DOING AND SAYING STUPID THINGS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: bêtise and animality in deleuze and derrida

Abstract

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated.

Keywords:

• Stupidity
• Deleuze
• Derrida
• Enlightenment
• Simondon

Notes

This was the year of publication, though it was written in 1944.

The spread of this word, malin, particularly in marketing and advertising, which initially referred to the Devil and which has come to designate cunning intelligence and a “wise guy” [petit malin], is a symptom typical of our misery.

See also Habermas: “In the transition from the literary journalism of private individuals to the public services of the mass media the public sphere was transformed by the influx of private interests, which received special prominence in the mass media” (53).

See Adorno and Horkheimer 214. The link made in this fragment by Adorno and Horkheimer between stupidity and frustrated desire, and which they inscribe here into a perspective that I would call organological, must be analysed as a process of the regression of desire towards the drives. The fragmentary and incomplete character of these notes and sketches, however, prevents going further here.

This is what became clear to Freud in 1920.

I have previously commented on this remark by Zabunyan in Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies (24).

“Quite generally, the well-known, just because it is well-known, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §31; translation modified). My citation of Hegel to support a proposition by Deleuze no doubt seems surprising. This is, however, precisely a question of the well-known belief, which is also to say, the stupid belief, that Deleuze – and Nietzsche – oppose Hegel.

I refer here to the height of what Gilbert Simondon called “key-points,” which are culminating points, highlights, and to those heights which mean there are base thoughts as the truths from which they are made:

There are imbecile thoughts, imbecile discourses, that are made up entirely of truths; but these truths are base, they are those of a base, heavy and leaden soul. The state of mind dominated by reactive forces, by right, expresses stupidity and, more profoundly, that which it is a symptom of: a base way of thinking. (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 105)

In relation to the worst, and to the worst stupidity, see Sophocles, Antigone, and my commentary in Uncontrollable Societies (24ff.).

See Derrida, “The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics” in Margins of Philosophy 175–205.

I have attempted to begin this analysis in Technics and Time, 1 and Technics and Time, 2. I will return to this question in Technics and Time, 4 (forthcoming).

If this is so, this is because Derrida plays the fool (fait la bête, which is not necessarily the same thing as doing stupid things, faire des bêtises), and not because he is stupid [est bête]. Anyway, who could one say is stupid? Heidegger, for example? Surely not. Heidegger, who was not exactly stupid, who was “not just stupid” [juste pas bête] as the younger generations say today, did – that is, said – stupid things. And in this case he was not content to “play the fool.” However that may be, in relation to stupidity, being and not being perhaps do not agree, perhaps never agree, even when these copulas are determined or undetermined by the adverb “exactly.” Between being (stupid), doing (stupid things), and saying (stupid things), the question of stupidity would be at the same time older, deeper and lower than the question of being and of spirit, including in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, where Derrida approaches the question of the animal “poor in world.” The default of spirit, that is, the feeling of not having any: such would be the commencement of spirit starting from that which is stupid, epimetheia (and this is also la Bête de la Belle).

I will return to this question of the indeterminate in Deleuze, which must be compared to the question of the indeterminate in Heidegger – in passing through the relation to death.

To this must be added the process of technical individuation, which psycho-social individuation presupposes, even though Simondon is not very clear about this. See Stiegler, De la misère symbolique 1.

It is this that enables Simondon to think industry. I have tried to analyse this reversal of relations between being and possibility in Technics and Time, 3, in Économie de l'hypermatériel et psychopouvoir and in What Makes Life Worth Living.

The crystal is the individuation of an amorphous milieu from which emerges individuality, that is, a physical individual. See L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique 83.

I shall return to these questions and to the question of animality in Veux-tu devenir mon ami? (forthcoming).

I have tried to show that it is this logic that is at work in what Heidegger calls “das Man” (the they or the one). See Stiegler, “The Theatre of Individuation,” and idem, “To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us: From September 11 to April 21” in Acting Out.

See Blanchot and my commentary in Veux-tu devenir mon ami? (forthcoming).

In the sense given to this in Simondon, Imagination et invention 13.

Derrida, Margins of Philosophy 3:

I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake.

And this is a trait common to both Derrida and Deleuze.

In his interpretation of the theory of the three souls outlined by Aristotle in On the Soul – where vital individuation in the Simondonian sense includes both the vegetative and sensitive stages of the soul – Hegel shows that any noetic soul (any psychic individual) can regress to an animal state. It means that they are in a deferred and suspended relation to their own possibility, held within their “in itself” without passing into the act of the “for itself.” And this is not without relation to Deleuze's statement about stupidity as a form which does not take. See Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy.

It is true that Simondon's thesis, from which these lines are extracted, was defended seven years before Leroi-Gourhan published Gesture and Speech.

That is, the interruption, suspension and transformation, or the individuation, of an earlier individuation.

On the doubly epokhal redoubling, see What Makes Life Worth Living, Technics and Time, 1 and Technics and Time, 2.