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How is that possible?

Before awakening this memory in its archive, before trying to understand what happened there, both the event and its mēhkanē, let us mark a pause and change speeds. Let us put in place the premises of our question.


Will this be possible for us? Will we one day be able, and in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (we call that an event) and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition (we call that a machine)?

For that, it would be necessary in the future (but there will be no future except on this condition) to think both the event and the machine as two compatible or even indissociable concepts. Today they appear to us to be antinomic. Antinomic because what happens ought to keep, so we think, some nonprogrammable and therefore incalculable singularity. An event worthy of the name ought not, so we think, to give in or be reduced to repetition. To respond to its name, the event ought above all to happen to someone, to some living being who is thus is affected by it, consciously or unconsciously. No event without experience (and this is basically what "experience" means) , without experience, conscious or unconscious, human or not, of what happens to the living.

It is difficult, however, to conceive of a living being to whom or through whom something happens without an affection getting inscribed in a sensible, aesthetic manner right on some body or some organic matter.

Why organic? Because there is no thinking of the event, it seems, without some sensitivity, without an aesthetic affect and some presumption of living organicity.

The machine, on the contrary, is destined to repetition. It is destined, that is, to reproduce impassively, imperceptibly, without organ or organicity, received commands. In a state of anesthesia, it would obey or command a calculable program without affect or auto-affection, like an indifferent automaton. Its functioning, if not its production, would not need anyone. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive of a purely machinelike apparatus without inorganic matter.

Notice I say inorganic. Inorganic, that is, nonliving, sometimes dead but always, in principle, unfeeling and inanimate, without desire, without intention, without spontaneity. The automaticity of the inorganic machine is not the spontaneity attributed to organic life.


Jacques Derrida - Without Alibi