Selected extracts from a conference with Maurice G. Dantec, Richard Pinhas and José Da Silva. Prism Escape : The theme that we had settled upon - and that we will largely surpass - is the human, and the project that this very particular species might have in the universe. The human project. Maurice G. Dantec : It’s actually pretty complicated. I re-read Maurice Blanchot last night, and I came to the conclusion that the human project was certainly at a crossroads. There is a dangerous ideology - and at the same time one that is full of promises - that remains to be seen. It comes from California and it consists in particular in considering the human body as obsolete, with artists like Stelarc and a few others, the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, etc. It’s a school, or a movement of thought, which I felt very close to at one time. In fact it is something that I’ve completely overturned because it seems to me to be the most advanced form of New Age Fascism. Today, I’m a bit torn between several currents. On the one hand, we all understand that the 20th century put an end to one history of humanity, especially with biopolitical experiments like Auschwitz, which are experiments that have not yet been entirely understood or even analyzed, excepting a few thinkers who apply themselves to it especially. And so that forces us to rethink what humanity is, in particular at the moment where, after the biopolitical destruction of man, we obviously arrive at a process of biological recreation of mankind, perhaps a continuation of Nazism in other forms - that we may call "California pop"- which in my opinion seem even more dangerous ; because in a certain respect, what they were actually experimenting with at Auschwitz was the limits of man, that is to say the most extreme destitution of all of humanity, and the total destruction of humanity in man. I was rereading a phrase of Blanchot yesterday, which says that man was "the indestructible being that can be infinitely destroyed", and that question gives rise to the problem of what humanity is, where does it begin and where does it end, how can it be destroyed, and what is this latent project, in advanced western societies, of an artificial recreation via cybernetics, via genetic manipulation, or by cloning existing humanity. These are the questions I ask myself in some of the novels I published in the last four or five years, and I don’t have the answers. The problem is that thought cannot hinge on political or economic contingencies either. Thought is a praxis that must be born of its own contingencies. Which means that at the very moment we become capable of thinking humanity, it may be too late. We must not lose sight of that possibility. José Da Silva : The word thought jumped out at me right away, because a short while ago I stumbled upon an article covering an experiment by a group of researchers in Montreal, who organized a project on human thought. Their objective is to be capable of listening to it and then to connect it to a satellite, thanks to the waves that are emitted, a bit like the dolphins. And they are already there : capturing thought ! PE : And what do they capture, what is thought ? JDS : Thought is a memory that I locate inside the soul, and I dissociate neither the soul nor thought, because the soul is the memory of thought. Richard Pinhas : The few words uttered here make me think of a process. Maurice often speaks of a carbon entity in the place of a human, in order to abandon the old notions of subject or of humanity, and it’s not such a bad idea. At one time we had spoken about the biological singularities, or "singbios". So it would be necessary to find a term to disengage thought referring to an object, let us say man, or to a subject. And there we had an entity that was in the primordial soup, way down at the bottom. It’s simply the ramification of the species. And at some point, what was going to become man - or that biological singularity - stood erect. There we have a whole current described by a lot of thinkers, of which Leroy Gourand is an example. The mammal stands erect, begins to free a limb. This goes together with a new morphology and the brain develops. The ramifications in the neuronal system become more complex, and perhaps that’s when we pass to an immanent network of nuclear rhizome. So the hand becomes free, the zôon emerges from the primordial soup and wastes no time in becoming a political animal. And therefore the object is going to appear, these objects that, incidentally, are quite rapidly going to become weapons for war. All of human history passes through this phase. And so the liberation of the hand permits the constitution of the object that is facing it, the "ob-jet", the "jet" at the opposite end. A thought came to me on that same topic, a thought that was in fashion at the end of the ’70s and that had merely been proposed - because Lyotard spoke very little of it - but a thought that seems important to me, in a very lovely text called The Inhuman. The end allows a glimpse of that current which had been innovated by anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers like Leroy Gourand. This current is actually a kind of phenomenon, in spite of whatever political thought you want to put around it, in spite of whatever kind of thought one has, from the most reactionary of the occidental decline, to the most left-ward leaning, and including the vaguest ideas in between, like those of Sloterdijk. This liberation finally leads to a human body disengaged from its terrestrial hindrances, one that could put this historical becoming into perspective. Man stands erect, disengages the hand, creates thought, creates the thought of the object, the object disappears and the object leads us to a future stage, which would be : Is there a need for the human body ? Is that, considering those technologies that are the fruits of that liberation itself, the next step ? Let us try to see what that could imply. It would be a being that doesn’t even need a body. There would be nothing but huge brains, the body being transformed to its final degree of mutation as we know it. That is to say, the human body, apart from any sexual fantasy or abjective - if you’d like to use a Lacanian term - and beyond the function of desire, is useless. You could tele-this and tele-that 98 % of "human" or "ex-human" functions. MGD : So it once again becomes "laid down", like it was at the beginning... RP : What would this mutant future be like, that of a brain enclosed in a body that would be useless except for reproduction purposes, which therefore would no longer exist ? No more need for a body, we no longer have anything except brains that communicate, aside from reproductive functions. What would a society be if it were composed of nothing but communicating brains ? So we have a new mutation step in this "prediction" of Lyotard’s, in which brains converse between each other and co-produce between each other and by way of all the technological machines we know of. We would have the meta-technological-neurotic side that Maurice began to develop in his very beautiful novel Villa Vortex. And the other side is : What would the function of our bodies become in terms of physical bodies ? JDS : I had a great experience, which is called an NDE, or Near Death Experience. Why do we have this need to reintegrate our body - it’s all personal sensations - if the mutation is such that at some point or another you don’t need a body anymore ? MGD : As I see it, that thought form consists in saying that the thought process does not need a body is a perversion. This ultra-modernist [conception] of a thought that could leave the body and relocate in technological devices and eventually "why do we need a body ?", it seems to me the logical outcome of western metaphysical rationalism that de facto imposes a radical break between the system of the brain and the system of the body. I have found in my own modest research that I began pointing my finger at a certain number of problems, in the Platonic tradition in particular, and strangely enough I found the answer in doctrines of Christian origin, in particular that of the glorious body, the glorification of the body, and therefore, in fact, the illumination of the body. And I became aware that in texts that are fifteen centuries old written by priests - in particular Greek priests - there was a constant injunction on the fact that even if the human "soul" was predestined to be resurrected, you could not forget that in the Christian doctrine there is a resurrection of the body, and so it’s not only about a sort of virtual thanatological universe, in which, possibly, ethereal souls, spirits without substance would be rejoined, but the Christian doctrine of the last judgment makes it quite clear that at the moment of the resurrection, there will be a resurrection of the body, which implies, perhaps, the idea of an immense program of DNA restructuring on a cosmic scale. In any case, this interrogates our conceptions of the body and the spirit. In the Post-Christian West, and after Descartes, and after the Enlightenment, materialism has once again bizarrely become the ultimate idealism, and these idealisms have done nothing but consecrate the radical break between body and spirit. Is this the ontological perspective we are promised - that is to say a spirit that would no longer inhabit the body - is this even possible and envisageable ? Are there not, in the NDEs, completely unknown phenomena that imply the body as well ? I tried to discuss that in my last book. At the moment of physical death, there is an astonishing phenomenon called the burst-retro-transpositional (cf. Colm H. Kelleher), which stops most of the genetic sequences in DNA, we’ll say they are switched off. But on the other hand, the sequences that had been turned off for the duration of life are suddenly switched on, which means that even all these extra corporal experiences - when the soul is leaving the body - imply a very specific activity from the physical body and therefore of the physical brain as well. PE : José, your NDE dates from three years ago, can you explain what triggered it ? JDS : It’s really weird because my objective was to give life. I was doing an organ donation, and after that organ donation, which went badly, I suffered a pulmonary embolism, which was handled very badly. And so I "died". It took six hours of cardiac massage to reanimate me, and the faith of doctors to bring me back. I think we always need an experimental field. When you plant flowers, you need primary materials, and our body remains a primary material. No matter what you do to make it evolve with a given technology, you must have a primary material. It’s simply an evolutionary stage. PE : And how did your body feel during that NDE ? JDS : I didn’t have a body anymore. When you have that kind of experience, it goes so quickly that you don’t have the time to understand that you are going through it, but you go through it. For me, it lasted for five minutes, but I was told it had lasted for twelve hours. We see the body but it’s not physical, it’s not indispensable, but it’s there. We see ourselves, and that’s painful for some people because a rationalism remains, these latent things reconnect and then, at some point, someone asks you the question, or you ask yourself the question, "do you want to leave your body for good or do you not ?" But the question is there and the incredible thing is that we have the choice to answer it. MGD : You just said a lot of things that raise a lot of different questions at the same time. For example, and without meaning to create a polemic because that’s not the point here, but the concept of the body as a primary material reminds me, unfortunately, and don’t take this the wrong way, of Heidegger’s bit on the industrial fabrication of cadavers. Among other things, the 20th century was the precise moment when it became possible to reduce the individual to a body, a numerical and anonymous body, predestined to destruction, because the body is not a primary material. It is nothing but human material, the term the nazis used in their reports was "Figuren". The fact that in the 20th century, although it is the nodal century of experience - but that’s another story - if we can conceive of the human body as a primary material, it’s already an indication of a potential disaster. In that same continuity, the problematic raised by Near Death Experiences is precisely that we enter into an age in which borderline experiences become even more indecipherable to us than they were in the Middle Ages. Simply because we live in an era of democratic opinion in which anyone who has a NDE is going to be able to draw from it a certain number of conclusions that are specific to himself, but no homogenous thought body is created in relation to it. We must therefore be very prudent because these borderline experiments, whether they be NDEs, or experiments under the influence of certain drugs, are strangely enough becoming the cement of a new post modern ideology that risks eradicating all of the real danger in that line of thought - a danger which is for me something positive if that makes any sense, that is to say a real questioning of the values on which not only our societies, but individuals are formed, for example the notion of the subject, etc. Which means that when I hear people telling their NDE - I cannot judge in their place since I have never been through one - I always get the impression that they try to explain these experiences with concepts that are absolutely unsuitable, and therefore we quickly find ourselves in a murky limbo, where one can easily get stuck in the mire. JDS : What you’re saying is very interesting, but I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this with other people who had the same experience, because, of course, after going through something like that, you begin to wonder if you’re always the same, and you notice that all of these people have something in common. We all experienced it in a different way, due to different phenomena, but we all have one thing in common, and therefore there is a language. Surely we are only at the confused beginnings of translating that language. But when it happened to me, I had already experienced what they call a soul quest - which has many names - and I come from a family that keeps religious rites and traditions. I come from a lineage that dates to 170 years before Jesus Christ, and we were raised to follow religious rites and I had been taken to experiments in latent death provocation. The attitudes provoked by those kinds of experiences influence your behavior. And when I had my NDE, there were common threads between that and what you can discover through religious rites in which latent death is provoked, and yet it’s not at all the same thing. PE : We should also mention that you are a Tibetan monk and a martial arts master. JDS : We call them monks because they aspire to become balanced, to create equilibrium, whether it be physical or otherwise. People often think of the monk as seated in mokutso, in meditation. No, the monk is actually someone who is perpetually searching, an explorer. We are considered to be warrior monks. The battles have changed. They have become as intellectual as they are physical, and their objective is to create a system such that when a weapon comes out - it could be a saber - but an individual can be a weapon just as sharp as a knife, and none of these arms become potent at just any time. That’s what it is to be a master, he who, at the decisive moment, tries to be as beneficial as possible. RP : I would like to add something about that kind of thought in which "man" would be dematerialized in a future of an electronic type, or a pure molecular state. In Maurice’s book, it’s as if there were two dimensions, and I liked that a lot. You had a police commissioner, a serial killer with devices, etc, and you had another story that takes place not after, but at the same time, you can read it like that, there is a sort of simultaneous co-existence, a real simultaneousness of events where men, or human beings, or subjects don’t exist anymore except as electronic entities. Subjects don’t exist anymore, there are only antennae, transmitter-receivers, oscillators of electrons, and you receive or don’t receive what’s happening, while at the same time people touch each other and speak to each other and move about on a geographical sphere, history is eliminated because everyone knows it doesn’t exist. So we have this kind of geographical stage on which the elements, things, and beings move, and at the same time and it is that simultaneity that counts, whether or not something is incarnated or disincarnated is not really important. But it would be of the order of an immanent transcendence. And I mean that without playing language games, in the sense in which Husserl made reference to it, something that is behind, that wouldn’t even be of a virtual order in coalescence with the actual processes, but would be of the order of the immediately behind and at the same time fulfilling itself in a process of +1 each time, amplifying reality. What is interesting in the idea of a non-body is not the idea of disappearance, any more than those erotic stories to which we are all so attached, whether it be via drugs or amorous experiences, but that is if we consider, for example, a brain that doesn’t get old because there is no longer a body in the voyage in space. That’s an example - even if it’s completely hare-brained - that becomes possible for an objective unity because there is no more temporality, there is no more aging, it’s therefore what we were calling earlier a brain without a body. I’ll be quick to point out that there is a lot being inferred here, and it’s true that a theory like that could become a fascist theory, via eugenics, via selections so much advocated on all sides. We are really on a line of rupture, of fracture, on the one side we fall into something very fascist and on the other we fall into the idealism boat, into some bullshit crypto-religion. Maurice gives us an idea which, because I’m very much a materialist, I find fascinating. For example, when I read the terms "Christ entity" in Maurice’s ink, I have more or less the impression that I’m dealing with energy, an electronic densification - or perhaps not electronic - but a densification of all of the magnetic fields. It is also ontological, I would say necessarily ontological. So what is important is, instead of having two novels that succeed each other, you have the impression - and it’s the first time this has been narrated - of a reserved space of synchronic simultaneity, perhaps what Jung had in mind under the term of synchronism, what Nietzsche called our simultaneous interior, which means that everything that each person tries to put out in space is played out at the same time. And as soon as we put that out in space, we call on politics. From Aristotle to the post-neo-meta-conservative Americans, or whatever you like, and we are in a different and very interesting operational field. But it’s about admitting that we don’t have the concepts yet, we don’t yet have the models but we just have an idea that something is possible and remains to be worked out. PE : Is there a finality or is it in construction ? RP : I think it’s a process of process, it’s a realization, it’s a future of process, it’s something that is constant variation, it’s a process of continuous variation, since you can find that concept in Deleuze’s theories. What I found interesting about your ideas is that you have an almost sacred relationship with the body. That’s what I meant by being athletic, because you push the body to extremes. We could ask you what is the relationship between the physical body as we know it and this ascent towards the extreme states in which it may one day exist. JDS : I’d like to come back on this idea of primary material. We really only try to understand the capacities of our bodies in order to better control them, to make the body capable of going further in its own research, and we put the body in situations in which you need to make a return to in the body. You put the body in a situation of "checkmate," and this putting the body in check creates a stimulus that makes us consider the reason for this lack of reaction and allows us to understand why it does not want to make that effort it was asked to do. Our body has the capacity to evolve if it is given the means. MGD : I absolutely agree with that, but it seems to me that there is a problem on the horizon. We’re talking a lot about evolution, as if, excepting a few incidents, there was a more or less linear progress since the moment that man liberated his hand and created objects and created the world. There would therefore be a sort of almost natural assumption towards better things. It’s a vision that’s not really that old in fact because it is correlative to the appearance of the industrial revolution, and the problem that I see on the horizon of the ex-human, as Richard called it, is this : Isn’t humanity on the way of devolution ? In effect, all technology, and I would say, the reign of technology in which we live today, from one end of the hemisphere to the other, is it not programming the disappearance of mankind on the very ground of its own alienation ? In the same way that capitalism is visibly making wage-earners disappear on the very ground of employee alienation. All of that seems very problematic to me because of the mutations you were talking about, which in fact already, it seems to me, go in the sense of servitude to the social matrix, for example the connection of the nervous system to electronic devices, which are things Richard and I have been working on, musically and conceptually, for a while now. That’s possible as well, and we can’t wash our hands of it, it’s also a way of integrating the network to the interior of our bodies, that is to say the bodies will be traceable, will return once again to that state of human materials. They will be traceable genetically, traceable by GPS, etc. It is possible that between the truth and a lie, or between catastrophe and a way out there is a space as thin as a leaf of cigarette paper for rolling joints, for example. It was Christ, in fact, Jesus who had a line like that in the new testament, I don’t remember the exact text but He explains that between himself and the Antichrist it’s like a leaf of paper. Ok, so between our future as slaves to the social matrix through technological devices, which are going to render our bodies obsolete, and the eventuality of an antenna future, of a cosmogony future of man... Well, there you have it. It was Heidegger who spoke of that zone of being where the biggest danger resides, and I believe we are there in full. It’s exactly that, it’s the world that is opened up, and at the same time it’s also like Hölderlin said, I believe, the world of the highest grace, the moment where man is just on the edge of the precipice. It’s also the moment when his conscience, his thought will become an action, that is to say not homo faber, that is going to fabricate objects, but the moment where thought becomes a praxis as such. And perhaps that’s the moment where - I quote Heidegger one last time - only a god, as he used to say in his post-war conferences, is going to be able to save us... RP : A Dickian god... There are numerous pit-falls in the heidiggarian matrix, god comes after the world of the titans, therefore like horizon, like the advent of the event or the event of the advent. We can reverse history, so we stop the historic future and therefore fall back on a world where the gods make sense again and in that case, Heideigger was referring to the Greek gods, and we can more or less see where that’s rapidly going to lead, and we must not commit that error if it’s only to reinvent the wheel... Although behind the term God in the sense that Maurice used it there is, I think, the Christ future, it’s a large matrix of energy that remains to be defined, and in which events may take place. We are still in that production of events or in that demand for a production of events and it’s certain that we are on a razor’s edge. Of course I wouldn’t use the same terms, ever when I take up the metatronic hypothesis again, that is to say the angel on the opposite end, it’s uniquely in its function as a global electronic device of distribution and reception of energies, oscillations of energies in an antenna future. There’s a whole theory you try to put in place, it’s not about saying that the angels are there to pull the chariot of god, the Merkaba, and we’ll end up citing 631 Names. But you have to realize that at each step the dangers are extraordinarily intense, acute, sharp, and that anyway, in this problematic we are on a razor’s edge at each turn, and if we are not on this razor’s edge, we will not advance, we will only repeat what is out there already. Therefore we do want to repeat, but repeat with a difference, and that’s the final word.
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