘重新回復某種真正的「生�命」的可能，本文將試圖比較德勒茲的生命作為「純粹內在性」、翁希的生命作為「自我感觸」以及巴迪烏的生命作為「忠誠的形式主義」的概念，並進一步地闡述「生�命」對這三位當代法國思想家而言究竟意味著什麼。最後，我將試著指出，為了能對當代的生命政治的這種對真正的「生�命」的否定進行進行抵抗，或者用當代義大利思想家艾斯波希托的話來說，為了能從共同體的生命形式中「免疫」，我們應對某種生命本身的政治可能性進行思考。而這種生命本身的政治可能性，並不是對某種政治性活動的預設，而是某種在概念中的真正實踐或某種感受我們自身以及這個世界的全新倫理。

關鍵字：德勒茲、翁希、巴迪烏、內在性、自我感觸、形式主義、生命哲學

Abstract

 As true as many contemporary thinkers remarked, one of the main characteristics of our modernity is its ability to resist death or to negate the real “living”. In the contemporary, we have already seen a lot of complex and somehow sad overlaps of the individual natural life and the organic/constructed life of the community, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote in his magnum opus Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life or the French Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy meant by “immanentism” (L’ Immanentisme) in La Communauté désoœuvrée. In light of this, in an article named “Absolute Immanence”, Agamben has pointed that the concept of “life” must be “the subject of the coming philosophy” and urged us to trace the genealogy of the concept of “life”. Regarding this, in order to apprehend the legacy of Deleuze and Foucault as well as find the prerequisite for recovering the real living, this paper will compare Gilles Deleuze’ s concept of a life as “pure immanence” (pure immanence), French philosopher Michel Henry’s notion of the life as “auto-affection” (auto-affection), Alain Badiou’s belief of life as subjective “faithful formalism” (formalisme fidèle) and try to explicate what does it mean by “living” for them. Finally, I will argue, in order to alter the vicious circle of biopolitics’ negation of the real “living”—or let’s borrow the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito’s phrases—in order to get the “immunity” (immunitas) from the “community” (communitas), we shall look for a “politics of living” itself: not only as the prerequisite of “the political”, but as a new way of praxis in the concept or the new ethics of “sensing” ourselves/this world.

 Keywords: Deleuze, Henry, Badiou, Immanence, Auto-affection, Formalism, Philosophy of Life

 Introduction: Negating The Real Living As Present

Concerning the present condition of human being, in Homo Sacer, Agamben has remarked that what we witness today is the ultimate reduction of the political existence or form of life to its “simple fact of living”, natural life or bare life, for which the “camp” is the suitable name. By explicating this gray zone between zoe and bios further, in The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben has also pointed out that the production of the modern “anthropological machine” has coincided with the process of “a total animalization of man”[1]. In a much more critical fashion, Alain Badiou has showed that the contemporary call for the “rights of man” has became an empty slogan which is synonymous with the “rights of living being”, in which the humanity must be “resorbed” (résorber) in “an over-stretched vision of the animality” as what he called “democratic materialism”(matérialisme démocratique) and “bio-materialism” (bio-matérialisme)[2].

From the observation of Agamben and Badiou, it seems like what we are witnessing today is the world as the flat disinhibitor of living beings (les vivant) or, as Jean-Luc Nancy said, the nature of “eco-technics” (ecotechnie).[3] In fact, we can see two different aspects in this world-creating process: on the one hand, the “total animalization of man” when the presentation of bare animality being aggrandized as the self-evident human creation by the (in)human (which emphasizes the self-legitimation of the human animal by rendering it an ontological status), in the midst of the excuses and the rhetoric of self-consolation concerning the cases from the corruption of the formal president and their family to the trivial everyday wrongdoings or the notorious false event of child abusing. On the other hand, the inclusion of the objective existence of the body of any living being into the regime of rights (which highlights the universal pre-existential equality of the rights of all living things anthropomorphically) or the all-naming totalitarian regime of truth (which emphasizes the simulated essence of possible terror and the necessity to name it all) as the predominant ethical ideology of the contemporary, as we can discover from the slogans of animal or plant protection associations, humanitarian rescue to the “innocent discourse of simulated masses” and the “spectacular discourse of quasi-multitude sovereignty” propagated by the participants of the “Wild Strawberries Movement” here several months ago[4].

However, facing this flat disinhibitor of living beings in which there is no longer or no need of any truth[5], we must ask: What is the real thing that makes a living being so diminished but at the same time, so rightful and so honorable when we make excuses for an evildoer and say: “It is also a human being! And that’s why he did something like this!”? What is the real thing that makes a living being an object who deserves (the protection of) rights at the same time when we say: “He is living! He can run, he can play, he can smile......In other words, he has the right of being cared and protected also!”? Concerning these questions, if the possible answer is our real life or real living (vécu) which is in jeopardy in this flat community of living beings, then how can we really live it, I mean, consciously? How can one tell that he/she is living it? And what does it mean by living (it)? Putting it in another way, if our contemporary world or modern culture has been defined by its characteristics of negating the real living or resisting death, its characteristics of “remaining non-living” (demeurant non-vécu) as the humaninal (Agamben)[6], its negation of the (real) life (Henry)[7], its “poverty of experience” (Benjamin)[8], its character as “a bad cinema which we no longer believe” (Deleuze)[9], its “institution of death” or the capability of resisting, interdicting death (Baudrillard)[10], its disaster of “capital parliamentarism” and “the State of right” (Badiou)[11] or its “immanentism” as the normality of the campaign of democratic state (Nancy)[12], then what does it mean by “living” it? And how can we recover or regain the (real) life or the real living which belong to us—if not just we—originally? Hence what is the prerequisite or the starting point for recovering that?

Echoing the exigency these questions bring, in an article named “Absolute Immanence”, after posing the possibility of mutual-corrective reading of Deleuze and Foucault, Agamben has urged us to engage in the genealogy of the concept of “life” which, for him, will construct “the subject of the coming philosophy”. However, in order to apprehend the legacy of Deleuze (and Foucault) as well as find the prerequisite for recovering the real life or the real living, in this paper, I will firstly compare the concept of “life” and the meaning of living provided by three prominent thinkers of our time and their (inter)relationship, their inheritance, as well as their debates with the thinkers contemporary and previous to them, that is: Deleuze and his concept of “pure immanence” as a life, Michel Henry and his description of the life as “auto-affection”—both, I will argue, are the disciples of the French philosopher Maine de Biran or Biranism, though in different way or different emphasis—as well as Alain Badiou and his belief of the life as the subjective “faithful formalism”. Eventually, in order to alter the biopolitics’ negation of the life or the real living, in the conclusion of this paper, I will argue we shall look for a “politics of living” itself as the ethics of “stress” and “contraction” (of the welding rod), as the immunity from the community of living beings, hence the governance, the biopolitics of it.  

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Deleuze: Pure Immanence as A Life and Homo Tantum (Biranism I)

Let’s start from Deleuze’s conception of “a life”. In an article named “The Immanence: A Life”, Deleuze wrote:

One will say the pure immanence that it is A Life, and nothing other. It is not immanence to the life, but the immanence that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of the immanence, the absolute immanence: it is a force, a complete beatitude......is this not a similar adventure which takes place in Maine de Biran, in his “last philosophy”, when he discovered under the transcendence of the effort a absolute immanent life? The transcendental field defines itself by a plan of immanence, and the plan of immanence by a life.......the life of the individual makes way to an impersonal life; nevertheless singular, which frees a pure event liberated of accidents of the interior and exterior life, that is to say of the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. “Homo tantum” for whom all the world sympathizes and who reaches a kind of beatitude. It’s a hecceity, who is no longer individuation, but singularization: life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject who incarnated it in the milieu of things bring it good or bad.[13]

Indeed, for Deleuze, “a life” is always pre-reflexive, pre-individual, a-subjective and impersonal: it is made up of virtuals and is “suitable” for singularities, virtualities, events that “populates” (peuplent) it[14]. It is the pure immanence (in its intensity of being the immanence of the immanence, the absolute immanence) or the transcendental field[15], the (pure) plan of immanence (in its vital reference as milieu, as the human being capable of “radiating”, “organizing” itself[16]) in which the immanence—that is, the univocity[17]—is no longer in and to something other than itself. Instead of highlighting the transcendence and its subsequent immanence—the revelation of “my wound”—it’s a life as pure immanence contained and illuminating in the transcendental field of events and singularities which makes people say: “There is a wound laid in the hustle of people…”. As a reaction to the tekne of any representational politics, or “the denaturation of the transcendental” (hence biopolitics), it is a mutual physics, donation, “coexistence” between events and plan of immanence, between thinking and image, between philosophy and pre-philosophy or non-philosophy, between concepts and its milieu, between virtuality and reality, in other words, an “infinite speed” and becoming: starting from the surprises of (there is) a life, the fluidity, abstract plan of immanence will begin to donate horizon or reality to the events, starting the “concrete layout” (agencement)[18] of events as concepts in its infinite speed while being received the virtualities from them. It is “the splendid of the somebody” (la splendeur du on)[19] sighed after the individual life, the life. In other words, it is a “hecceity”, “rhizome” of this purely four o’ clock.[20]

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In other words, since the transcendental field presents itself as the “qualitative duration” of pure immediate consciousness which doesn’t “refer” (renvoie) to the object and which does not “belong” to the subject, a life will always carry a force (puissance), a singularity, a multiplicity, events forever here and forever rejuvenates itself as the immanent in the transcendental field, as the savagery beyond good and evil, as the “between” in “between the words and the things” (entre les mots et les choses), as the noematic or the expressive “neutral” of Ecce Homo[21], that is, as the beatitude of the eventuality of “human only” (Homo Tantum). Therefore, in this sense, it will always be subtracted from the phenomenological revelation and the “deformation of the immanence” characterized by the co-extensive consciousness and the transcendent.

In fact, this is also the move that Deleuze tried to separate the transcendental field from the experience, for experience is still tied to the “empirical representation” of the subject. Furthermore, as Montebello rightly discovered, with reference to Maine de Biran[22], Deleuze even defines the transcendental field by the so-called “transcendental empiricism”, as opposing to the “simple empiricism” as sensation—as “a blow in the current of absolute consciousness”. According to Deleuze, this transcendental empiricism as an immediate given or empiricism “without me” (sans moi) is constantly in the process of becoming, the passage from one sensation to the other, “augmentation, diminution of force”, that is, the decrease or increase of “virtual quantities”—singularities, events—which characterizes the infinite speed of pure immediate consciousness traversed in an impersonal life[23]. 

However, besides the transcendental empiricism, there is also another affinity of this impersonal life with the theory of faculties of Maine de Biran as Agamben wrote:

…it is in relation to this impersonal life that Deleuze’s brief reference to Maine de Biran becomes fully comprehensible. Starting with Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, Maine de Biran’s entire work is motivated by the indefatigable attempt to grasp, prior to the I and the will and in close dialogue with the physiology of his time, a “mode of existence that is so to speak impersonal.” Maine de Biran calls this mode of existence “affectibility” (affectibilité) and defines it as a simple organic capacity of affection without personality, like Condillac’s statue, becomes all its modifications and yet, at the same time, constitutes “a manner of existing that is positive and complete in its kind.”[24]

Concerning the articulation of Agamben, I would like to say, firstly, it is not started from Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée that Maine de Biran has begun “to grasp a mode of existence that is so to speak impersonal”; secondly, the “impersonal mode of existence” is not named by Biran as “affectibility” in his early writings; thirdly, it’s started from the Writings of Youth (Écrits de jeunesse) that Deleuze has taken the ideas of Biran as an important resource for the development of his concept of impersonal life. In fact, far early to his Writings of Youth, we can already see Biran’s attempt to develop his conception of the affection as the pure activity of the soul or, as impersonal. In an article named “Reflection on the personal identity” (Réflexions sur l’ identité personnelle) published in the Old Notebook (Vieux cahier) in 1794, Biran wrote:

The word of person marks an intelligent being who, by the interior sentiment of itself, is inseparable of the thinking, reflection, reason, and considers itself as being the same in different times and in different places. It is in the consciousness, or the interior sentiment that resides the me and it’s uniquely this sentiment constitutes the personal identity. It’s by the consciousness I share at present that I once made what I judge, that the me of this time is the same as the actual me. After this, people can only consider the identity in the memory; it’s the memory only who can donate the consciousness of the consistence of the me. If people wanted that the personal identity consisted in the invariability of the thinking substance, it is evident, I think, that there would be no identity; in effect, can people conceives that nothing will be as mobile as the state of our soul?……This state of variation, if humiliating for the man, is independent of the will, since a certain state of the body always responds a certain state of the soul, and that, the movement of our blood or our moods being purely mechanic, the affections of our soul who are dependent of it up to a certain point, must vary often, in spite of the opposition of the will; it’s this one we also feel, especially when our temperament is not ruled……in this great movement of the soul who carries the man outside of himself, who deprived him absolutely of the usage of the reason, it happens often that he is doing to the excess, that he makes the speech in which he no longer has the consciousness when the storm is calm and who is  surprised  himself when people remind him. It is evident that this man is no longer the same, his me has totally changed.[25]

For the author of Écrits de jeunesse, under the influence of John Locke, the person or the personal identity—the me—is mainly founded on the “intelligent being” who is capable of thinking, reflecting, reasoning, memorizing, and by a kind of interior sentiment or consciousness, considering itself as eternally the same and integrated. In contrast to this, in this period, we can see Maine de Biran has already begun to describe the affection as impersonal, since our affection is the “great movement of the soul who carries the man outside of himself, who deprived him absolutely of the usage of the reason”. In fact, this is why I would like to say it’s from the time of Écrits de jeunesse that Main de Biran has attempted to “grasp a mode of existence that is so to speak impersonal”, or let’s say, a mode of the soul that is varied, that is totally out of the control of the memory, the reflexive me, the actualization of me or the reasonable personal identity. Hence, in this way, as the notion of the “affectability” will be born later (especially after the forming of his conception of the subjective or the proper body)[26], this movement or mode of the soul as affection is also the opposition of the will. In other words, in this early period, the affection of the soul does not possess any subjectivity yet; it is an impersonal movement of the soul, “a fascination in the storm” [27] which donates Deleuze the resource to develop his idea of impersonal life. It is started from here Deleuze has ever pointed out that we can see the same adventure of life as he did in the “last philosophy” of Maine de Biran who tried to find the absolute immanent life under the transcendence of the effort[28]. In fact, in his Dernière philosophie: existence et anthropologie, Biran called this absolute, immanent life “the life of the soul” or “the interior life”, which “is no longer belonged to the animal reduced to the sensation that does not redouble”[29]. In other words, it is the life of the Homo Duplex[30] who is in a kind of impersonal affective state and who is no longer constrained by the exercises of human faculties.  

Therefore, under the influence of Maine de Biran—or let’s put it boldly as “Biranism”, in which we can hear the interior dialogue between Biran and the French  Ideologist Destutt de Tracy on the notion of “life” and the (subjective) “ideology”[31]—since such a life is the pre-individual plan of immanence or transcendental field which carries events, singularities, or virtualities with it, it’s also coexistent with “the life” which is triggered and multipled by the “accidents” and the individuality. For Deleuze, if a life is marked by events, singularities, virtualities, then the life is defined by its individualities, particularities, and collectivities, which means a set of relations between the slowness and the speed, the affecting and the being affected, the “kinetic” and the “dynamic”, the “longitude” and the “latitude”, that is, the Nature, the common plan of immanence or the plan of consistence which “reunites” the plan of immanence as the pre-philosophical ground, in other words, as the possible field of research of ethology [32].

Hence it is in this way that the conclusion of Spinoza: philosophie pratique and the reflections Deleuze and Godard made on the wound of Joe Bousquet and the montage, the “affection-image”[33] of Jean Epstein can shed lights on our thinking on the present negation of the real life or the real living: if what the modern men live is a death-resisting life—according to Bichat, "the set of functions that resists death"[34]—or a non-real living, if the Beatitude we feel in “a life” is indeed manipulated by a kind of “biopower” as Foucault and Agamben pronounced, if “this world has became a bad cinema we no longer believe” and, if we can consider the study of the behavior, the nature, or the external and the internal corporeal extension of the spectator of cinema as a kind of ethology, hence, concerning the infinite animalization of humanity following the transcendence of the already-too-much sufferings, wounds or mourning, we can say, not only “the suffering is not a star” (la souffrance n’ est pas une star)[35] Godard said—with reference to the Cœur fidèle of Jean Epstein (for whom the situation is quite similar as to “focus on” the proletarian sufferings and the subsequent necessity of the solidarity of  “community”)—or “my wound existed before me...” (Ma blessure existait avant moi...)[36] Deleuze wrote—by making a footnote to the war-time injury of Joe Bousquet—is insightful, but also we have to pay attention to these events, illuminations and beatitudes of the everyday life of modernity when they are banalized by “the life”, by the “technique” (of body)—maybe by the politics of representation or biopolitics, by the mutual translation of philosopher and non-philosopher (in the midst of the “shows” of the capitalist consumerism) even.

In other words, this is the lesson we can draw from Deleuze while involving his concept of (a) life as “pure immanence” with the co-existent element of the life as the possible modes of life or way of lives: to live in the Deleuzean modern or con-temporary will always mean to live it personal while becoming impersonal, impersonal while becoming personal. Facing with the living beings who try to merely negate the real living or resist death after the destructions, wounds, suffering of the wars and for whom the distinction between man and animal is no longer meaningful, it may still be true that “the life is simple, and the man incessantly complicates it in ‘stirring the still water’”[37]. However, if not this kind of biopolitics, this kind of simplicity of the life, if not this kind of self-management of the present and the next as a self-evident institution of meaning, what Deleuze’s conception of Homo Tantum of a life will be is just the Homo Duplex of the (Biranian) life.

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Henry: Life as Auto-Affection and Pathos-With (Biranism II)

However, the notion of the Homo Duplex will also provide the basis for the theory of the subjective body or the proper body to which Michel Henry relates his concept of the life as something different from Deleuzean “a life”. In his Philosophy and Phenomenology of the body, Henry wrote:

The subjectivity is not pointed to an impersonal milieu, a simple “transcendental” field which dissolved, in term of the classical thinking, in a pure mirage, in an empty continuity, that is, a simple representation deprived of all contents......the subjectivity is nothing transcendent. The one who characterizes it in the eidetic point of view, it’s rather the fact that it is a life in a sphere of absolute immanence, that it is the life.[38]

Different from Sartre, Merleau-Ponty”[39] while sharing the immanence tradition with Deleuze but also departing from the impersonal milieu of him, Henry’s interpretation of the theory of the subjective body of Maine de Biran leads him to consider the life “in a sphere of the absolute immanence”, as the life who even feels itself in and by its immanence. In other words, it is the life as an auto-affecting life, as the auto-affection. Henry wrote:

The Life feels, suffers itself. Not that it is something who would have……this propriety of feeling itself, but it is here its essence: the pure trial of self, the fact of feeling oneself. The essence of life resides in the auto-affection......the life, in its premiere affection, is not affected by something other than it. It constitutes itself the content that it receives and who affects it. The life is not a self-position, a self-objectivation, it does not poses before it for affecting itself in a seeing itself, a apperceiving itself, in the sense of a manifestation of self who would be the manifestation of an object......The Life affects itself, is for self, without proposing to itself in the object of the ecstasy, it feels itself without the intermediary of a meaning, of internal meaning, of any meaning in general. This original auto-affection in a real radical meaning, in the sense of an exclusive absolute immanence of all intentional rupture and all transcendence, is not a postulate of thinking.[40]

Indeed, in opposition to the passive synthesis and the hyletic phenomenology of Husserl, usserHenry provides here the notion of “material phenomenology”. For Henry, different from Levinas who still linked the “living experience” (vécu) with the idea of “being” and find truth only in the “presence of life”[41], material phenomenology is the phenomenology in which the “material” is the material—if not content or the sensory hyletic data—of the act who devotes (se donner) itself to the form in order to be informed[42]. It is the life in its auto-donation and auto-affection itself, since there is no law of the world or the object, but only “the law of the life” itself[43]. By auto-affection, it is all about the life’s thinking, feeling, and experiencing of itself as “fact”, “trial”, “suffering”, as a conscious act of receiving while affecting itself at the same time, that is, as Jean-Luc Marion putted it, as the immediacy of receptivity and its generosity, as I feel something inside me when I am conscious of something, as “the feeling essence of ego”[44]. It is the absolute immanence, that is, as Henry also wrote, “the ultimate intuition of Kandinsky”[45] which does not belong to the reign of the object of any intentionality, representation, reflection, or apperception, which is not ecstatic and, which does not need the assistance of any meaning at all, since it is not a correlate or “postulate” of thinking. Different from the objective body which is the object of representation or intuition in the external world controlled by our “active touch”, for Henry, life is always “the life” of the subjective body, since the subjective body is the internal resistance to the personal effort, since the subjective body is also the locus of “the inner touch” or “the interior tact” (le tact intérieur), that is, “the affections of the interior life and their product”[46], the possible synthesis between the “organic impression” and the freedom of the soul in the body[47], since:

I have substituted the resistance or the organic inertia for the foreign resistance, not exclusively in this constraint movement who teaches us that it exists something outside of us, but more generally in the effort who is essentially relative to the term, that I apply either to the proper body, or to the foreign body.[48]

In fact, for Biran, it is the proper or the subjective body that induces the resistance in the effort. As true as the interpretation of Heller-Roazen, this kind of “interior tact”, “interior extension”, “localization”, or “inner space”, this kind of resistance of the subjective body in the effort, will always imply the “force” of the body, that is to say, the power of “I sense” or “I sense myself in my body’s resistance to my effort” prior to the “I think, therefore I am” of the Cartesian cogito[49]. Different from Ravaisson who describes the effort as “the place of balance”[50] between action and passion, activity and passivity as well as considers the antecedent of effort as “without effort”[51] while belonging to the French spiritualism tradition with him, Biran viewed the effort as the relation between the hyper-organic sensation and the organic instinctive force which will “spring up the personal sentiment of existing” that is me (moi)[52] from the start. Therefore, the subjective or proper body is the interior resistance to it; that means, the subjective body is also a body capable of immediate apperception, since the apperception is the immediate product of the relational personal sentiment of existing at the same time. Hence, when Biran made a distinction among the  “sensitive” (sensitif) system which is passive , the “perceptive” (perceptif) or the “intuitive” (intuitif) system which is mixed, and the “apperceptive” (apperceptif) system which is active as well as defined the apperception as “the modes or the acts…which are the exclusive and immediate (or even the mediate or only partial) products of the same living force which creates the effort”[53], he has already made a response to Condillac: for Condillac, especially in his Treatise of Animals (Traité des animaux), if there exists an exigency to draw a hierarchy between the “me of habitude” (le moi de habitude) who takes care and conducts the animal faculty and body and “me of reflection” (le moi de réflexion) who impresses the soul and induces our ideas, curiosities, industriousness hence, happiness[54] in which the latter dominates the former, for Maine de Biran, these two means are being redistributed as “passive habitude” (habitudes passives) and “active habitude” (habitudes actives) on the path of the production of spontaneity and automatism: for Maine de Biran, the task of habitude is about reflection or “introspection”—that is, “a thinking in act”[55]—all about diminishing our sensible impression which is flow and not in our control as well as enhancing the capacity of perception and their relation with the activity of the will[56].

Again, in contrast to Condillac who, under the analysis of the “sensation of movement”, constrains the possibility of the resistance of the effort to the sphere of motility (which is no more than “the faculty of making movement” and the consciousness of it as Biran called[57]) and to the corresponding proper organ of touch, this subjective body is also the “primitive fact”, the original corporeity—that is, the flesh (la chair) before “the chiasm” (le chiasme) of the “touching” (touchant) and the “touched” (touché), before the chiasm as the condition of the “can-touch” (pouvoir-toucher)[58]—who moves itself (se mouvoir) in the “can-touch” by the way of immanent movement[59]. Besides, it feels itself, suffers itself, affects itself as the primordial affection, as primordial suffering, as auto-affection without any aid of the mediation of meaning or the transcendence of the self: it is not an object=x we can postulate before affecting the self. It is the fact of the auto-affection itself. As Henry manifested, if the originality of Biran’s theory or science of faculties or “categories” lie in its attempt to defines man by its non-biologic, non-living, non-human body, and the non-living, non-human, non-biologic body by the subjectivity, by the I, or the ego which is the mode of existence as “sphere of absolute immanence”, if the originality of Maine de Biran lies in its attempt to link the problem of the categories—not with the spirit of the reason but—with that of the subjectivity, then the life as auto-affection or affection without sensibility[60] will also take the affectivity as its foundation which can sympathize with all those who suffer the same mode of existence, the (same) Life, which can reduce phenomenologically the sufferings of the life into the primitive human Suffer, which can contribute to, if not too audacious, the “science of community” based on the ontology of subjective body and its primordial subjectivity: 

As the essence of the community is affectivity, it does not limit to the only humans but sympathize with all these who happen to be defined by the primitive Suffer of the life and thus by the possibility of the suffering in itself. We can suffer with all these who suffer; there is a pathos-with which is the form much more large than all the conceivable communities. This pathetic community does not exclude the world but only the abstract world, that is to say the world which does not exist, in which people has put subjectivity out of play. The community includes the real world—the cosmos—in which every element—form, color—is ultimately only as it auto-affects itself, that is to say precisely in this pathetic community and by it...…there is only one community, situated in this place that we have tried to define, one sphere of intelligibility where all these are, are intelligible to the others and to oneself on the ground of this primordial intelligibility which is the pathos.[61] 

In fact, what Henry tries to investigate here is what he called the “phenomenology of community”. He attempts to investigate in the idea of community is “the mode in which they are offered to us”, that is, community in their “how”: “How do the members of community have a share in what is common to them? To put it in another way, what is the mode of access by which and due to which they enter into possession of the common reality?......Or how is the common reality given to them, to each one of the members of the community?”[62] Facing these questions, Henry answered, it is in the form of the affectivity or the pathos-with that we can see a much more large community based on the primordial Suffering of the living beings offered itself to us, and we are all the members of it.

Therefore, it is in this sense it’s also a respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy’s primary reference to Henry is mainly to his Marx, which was a two-volume work published in 1976, seven years earlier than the publication of The Inoperative Community. As Nancy’s remark, Henry’s discussion of the individual’s escape from the dialectics in Marx permits him—together with the ecstatic negativity of Bataille—to conceive of the possibility of “slipping into the immanence” as the way to escape from the mediation of totality. For Nancy, the conception of immanence is ingeniously linked to the problematic of individuality and collectivity, since it is a negation of the possibility of any kind of ecstasy of Being, since it is a denial of the absolute impossibility of complete immanence. Furthermore, since the problematic of the immanence implies the individuals and its composition—the community—as the non-absolute being, it is reasonable that Nancy wrote: “Community, or the being-ecstatic of Being itself. That would be the question.”[63]

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Then again seven, seven years later, Henry’s respond to Nancy will be this: if individuals, in its life as auto-affection, can truly escape from the totalizing effect of the dialectics, then it is because the individual life has primordially connected to the community of the living beings in the affectivity of common Suffering or the “pathos-with”—as the absence of the postulate or presupposition of thinking which gives foundation to the “immanentism” Nancy said or “the exigency of an absolute immanence” Blanchot wrote[64]. Furthermore, since this is the way how the community, the common affectivity, the common Suffering are given or offered to us, it is also the way we can sense the same Life of all the living beings which makes the moments of the dialectics impossible, not only because the way that the life is inseparable from its own auto-affection as the absolute immanence, but also due to:

The affectivity is the essence of the auto-affection, its non-theoretical or speculative but concrete possibility. The immanence itself is no longer seized in the ideality of its structure but in its indubitable and certain phenomenological effectuation. It is the way in which the essence receives, feels itself……[it is] presupposed by the essence and the constituent, which is disconcealed in it, in the affectivity, as feel itself effectively, named as sentiment precisely. It’s what constitutes the essence of the sentiment, the essence of affectivity as such: feel oneself, in such a way that the sentiment is not something who feels itself...…As such, as this effective “feel oneself” phenomenologically, which constitutes the essence and the possible making, the sentiment is not different from this one: the affectivity is the original essence of the revelation......the affectivity has nothing to do with the sensibility with which it always confounded but rather heterogeneous structurally to it......the affectivity, considers itself as a power of feeling, or more exactly,  of testing something and being affected by it, precisely has nothing to do with the meaning thus defined with the one who founded it, has nothing to do with the transcendence......speaking of a sensible sentiment is in the empty rigidness of meaning, proposed in the ontological point of view as an absurdity. The affectivity as such is never sensible.[65]

Indeed, what Henry tried to articulate here is the phenomenological “effectuation” of the affectivity as “concrete possibility”, as the essence of the life, as the auto-affection which is also a kind of revelation. Different from sensibility, affectibility (for affectivity is not an ability or capability) as well as the unnecessary transcendence and the intermediation of meaning, the affectivity is “the fact” and “the power of feeling” which is the “sensible sentiment” (of the soul). It is the possibility of “testing something and being affected by it”, hence making it. For this reason, this is also why that “something” being tested in the world will become Henry “the original revelation of the living experience” in a radical immanence—“transcendental internal experience”[66]—and that’s why Nancy’s criticism of Henry or Nancy’s respond to Henry’s “phenomenology of community” in Le sens du monde is problematic: Henry indeed takes into consideration the pain of work itself and it is in this sense that Henry speaks of—not the effort (as a filtered version of Biran’s concept) but —the primitive Suffer (of the life) [67]. To say Henry does not take the pain of work into consideration “directly and for itself” or only melt the pain of work in a dialectical version of the effort is meant to say Henry is not a reviver of Biranism, he does not engage in the ontology of subjectivity, or life could no longer be the “auto-affection without distance” for him, since Henry’s equation of body=subjective existence=ego=I=the foundation of the science of “subjective ideology” or “categories” and its relationship with the life as auto-affection has corresponded to Biran’s conception of the proper body.

Since for Henry the life is no more than life’s primordial affection and suffering of itself or auto-affection, since the idea of community is no more than its phenomenological revelation and affection, since there is a “pathos -with”, an eidos of all the communities of living beings in the world, we can make the following announcement concerning the contemporary negation of the life or the real living: different from Deleuze’s impersonal reference to Biran’s conception of affection and affectibility, to live in the con-temporary—in light of the phenomenology of the life and community of Michel Henry—will always mean to let our subjective or proper body extends in the exterior and interior spatiality of touch, that is, not the problem of the “self in general”, but the affectivity—the necessity of marking the essence of affection and of life (of the community) as affectivity—as the power of—I would like to emphasize—testing (someone) and feeling, as the reflection, as the possibility of demarcating an internal experience or corporeity independent of all the involvement of the “empty rigidness” of meaning[68] and the transcendence of being (this is the theme Henry shares with Deleuze). Deducing this, we are all the disciples of Maine de Biran—this “prince of thinking”[69]—we will answer the question “is there an immediate internal apperception?” [70]forever by our proper body, as long as we test, we feel, we live, Suffer—since it is like Stendhal wrote in his Journal in 1806: “For the moments one feels without energy, distasted, that one is boring, the study of facts can be the study of art of conducting his spirit to the truth. Tracy, Biran, Cabanis, Hobbes.”[71]

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Badiou: Life as Subjective Faithful Formalism and “To Live Is To Be Faithful To The Eventual Present”

However, for Badiou, Henry’s idea of community will just fall into the category of what he called “democratic materialism”, though Henry also admitted the prescription of “the rights of man” is problematic[72]. As we mentioned above, Badiou is quite hostile to the so-called “democratic materialism”. According to Badiou, what we have in the “democratic materialism” will only be the encyclopedic knowledge and a long list of living beings and their correlate, objective inscription in the regime of rights in which we can see not only the “obligated references” of the state[73], but also the impossibility of any subjective dimension, any politics, any fidelity, any real event, any regime of the true or truth. In other words, there are only the suffering bodies, the all-too-evident bodies, and the disastrous effort of naming it by language at all costs, since what we witness in the contemporary opinions of the living beings by livings beings is the reduction of the individual to its mere existence, its “existence=individual=body”[74], its merely living bodies and its imaginary community.

In opposition to the democratic materialism, Badiou urged us to conduct the so-called “dialectical materialism”, whose axiom will be: “There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths” or “There are only individuals and communities, except that there are truths”. Against the layout (agencement) of the “and... and... and...” (et... et... et...) of Deleuze (and Godard)[75] as well as his philosophy of “the One-thinking” and “minoritarism”[76], for Badiou, this “except that” (sinon que) is the requirement for the truth procedure, its phenomenology, its “logic of the appearing”, that is, the appearing, the “being-multiple”, or the (visible) “body” of truth in the world. It is the only way to escape, to subtract from the cliché, the inauthentic living of individuals, objective bodies in the regime of democratic materialism. So as there is the event and the being-multiple of truth, it is insufficient to just identify the eventual trace only, since the subject—that is to say, the “local configuration of a generic procedure in which the truth supports itself”[77]—must “carry” (porter) the body, the being-multiple—together with the fact—the “subjective formalism” and “all the elements of an eventual site” of truth in the world, since the subject must create or “incorporate” [78] into the eventual present which is “the ensemble of consequences of an eventual trace in the world”[79], and it is what Badiou means by “living”. Regarding this, Badiou wrote:

It is not sufficient to identify a trace. It must incorporate into this in which it [event] authorizes as consequences. The life is creation of a present......continued creation......the life is a subjective category. A body is the materiality that it requires, but the disposition of this body in a subjective formalism depends on the becoming of the present: that it is produced (the formalism is faithful, the body is situated “under” the eventual trace directly), that it is deleted (the formalism is reactive, the body is held in a double distance of the negation of the trace), or that it is occulted (the body is denied). Neither the reactive delete of the present, who denies the value of the event, nor, a fortiori, its mortified occultation, who supposes a transcendent “body” in the world, allow the affirmation of the life, which is incorporation, point by point, to the present. Living is thus the incorporation to the present under the faithful form of a subject. If the incorporation is dominated by the reactive form, one will not speak of life, but of simple conservation. In fact it is a matter of protect the consequences of a birth, of not relaunching the existence beyond itself. If the incorporation is dominated by the obscure formalism, one will speak of mortification. The life is the suitable bet ultimately, on a body happened to appear, that one entrusts a new temporality, holds the conservative drive (the instinct badly called “life”) as the mortified drive in distance (the instinct of death)......living, it’s thus also, always, to express the eternal amplitude of a present to the past......so we must assume this: for the dialectical materialist, “live”, and “live for an Idea”, are one and the same thing.[80]

Actually speaking, in terms of Badiou, to live will always mean to carry the subjective formalism in its faithful form, that is, to be faithful to the eventual trace or to create, hence to incorporate into the eventual present, to “express the eternal amplitude of a present to the past”. Different from the so-called “reactive formalism” (in its double negation, they are the negation of the eventual trace, the eventual present and its history, as well as the alienation of self, like present Taiwan or Taiwanese people in the present, however paradoxical, in its conservative form, for example: “what I want is just to get along…”, “Facing with such a pressure and hardship of life, how can one really has time to think, to pay attention to the surroundings and to consider it that much and that further?”) and “obscure formalism” (which is the death drive symbolized in either a kind of hypocritical fatalism or blind, superficial occultism of the mysterious body also happened frequently here), the faithful formalism is the continuous production of the present, the topos in which the body, the materiality, the material resources the subject requires is the direct product of the eventual trace or the eventual site. It is the topology of the subject and the present which decides the apparatus of the body, that is, the living, the real living.

Faithfully, besides his explicit Platonism, Badiou also admitted in his Logiques des mondes that he belongs—together with Jean Cavaillès, Albert Lautman, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and in opposition to Canguilhem, Simondon and Deleuze who belong to the tradition of “vitalist mysticism” of Henri Bergson—to the tradition of the teachings of Leon Brunschvicg (a tradition he called “mathematized idealism”). In fact, Badiou’s conception of the faithful subject discerns the connection of the multiples of the situation with the name of the event as an “approximative truth” (vérité approximative), conceives of the terms, investigates, anticipates its “to come” (à-venir) all in the “local stage”[81]—“to come is the proper of the subject who judges”—is influenced by Brunschvicg. As we can see Brunschvicg wrote in his The Modality of the Judgement:

Conceiving man, it is to unite together certain characters and certain individuals; it is to affirm these characters of these individuals. In other word, the foundation of the concept is the one we call judgment, and people can say without paradox that to conceive is to judge.[82]

Actually speaking, we can say, for Brunschvicg, to conceive is to judge or to affirm the multiplicity or the all “together” (ensemble) of the concept. In fact, besides the tradition of idealism in which the reality imposes the task of the judgement of truth on the intellectual consciousness[83], we can also observe in Brunschvicg’s The Philosophy of the Spirit (La Philosophie de l’esprit) Badiou’s critique of the anthropomorphism or the absorption of human beings in the vision of animality[84], for anthropomorphism, according to Brunschvicg, is the total reverse of humanism, which means to treat the human in a human way. However, there is one thing Badiou will not agree with Brunschvicg: that is, Brunschvicg’s conception of social life, which is influenced by the theory of Maine de Biran on the habitude. According to Brusnchvicg, to work for living is to work for the society, since the reward of work is directly or indirectly came from the society and its utility, that is, for Biran—under the influence of Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis who are the primary advocates of the group les Idéologues—the social passion, which is a “mixed phenomenon” of the affective and the intellectual life[85]. That’s why in light of this, the life—for Brunschvicg—is always the social life and it always requires an “interior habitude that penetrated up to the soul” and a kindness in everyday life that shows the virtue in the world[86]. 

       Nevertheless, the assumption is quite different with Badiou. For Badiou, to live will not and should not become an objective, relational, economical “habitude” or take the individual reflection as the unmovable starting point, for it is always a matter of the subjective production of the present, its local configuration after the “generic hole”[87] (in the knowing) and its faithful formalism, its incorporation into the eventual trace, as well as all its “to come”. In fact, we can pronounce: since the subject believes there are truths as the exception to the individuals and communities, to live will always mean to live in the tension between the real of the body and the (re)production of the present. Facing with the reactive and obscure formalism in which there is no truth or no need for truth but only the absence of truth as the negation of the real living, as true clichè or, to its radical opposite, the disastrous all-naming itself, maybe the proposal of the life Badiou provides is just the beginning: as an ethics of truth, to incorporate faithfully into the eventual trace and the process of reciprocal production of the body and the eventual present is the step toward the incorporation and the “half-saying” of the “we”, not the pathmark that leads to the endless terror, devour and operation of the real.[88]

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Conclusion: Immunity, “Welding Rod” and the Politics of Living

In this paper, I have first outlined the general situation of the modernity as the negation of the real living, or as the disastrous overlapped of the individual natural life and the organic, political life of the community, no matter how complex the topology of their mutual relations. Facing this, in order to figure out what does

it mean by living for them and find the prerequisite for the recovering of the real living, I have surveyed Deleuze’s concept of life as “pure immanence”, Henry’s description of life as “auto-affection”, and Badiou’s idea of life as the subjective “faithful formalism”. In addition, I have also discussed their inheritance, interrelation, dialogue with the previous and the contemporary thinkers, as well as the insights their conception of life can bring to us.

In fact, the thing Deleuze, Henry, Badiou see in common is that our world has became the resting place of the real living or real life (Deleuze’s sympathy with the thinking of the Japanese director Ozu, his lament of the “bad cinema” and his belief in “a true cinema as elsewhere”; Henry’s critique of the barbarism of our scientific culture’s negation of the life; Badiou’s opening question in Logiques des mondes[89], his fierce debasement of the protection of the “right of livings” of democratic materialism, “reactive formalism” and “obscure formalism”) in the contemporary. However, they conceive life (no matter it’s an impersonal life or the individual life, no  matter it’s a falling of the beatitude or the affirmation of individual business or sufferings by the subject) or the possibility of living as the key to break this plight very differently: Deleuze conceived of an impersonal life as pure immanence and beatitude of the Homo tantum made up by virtualities, singularities, events before the transcendence or the star of our sufferings, before the immanent reflection, hence all the possibilities of revelation; different from Deleuze’s impersonal life (though shared the immanence tradition and the legacy of Maine de Biran with Deleuze), Henry stressed the life’s immediate auto-affection of itself and its “pathos-with” as the primordial eidos of any kind of community, as the subjective body in which we can recover the (phenomenological) life. Finally, in opposition to Deleuze’s philosophy of “the One-thinking”, his “minoritarism” as well as the implicit sympathy of all living beings of Henry, Badiou affirms the life as the possibility of living, as subjective faithful formalism to the eventual trace then create the eventual present, hence incessantly incorporating into the becoming of it while conceiving, judging the natural faith of the coming—in opposition to the reactive and obscure negation of the possibility of living.

Therefore, in no way I would like to reconcile the differences among these three thinkers. In order to alter the vicious circle of biopolitics’ negation of the real “living”, by taking their implicit debates and their conceptions of life as the intellectual background, what I would like to argue or propound at the final of this paper is the “politics” (la politique) of living itself, not only as the prerequisite for the actualization of (lost) virtuals (Deleuze), not only as the motility who accompanies the affectivity of life (Henry), not only as the mirror of the material body the subject requires (Badiou)—not only as the prerequisite of “the political” (le politique)—but as a new way of praxis in the concept (of the real living or the real life which is blurred by the indigenous translation of the “biopolitics” as “life politics”[90]), as a new way of sensing ourselves and this, in fact, no matter we like it or not, living community. In the age of biopolitics where our real living has been negated or there is only the disinhibiting, the counting and the translating of the communities of living beings, let say, by preserving the community “through the negation of its original horizon of sense”, that is, by obtaining the “immunity” (immunitas) or the “immunization” from and at the same time, in the same community (communitas)[91], what we will do is to fall into the process of “contraction” and the production of “stress”[92], that is, to live by the “ethics of stress” and “contraction” from time to time (since the temperature of the “forced common” will be lower naturally, if not being considered too quickly and too thoughtlessly by us as the self-evident “nature”), since we are all the “welding rods” Taiwanese poet Tsao Kai said, since there always remains the possibility of  fissure in this flat community, since there is always an unbalanced “smooth space” between the real of community and the history of it, since “the Memory is the fundamental synthesis of the time who constitutes the being of the past” and who will let “the dissolved me sings again the glory of the God” or the mundane differences in “the repetition of elements”[93]. Thus, it will always be the coming site of any possibility of (the politics of) living itself, as Tsao Kai has lamented and foretold us the tragic extension but also, the inevitable possibility of contraction of the “welding rod” in his poem:

The great construction

often retains the feeling of animosity     hard to conciliate

like the soaring Eiffel Tower

between the hardness of the steel

cannot prevent from the occurrence of the fissure

In order to make up for the defect and the deviation of exclusion

to elaborate the power of welding and condensation

the welding rod is doomed to sacrificed

lightning burns it up

forced to cremate its body

sacrifice its body to fulfill the mission of integration

The welding rod,

scarcely can it be the metaphor of a brave man

due to the cruel punishment of fire, the strike it brings

force itself to melt

melted, falls into the interval of the split of the steel

more and more deep, solid the fuse

up to the fill up of the fissure, there is no trace remained

turns into one of the member of the construction of the steel

the tough journey of life lasts into the air

following the new image, comes into being

there is no longer any surplus value

like Prometheus

the trace of the struggle cannot be found already

the spirit of sacrifice, already ignored by people

functions, insignificantly small but great

all the people ignore, the lightning disdains

even discarded by itself

many people think

it’s just a trivial initiation

as time passes, who will mention that again

the sage has no interest in it

the tour is indifferent

the lightning is sick of it

however the fissure being filled up has already shut its mouth

like the wound of history has been healed

longing for speech but cannot tell![94]

Hence, in this way, it will also be the matter (matière) of “the resistance of the poesy”, as one of the possible modality of the real living, as the resistance to the infinity of languages and discourses of the negation of the real living, as the resistance to any kind of self-constitution and self-comprehension of the biopolitics in general, as the distribution in relation to “one another” (aus-einander), as the internal ex-actness, that is, the eternal return of the SAME as the eternal touch of meaning, as the eternal non-coincidence[95]. If it is not the pure nothing-in-common or the lacking, negative form of it, then, within the biopolitical community, as the politics of living itself, we will be able to touch “the death in the midst of the life—or the inverse—the one of the generous other, the one by the grace of the other. The plucking, the appeasement”[96]; hence, the “ethics of contraction” made in the interlacing, mixing, physics between the death, the grace and the real living—if not too quickly falls into the fixation of the being-toward-death of Dasein.

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