Five definitions related to the force (of) thought

Non-dictionary

Collection of non-autopositional universes obtained by the reiteration of a universal pragmatics to a material of philosophical and regional terms; open list of non-conceptual symbols obtained beginning from a list of philosophical concepts.

This expression does not exist in philosophy but could here designate a negative or suspended moment in the economy of a dictionary, dialectic or differential economy, etc.

A non-dictionary is produced from a pragmatics beginning with the vision-in-One and its ordination of conceptual philosophical—indeed philosophizable—material (regional terms). To the unitary philosophical autosufficiency it opposes the sufficiency-to-the-Multiple of the One real rather than the multiplicity of philosophical and semantic decisions. Whereas philosophical dictionaries constitute an inventory, in the name of unity, of the multiple opinions in the subject of a presupposed-Being or (psychoanalytic variant) of a supposed-Other, a non-dictionary—without another supposition—translates the real multiplicity inherent to the force (of) thought beginning from an empirical plurality of concepts. The force (of) thought manifests the repertory terms as so many non-unitary universes.


Force (of) thought (existing-subject-stranger)

Organon or means through which the One can enact or possess a causality without being alienated in the material of its action. Instance which is not real like the One but produced through cloning. Transcendental and aprioritic, it has its real essence in the One without adding or subtracting anything to the Real itself which determines it in-the-last-instance to a local occasion.

Marxism recognizes an equivalent concept which it places at the foundation of historical Materialism: labor power [la force de travail]. This is an energetic concept of human energy which only exists in the personality of the worker and which is irreducible to his functions or operations, to work output or expended. This concept is necessary so as to transform the object of work into exchange value and is thus creative of value. According to the plan of the Marxist systematic, it articulates the Marxian ontology of the individual and the theory of capitalism. Nietzsche and Deleuze propose an idea of thought as a symptom of forces, establishing its cause in a differential play of multiple forces rather than in a Real-of-the-last-instance.

Whether idealist or materialist, philosophy recognizes “thought” [la-pensée] as a continuously differentiated generality beginning from an empirical tracing of the faculties (intuition, understanding, reason and finally philosophy itself as objective auto-reflection). In its concepts of thought, philosophy is content to idealize, sublimate or critique an image of thought. Under its most ethereal forms, it conforms to its origins and internalizes a final intuitive content, topological in the best case, which reifies or thingifies it into an ontic element or into a transcendental imagination, at best. Philosophy is nothing but the mobilization of this inertia or this substantialization which continues to burden its experience of thought and which at best proceeds to the “act” (Fichte, Nietzsche, Husserl), or to the Unthought (Heidegger), but never to the Real which determines thought in-the-last-instance as force (of) thought.

In opposition to the gregarious generality of “thought,” non-philosophy discovers the content of the latter to be foreclosed by philosophical authority. The force (of) thought is the first possible experience of thought—after the vision-in-One which is not itself a thought—and a defetishizing experience. Whereas “thought” is a fetishized and auto-factualized generality, susceptible of circulating among all philosophies and all their objects and dimensions,—in the manner of an abstract exchange or a common sense—the force (of) thought is the reality of thought insofar as the former is not alienated in the latter or in its historico-philosophical forms. Under the dependence of the vision-in-One in-the-last-instance, but only from its practice, it transforms the material of philosophical statements and particularly the datum of the images of thought so as to give them the scientifico-transcendental (“unified”) sense of non-philosophical knowledges.

The force (of) thought is a complex concept. The One cannot act of itself, for only Being or Transcendence can act upon philosophical material, i.e. a universal exteriority which is employed by the organon for the One. Since the force (of) thought serves to determine Being itself beginning from experience, there is a circle, but this circle must be understood as that which is characteristic of the a priori and which is broken with the transcendental. In effect, Being is the a priori which structures every theory produced by thought and which, as such, is itself presupposed in its existence, but the transcendental Identity which precedes it and which makes of the force (of) thought a transcendental subject in its radical manner puts an end to this circularity because it is a clone entirely produced “under” One or “according to” the One. The force (of) thought contains two constituants: transcendental Identity and aprioritic Identity, the latter being directly open to experience. Why “force?” Nothing here is either mechanical or energetic: it is called “force” because the transcendental Identity, cloned according to the one, concretely effectuates—thanks to the occasion of philosophy and its transcendental identity—the immanent universality of the vision-in-One. The latter, because it is turned-towards…the World or given to…that which it gives, is for that a force, but still “negative” or in-effectuated. Transcendental Identity is necessary in order to effectuate this real or immanent uni-versality and to make it the transcendental force which is thought.


Drive (Non-Autopositional)

Other name for the force (of) thought as organon of the One and for its action of a pragmatic nature on the World or philosophy-material.

The notion of “drive” is consecrated by psychoanalysis rather than its philosophico-psychological equivalents (as tendency, and notably an altruistic tendency with Maurice Pradines). In psychoanalysis, it is a question of a “borderline” concept which Freud situates at the limit of the psychic and the somatic, if it is not elsewhere in metapsychological mythology. In every case, the most exact equivalent of drive (sexual/death) would be the physical image-concept of force, itself valorized by Freud. It would no longer be interesting, from this perspective, to ask what would a drive become, in the psychoanalytic sense, if it were no longer understood as a force in the sense of pre-relativistic imagery, but as a field: perhaps, as certain analysts have suggested, a function (of repression or resistance).

The force (of) thought (or drive in the first forms of non-philosophy) takes it character of force/drive from its cloned nature (not clone of the One but of the World as seen-in-One). The clone is not distinct from the One, it is the universality of the One effectuated by a givenness. Therefore, it is itself, through one of its aspects, One-in-One, radical immanence. Consequently, the clones in question here—transcendental and a priori instances—are radical immanence on one of their “faces;” on the other, they are primarily relation-without-relation (transcendental) to the World, and, secondly, relation of transcendence or (aprioritic) exteriority to this same World. The force (of) thought is intrinsically an action, a pragmatics of the thought-world. This drive is deprived of negativity or representativity and ignores the play of forces as well as the functions which engage in transcendence or in the logico-real order. It constitutes thought or reason in an action without principle, but not without cause, and which “attains” the World in its identity. This is not an immediate given but rather a given-without-givenness of action as the ultimate transcendental residue of activity as mediation. The One is effectuated as pulsional. Drive [pulsion] is the Other or the Unconscious whereas in its psychoanalytic sense, drive is the mark of the Other.


Rule (of the Force (of) Thought)

Syntax or immanent form of the usage of language-material (philosophy). The rules of non-philosophy constitute an a priori pragmatics of the unilateral action of the force (of) thought.

The concept of rule has been subtracted from its purely (methodo-)logical usage (Descartes, Durkheim) by Kant who defines the understanding as the faculty of rules. Consequently, the rule is constitutive of the theoretical usage of reason yet is, however, not reduced to it. Reason, the faculty of principles, is moreover less constrained in its practical or teleological usage. Kant thus refuses the reduction of thought to regularity, a refusal which for example also characterizes the reflection of Wittgenstein, who emphasizes the necessary hiatus between the rule and its application, and inscribes complete regularity into the fabric of a form of life.

The vision-in-One or given-without-givenness is deprived of rules, unlike the regulated use in immanence—thus “non-regulated” but not uncontrolled—of non-philosophical pragmatics. Immanent expression of the force (of) thought whose essence is the determination-in-the-last-instance, the rule naturally accompanies the procedure of reception and transformation of philosophical material. It takes as many determined configurations—which are not transcendent or autopositional—as this procedure needs for its operations. The non-philosophical rule is neither the rule of the rule nor exception to the rule, but a non-autopositional rule (not auto-regulated).

Thus the first rule of non-philosophy prescribes, under the (misleading) term of “reciprocal redescription,” the determination of material by the One and the reformulation of the One with the symptomatic aid of material. The second rule hurls the ensemble of material into the “general equivalent” of the chôra or a generalized Aesthetic. The third and fourth rules characterize the cloning and “redescription” in language-material of the (transcendental and a priori) structures which are equivalent with the philosophical Decision. The fifth rule announces the function-support fulfilled by the material itself in the course of the preceding operations. Finally, the sixth rule explains the results of the procedure itself (rules 2 and 4) under the form of a non-thetic universe, i.e. a clone or reflection.

One can then no longer speak of a transcendent opposition, within use, of a material and a rule—which confirms the immanentization of the latter—but of a unilateral duality between the transcendental essence of the rule and the given to be transformed. As for the rule, it is contingent-and-necessary through its own occasional material (the philosophical concept of the rule and a priori rules of philosophy) and determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real or the vision-in-One. Thus is broken the supposedly immanent “systematic necessity” of a “body of rules,” the last fetish from which pragmatics must be liberated if it wants to focus on philosophical language itself.


Reversibility (reciprocity, convertibility, exchange)

Syntax and operation of the dyad which form the basis of the philosophical Decision and which are reflected on the superior or transcendental level of the system. Tendency-limit of all philosophy to which the apparently least fluid syntaxes can be reduced (reciprocity, convertibility, exchange, contract, etc.). To reversibility is opposed the unilateral duality of cloning (whose principle is the vision-in-One) which should instead be characterized as “uni-tax.” Or still, to reciprocal determination is opposed the determination-in-the-last-instance.

As duality and synthesis of a “syntax” and a “semantics” (experience of the real), philosophy defines a specific “form of order” which it interprets and mixes with scientific forms of order—this is “philosophical rationality.” The essence of philosophical syntax is precisely to be a syn-taxis (a synthetic order par excellence, unifying analysis in this same sense). This is reversibility, fully realized only in certain cases of absolute idealism (Hegel—above all Nietzsche), but which is a tendential limit of all philosophy as such, again relieved of its procedures taken from the sciences with which it is combined (convertibility, dialectics, difference, reciprocal determination, relation-without-relation or semi-reversibility, etc.). Reversibility is the mixture of a formal relation of equivalence and of the intuitive given of spatiality which is the element of philosophical topology. It is in the principle of philosophy itself insofar as the latter commences with a dyad, a coupling of terms or a line of demarcation; particularly in the principle of the order of phenomena in Plato, of the essence of matter in Aristotle, of the cosmological dialectical illusion in Kant, and forces every philosopher to reject the irreversible as semblance or to reabsorb it into circularity.

In psychoanalysis, reversibility is a fundamental dimension of the topological approach of the Other and assures its footing on the One; instead of the determination by the One in-the-last-instance, there is a reciprocal determination of the One by the Other, and consequently the impossibility of thinking Unilaterality and Time. This reversible coupling of the One and the Other is the analogue of that of the One and Being in philosophy and demonstrates that, in the best of cases, psychoanalysis is structured like a philosophy.

Non-philosophy treats this syntax as a simple material. It prohibits it from entering into play, at least for its own account, not in philosophy itself, but its relating to self or being autoposed. It transforms it into a simple symptom of the transcendental identity constitutive of the force (of) thought at the same time that it manifests the sense (of) identity as foreclosure of unilateral duality. Stated otherwise, it determines it in-the-last-instance. The preceding descriptions, carried out beginning from philosophical indications, already suppose the perspective of the vision-in-One.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s