Angels and the general intellect

Abstract

"Today, anyone who wants to seize their own time with thought (rather than lose time in refined or inflated, in any case innocuous, thoughts), must pause for a long time over the relationship between that which is maximally common and that which is maximally singular. This particular speaker, whose statements have provoked either our approval or irritation during a political assembly, differs from all those who have taken the floor before or after him. But he differs from the other speakers in constituting a singular entity precisely and solely because he shares a ‘common nature’ with them – the faculty of language. The capacity for articulating signifying sounds – biological prerequisite of the species Homo sapiens – cannot manifest itself other than by being individuated in a plurality of speakers; inversely, such a plurality of speakers would be inconceivable without the preliminary participation of each and every one of them in that preindividual reality which is, precisely, the capacity for articulating signifying sounds. Should the linguistic example be repulsive to the Bergsonian palate of a large portion of post-structuralist philosophy because it is too ‘naturalistic’, we could also consider, as an alternative, the condition of migrants or the supple inventiveness mass intellectual labour requires. In both cases, what is at issue (mobility and the force of invention) is a historically determined preindividual reality, which nonetheless gives rise to an extraordinary process of diversification of experience and practice. And vice-versa: individuated in all their haecceity, this migrant and that intellectual labourer nonetheless ceaselessly attest to the existence of an undifferentiated ground. Far from cancelling each other out, the Common and the Singular refer back to one another in a kind of vicious circle.