On Time, Being, and Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life

Eight

64 Eight The possibility of asking about the meaning of being implied that “being” is no longer self-evident, or that the obscurity of the term’s meaning can no longer go unnoticed. The effort deployed around the “question of being” led necessarily to resaying, rewriting, retranslating, reinterpreting, substituting, or even crossing out the names of the “being,” beyond all the given concepts and meanings of it. If there is a legacy inherited through the “question of being,” it is no other than the one that radicalizes such a process of destruction or deconstruction of the names of being, until reaching its maximum, that is, until the full “voiding of being” or the ontological kenosis to which, according to Gérard Granel, “even Heidegger did not allow himself to be carried.”1 To ask about being is first of all to respond to the fact that being is nothing—neither a concept, nor an essence, nor a nature, nor a cause, nor a principle, nor, in sum, any “being” whatsoever. But if being is nothing, and has no name, the only thing that remains to think or to affirm as being is this nothingness itself, that is, the difference between being and beings— Chapter Eight 65 difference that, qua “ontological,” is only a derivative determination of a more originary différance, a word that Derrida invented to designate, as it were, the unnamable nothingness of being. The unnamable nothingness of being, to which philosophical thinking seems to have been led after Heidegger, makes what we may call the inaccessibility , the animality of being: the need, the want, the hunger for putting being into question, restlessly, until the point at which being is exceeded and voided by the very demand of the questioning that concerns it. No wonder that Derrida’s work on “animality,” along with the whole deconstruction of the “metaphysics of presence”—that is, of the life of consciousness (the “living present”) and of the “proper” or “appropriation” of being—that precedes it,2 was a possible task for philosophical work after Heidegger. The disclosure of animality—that is, both the closure of being as life in the sense of self-appropriation and production, and the disclosure of life as the excessive movement that takes being beyond itself and its names—has been handed down by the very question of being and its kenosis. The historical movement followed by the philosophical tradition parallels another kenosis, a biological one that occurs in life sciences and concerns the concept of “life.” On one hand, thermodynamics’ view of self-organization, as we saw earlier (Chapters 2 and 3), made it possible to incorporate both temporal immanency and teleological structure—old strongholds of vitalism —to descriptions of physical phenomena. The developments in the theory and practice of biomolecular analyses, on the other hand, have made possible a description of cellular processes in which “life” plays absolutely no role as object of inquiry. In fact, since the appearance of thermodynamics, the operational value of the concept of life has continually dwindled and its power of abstraction declined. Biologists no longer study life today in laboratories.3 What “happens” in the laboratory probably has nothing to do with the “pure coming” that characterizes life or being as such. I am not saying this on account of the fact that laboratory events are meant to be produced by knowledge and thus foreseen by the technological representation that looks for the reproduction of biological processes (see Chapter 1). Technical conditions would not destroy by themselves, that is, by their ability to reproduce the identity of the processes, the so-called wonderfulness of the production 66 On Time, Being, and Hunger of life; the development of an embryo, for instance, will be “extraordinary” whether it results from in vitro conception or not (see the end of Chapter 4). A “living process,” wherever and however it is thought to occur, is by definition something self-produced, exceeding any natural or biotechnical condition for its emergence. Where in laboratory work could such a thing as a “living process” be encountered? With which conceptual tools would it be possible to name and quantify it? And if such a process were to happen, what would it have to do with experimental research? All possible regulative unity of the concept of “life” now seems to have exploded along with the unprecedented proliferation of discourses and techniques concerning living beings...