Quote of the day

Aaron Schuster on Deleuze's understanding of complaining:

"Complaining can be like prayer or song or dance, a hymn to what is above the person or greater than him or her: but this is nothing other than a dense combination of forces and affects that compose and decompose an individual existence. For the truly gifted complainer, it is no longer the person who complains but the complaint that complains itself in and through the person. This is the properly Spinozistic or Nietzschean complaint, as a form of self-overcoming." (Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis, p. 17-18)

Critique of bioethics and other forms of life-centered philosophy

I recently wrote this short text (mostly as a sketch for a more elaborated critique) in which I criticize still prevailing discourses on life. 

It was partly meant as a response to all those civic associations and politicians from the right political spectrum who claim that they want to defend life (mostly that of unborn children) but also as a critique of some philosophical positions, namely that of bioethics. To summarize, the problem I see with those forms of discourses on life is a) that they favourize living beings in opposition to non-living matter and b) that they think life (only) as a sort of transcendence, as something which is possessed by / belongs to individual beings. 

In my view, there are two types of philosophy on life. One is that which revolves around the concept of life but which is actually anthropocentric or which at least speaks about life from the point of view of living beings (human or other animals). The second is a philosophical tradition which really tries to think life and which is usually recognized in the history of philosophy as a philosophy of life. Two famous representatives of this tradition would be Nietzsche and Bergson and its revivalist in the second half of the 20th century would be, of course, Deleuze. What is common to these philosophers is that they try to think life as immanence and thus as something which extends beyond the life of individual beings. This text allies itself with that tradition. Without further ado, here is the text:

Life is pure immanence, pure bliss (Deleuze). No one, no politician, no human being can protect life but only succumb to it. One never protects life which has no face and cannot be protected but only an individual (wo)man which is in-Person and that is a completely different thing.

Furthermore, this is why the ethics which are centred around (preserving of) an individual life are so stupid. I know it will sound rude but it is not life - my life, your life, their lives - that is important but how one lives one's life. That is the only possible domain of ethics. Finally, the category of preserving does not pertain to life in the first place because life, for the most part, consists of the sheer opposite - wasting of energy. So what does it mean to say that (human) life does not matter? Isn't that pure nihilism. I wouldn't say that it necessarily must be nihilism. For me, it is first and foremost an attempt at realist and materialist thinking. And indeed, it is not people's lives that matter but people themselves. There's no need for this recourse to a notion of life in order to give dignity to a human. We grieve because someone is not alive anymore but we do not really grieve over his/her life but over him or her as a person.

To put it shortly, life (what Deleuze calls a life) is the ontological principle and therefore cannot be the object of value. All human values exist because of life or are dependent upon it but life itself does not have a value! There's no intrinsic value of life and so life itself can never be sufficient reason to keep living. It is the creation of (new) values or, to put it more generally, what we do with our lives, that makes life livable (bearable) in the first place. Finally, life does not contribute any surplus value to living beings as opposed to non-living things. (And what about viruses?) All that exists - living and non-living beings - is equal and equally in the Real. 

Finally, what about human-machine relationships as represented in the films such as Blade Runner and Terminator 2. If it was (biological) life that mattered, we could have no emotional relationship to a cybernetic organism. But we relate to a machine because of its human aspects. So it is not important whether one is a living organism or not but whether one is a person and what kind of person!

And the only people who care not about people themselves but about their lives are really capitalists because capitalism needs people, among other reasons, to invest their (living) energy into a system. Capitalism converses living energy into a profit. So when one Croatian minister said that he is sorry for all the lives we lost due to coronavirus pandemic because Croatia needs lives of all those people, I think he really meant it. All the lives are more than welcome if they can be exploited for economy.

To conclude, life is a concept for biology (and maybe philosophy) but not for cheap moralising. If we cannot think life immanently and as immanence, I suggest we stop using the term.