Laurent de Sutter: "We don't need democratic debates, we need a democratic invention."

A theory of reading where there is nothing to interpret but rather a proposal for experimentation as a sensitive territory for disengaging from meanings allows us to think of the book as a machine, a cog that fosters imaginative connections. The outside is the most important aspect of this endeavor that Gilles Deleuze episodically called pop philosophy. This project, which the French philosopher mentioned occasionally in his books, takes center stage in the work of Belgian author Laurent de Sutter as the impulse that allows him to generate a creation of concepts where inventiveness replaces the affirmation of knowledge .

Laurent de Sutter arrived in Buenos Aires (invited by the French Institute of the French Embassy) to give a late presentation of his books What is Pop Philosophy? (2020 – Cactus Publishing House – Translation by Sebastián Fuentes) and Deleuze and the Practice of Law (2015 – Jusbaires Publishing House – translation by Sol Gil and Ariel Dilon) at the Book Fair.

All of his works can be thought of as a way of testing that post-critical mechanism , allied with pop philosophy, which he sustains as a challenge to critical thought, which he considers trapped in the indignation and paranoia of conspiracy. For the professor of legal theory at the University of Brussels, philosophical practice becomes the cipher of an enigma, a surprising structure that cannot escape a decisive intention. If Laurent de Sutter considers law to be the future of philosophy, it is because he finds in its programmatic basis the resources to invent concrete solutions, to break away from the discourse of impossibility on which much of the left seems to have established its political identity.

This power to continue is a misdirection that displaces the formulations of thought toward an outside world and achieves a performative effect in reality. If for Deleuze the intensity he yearned for in reading was an ontology, Sutter continues this focus on the figure of the monstrous as a characterization that helps him think about this era within the codes of teratopolitics, the theme to be developed in the closing lecture of The Night of Ideas, organized by the French Institute on Saturday, May 17.

In this characterization, which stems from the Gothic genre, from horror, from the fantastical manifestations of Sutter's imagination, he finds a contradiction that serves to destabilize the way we view ourselves and others, to break down the identity divisions that imply social hierarchies and begin to verify, in a situation where masks fall away, that perhaps nothing else exists but this monstrosity. A formulation that may be appealing or debatable, but which calls for such an uncomfortable level of implication that it places us in another place, in a estranged point of view, from which to think about what we already thought we knew.

–In What is Pop Philosophy? you point out that Deleuze called for a move away from interpretation to a weak reading and writing where knowledge would no longer be confirmed. Is this a time of strong return to interpretation? I ask this not only because I think it's a very marked trend in the field of aesthetics but also because there is an attempt to interpret social reality from a perspective of indignation, scandal, or conspiracy theory, as you pointed out in your book Total Indignation (Ediciones La Cebra), which are other ways of assigning meaning.

–Deleuze's idea of ​​pop philosophy sought to open the space of knowledge to what this knowledge didn't include. The key word when talking about pop philosophy is outside. One of the problems of contemporary rationality, perhaps the most important, is that the outside is rejected, absent, denied. Indignation and conspiracy are modern forms of rationality. The idea of ​​conspiracy brings to life the fundamental idea of ​​critical thinking, which is our shared capacity to judge. And how do we judge? Based on what we already know. Pop philosophy is the other way around; it's the outside, so it's possibility, what we don't yet know. As Deleuze said, pop philosophy is the exploration of the outside at the moment when that outside can be anything, but also from that anything. That is, anything can become a surprise from this conception. Evidently, surprise ruins knowledge; it ruins our capacity and willingness to rely on what we already know. It's a negative relationship. Traditional critical thinking refers to indignation, to conspiracy, to academia, to all those things that are built on constituted knowledge. For me, there's a direct relationship between these seemingly different things; there's an equivalence because they operate with logic, where all that matters is knowledge. It's that conversation Deleuze had with Claire Parnet in Dialogues, where he begins by saying: "Debates are useless because one already comes to the debate with all one's knowledge. The debate doesn't change anything or create anything new. One comes in and out of the debate, and nothing happens." Deleuze said it's not important what one enters the debate with; what matters is what we fabricate with it to emerge from it. The rationality with which one comes armed to a discussion is that of impossibility, and pop philosophy operates from possibility.

–You just mentioned that one of the reasons you wrote Total Indignation (2020) was seeing the concern about establishing the forms of democratic debate that always ended in failure. We could say that the energy invested in thinking about ways of debating couldn't prevent the formation of the current world with the new right.

–I don't think we need democratic debates, we need democratic invention. We need the capacity to invent paths that aren't included in the current situation, to invent another advent. The contemporary crisis isn't a crisis of debate. In the critical commentary on the contemporary, we see a fascination with impossibility, with what can't be done, and this contributes to our impotence. The current state of affairs is absolutely contingent; it's the result of possibilities that were realized but aren't necessary. There are militant leftist positions, with which I agree, but they are positions obsessed with impossibility that are mobilized solely from the perspective of critique: we already know that the world is capitalist, sexist, colonial, patriarchal, and police-driven; repeating it doesn't help us. What we need now is leftist speculation, fabrication, imagination, concrete dreams. To say: we want this. It's not about rejecting this, it's about wanting this. From that perspective, it seems to me that we're in crisis. The critical position is attached to the idea of ​​impossibility

–That's where you see a power in the law, a capacity to resolve specific cases. But you yourself pointed out that the right is able to capitalize more on the law's creative capacity. Isn't it necessary to create a body of power to achieve this goal?

–Yes, naturally it's contextual, but in the case of law, the mechanism of law itself is a mechanism of imagination, a mode of creating continuities that can be used by police forces in the same way as by progressive, revolutionary forces. I know many people disagree; they tell me that law isn't neutral. I'm not saying that law is neutral; I'm saying that law is a machine with capabilities that can be appropriated in any direction, precisely the opposite of neutral. The real struggle is for the most creative appropriation of all. The problem today is that the most creative are the conservatives; that's why it's so important for the left to reconcile itself with the creative capabilities of law—not just the political struggle with law or the political struggle for rights, but the struggle with the technical means of law.

–I want to continue with this topic, but from a different perspective. In What Is Pop Philosophy?, you mention the importance Deleuze gives to style. He thought that style is something that cannot be interpreted, something that opens the imagination but escapes meaning.

–Style is interesting in Deleuze because it connects with his obsession with Spinoza, his obsession with manner, as opposed to conventional ontology, which is a position without manners, without modes. Style demands invention; there is no style without invention, an invention of oneself, in relation to the object and what can be done with the object. It's also a question of distance from things. For Deleuze, style is impersonal; it is becoming outside of oneself. I think the common point between pop philosophy, law, style, and interpretation is delirium. It's the possibility we have of delirium. Nothing I say can guarantee anything, but the right also delirium. There is a delirium of the right that is the contemporary delirium, and it is impossible to respond to this delirium with reason. To respond to this delirium, we must do so with a better delirium. One that increases the level of possibilities, rather than impossibilities.

–In relation to the topic of monsters that you are going to develop in the closing conference of The Night of Ideas, there is a whole fiction about monsters that shows them as a product of scientific rationality.

–I'm interested in monsters because, in the contemporary situation, political relations are determined by the idea that others are monsters. My hypothesis is that we are all monsters, and that monstrosity can be described as a possibility of loss. We need to lose the relationship we have with our identity, with our certainties. Seeing ourselves as monsters allows us to differentiate ourselves from what until now has seen us as great and beautiful beings from an aesthetic, moral, and political perspective. Politics as a place of greatness does more harm to the destiny of humanity than many other weapons. Creating a democracy of monsters, a monstrous democracy, is one of the most precise ways of posing the question of equality, and consequently, of what it means to live together when everyone is detestable because there are only monsters. It's a statistical truth: the people we are closest to are the ones we detest the most. We need to build relationships on the idea that, even if we detest our neighbors, we have to live with them. Even when most crimes are within the family, family is still what we love most. The paradox of monstrosity is the paradox of an impossible yet possible relationship. The question of monstrosity in politics is what kind of monster we want to be.

–At one point you say that monstrosity is often replaced by tolerance of the different. So we're in a context where that simulation has ended, and just as the right speaks of immigrants or homosexuals as monsters, many see those who govern us or vote for us as monsters. You point out that in this way we're creating an aristocracy. That's another interpretive way of seeing reality; there's also an assignment of knowledge and meanings.

–Monstrosity is always popular; the monster is always the people. Tolerance is the affirmation of difference: That's a monster, and I'm the person who tolerates it. The opposite is more important: I'm a monster, and so are you. What do we do together? I try to produce a theoretical discourse that is a monstrous delirium in itself, as a contribution to thinking about things we consider natural or obvious. The possibility of contamination with monsters is also the possibility of abandoning the aristocracy of ontology, of the obsession with being. I am, you are is a catastrophe translated into actions and discourses. Ontology shapes everything we do, everything we think. Monstrosity, becoming, metamorphosis are strategies of delirium to escape identity.

Laurent de Sutter will give the closing lecture of the Night of Ideas today at 6:30 p.m. in the Golden Hall of the Teatro Colón, entitled "Terapolitics" or How to Live Together in the Age of Widespread Hatred. Sponsored by Ñ, the Night of Ideas is organized by the Institut français d'Argentine in collaboration with the French Embassy in Argentina, the Alliances Françaises network of Argentina, the Medifé Foundation, and the Franco-Argentine Centers. It also has the support of the Institut français de Paris, the Novotel Buenos Aires, and municipalities, provinces, and institutions from the seven host cities.