Frédéric Neyrat, author of Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism, will be speaking at Clemson on Wednesday evening at 5 PM in the Class of 41 Studio in Daniel Hall. Atopias has just been published in English by Fordham university Press in Lit Z, a series co-edited by Clemson English colleague Brian McGrath, and translated into English by Clemson English colleagues Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner. I’ve read only the first chapter, titled “Critique of Pure madness,’ but found it a dizzying poetical tour of critical and cultural theory from the late 60s, at least, to the present. The language triggered all sorts of associations to other theoretical and philosophical texts and authors including Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Jean Paul Sartre and many others.
Neyrat’s objective, if that’s the right word, is to argue against Object-Oriented Ontology which, he contends, unnecessarily flattens the world. This so-called “speculative realism” tries to imagine life from the perspective of the object rather than from the subject, the (human) subject, that is. Neyrat quotes a description of OOO: “nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally – plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and Sandstone” (6). Against this flattening, Neyrat turns to an idea of ek-sistence, which can be found in Heidegger, but also appears in Lacan, and argues “each existence obliged to be eccentric in order to be” (8). It is not that we must stand out (ek-sist) in order to exist; we simply do, and we need an ontology which sees that. To get there, we need “a positive and creative trans-valuation of values.’ We need, that is, to value valuing.
Neyrat asks “how has ontology gotten to this point? . . . How has eminence … come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences? ” (6). And it seems to me that Neyrat’s answer is that we have forgotten that “hybridization and identity are in no way incompatible” (5). Hybridity had been a popular way of thinking about relationships between others – and Derrida used to say that we are all others. Hybridity can be seen in Homi Bhabha’s important work from the 1990s, and across much of Jacques Derrida’s later work. But hybridity fell out of fashion for reasons I’m not sure I fully understand. Apparently, “conservatives” do not want to see the Other in themselves and would thus now be opposed to hybridity, whereas progressives want to preserve cultural differences and thus would not want to see themselves in the Other. The idea that one’s culture is a hydrid, and that other’s cultures are also hybrids seems at least temporarily to have been ruled out.
The fact that Neyrat is reviving and indeed–as early as page 5–insisting on hybridity and identity makes this work an important intervention in current discussions.
Sotto voce, or just below the surface of Atopias, Neyrat is engaged in a complicated discussion with Bruno Latour, distancing himself on the one hand from Latour while on the other retaining from Latour an idea of hybridity. For Latour, in we have never been modern (translated into English in 1993), the modern constitution accepts hybridity, although Latour then distinguishes between anti moderns who reject modernity and hybridity but use the tools of modernity to do so and postmoderns who don’t realize the degree to which they are accepting hybridity and thus are simply moderns. Finally, Latour posits a-moderns, who both accept hybridity and accept that they accept it. For Latour the amoderns are the only ones who might have been modern to the extent that any of us can be modern for any length of time.
This is one of the many reasons why the “a” in the title Atopias is so striking. An a-Topia is not a place and in that way refers to one of the two punning contradictory meanings of utopia – no place. Neyrat’s A is like Latour’s A. And different than More’s u-topia, whose other meaning is “this place.”
Soon, Neyrat will be at this place and he will be discussing this and other… topics, at Clemson tomorrow at 5 PM. As you can tell, I am looking forward to the discussion.