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  • Etho-techno-logyOf Ethics in an Intense Technological Milieu
  • François Laruelle (bio)
    Translated by Alyosha Edlebi (bio)

Ethics will have known several historical deaths. But beyond these deaths in the Enlightenment, the de-Christianization, the murder of the moral God, as beyond its fits and starts, assembling these accidents in the flux of a unique decline, there is a death-process of ethics that fuses with the effectivity of its existence. This process in which it does not cease to sink in an interminable fall, we call Ethologos, the becoming-ethological of ethics. This formula must be complicated, explicated, prolonged also by the following thesis, which adds to it almost nothing, except the supplement of which it is capable by itself: No known form of the occidental field of ethics is still capable of furnishing a rule of life, a criterion or a basis for decision, the principle of a legitimation of human existence when this existence develops in an intense technological milieu. The problem of “legitimation” begins to be posed when it is too late and there are no more criteria of legitimation. Legitimation becomes a problem when the problem of legitimation is no longer itself legitimate. To be more precise, the “etho-logical” formation in which our existence and our “values” are increasingly submerged functions—we must grasp this—at once as a hypo-legitimation, an active lack of legitimation affecting all of our behaviors, and as an over-legitimation in [End Page 157] which any behavior whatever is immediately justified and valorized by means of its overdetermination by the others.

This mechanism of Ethologos has to be elucidated in itself and in its relations to the conditions of over-technological existence that are our own. But such a mechanism gradually proves to be nothing other than the self-asphyxiation of the Decision. We lack a concept and a criterion of the Decision that would render it possible anew. Because everything becomes possible, the possible is rarefied and turns into effectivity. And the rarity of the possible is unlike that of goods: it is distressing. If ethics has to be awakened from its slumber, which makes up the life of our occidental memory, it must indeed be awakened against universal Ethologos. Doubtless, the strict conditions that prohibit this awakening from being nothing more than a new avatar of old forms of ethics, and of the Metaphysics that supported it, remain to be fixed. A legitimation of ethics through the regressive return to something like a foundation, an ontology, a theology, an onto-theo-logy, a Christian or transcendental personalism, a formal or material practical reason—all of this is undoubtedly excluded here. Not only because these games have already drawn out all their consequences and, in multiple senses of this word, are “interminable,” but because all of these possibilities are truly “dead.” Not in the sense that they have vanished from our present historical horizon (repetition compensating this type of loss is always possible), but on the contrary because they have merged with this horizon and form henceforth a part of our most immediate conditions of existence. There is no need to resurrect love, justice, reason, values, and the person. They are only too much there rather than not enough, and we need a solid ignorance of “repetition” to believe so casually that we repeat at will, when all of this already returned a long time ago and does not cease returning without even passing by philosophy anymore. Returned, and thus gone, infinitely gone as it were. If an ethics is still possible, if the possible can be re-injected into existence, it is beyond this effectivity, this carnival where love, justice, responsibility, and the person do not stop revolving and communicating to us the nausea of things, at times too drab, at others too brilliant. The effectivity of our existence, it is Ethologos that constitutes [End Page 158] it, and thinkers—overburdened with their concern for legitimating ethics—always arrive too late relative to Ethologos, which is the whole possible legitimation. The question of ethics—is it still a question, in fact, isn’t every question onto-ethical, isn’t it gathered in Ethology?—requires...

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