Desire and Knowledge: The Dead Seize the Living.

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Desire and Knowledge: The Dead Seize the Living.

Desire and Knowledge: The Dead Seize the Living.
Elements of an organalogy of the libido.
By Bernard Stiegler.
Translated by George Collins and Daniel Ross.
The dead seize the living.
Marx.
If there is a question that the philosophy of Marx did not address, although he acknowledged its crucial
importance, it would have to be the question of the dead and the living.
This dead-end (impasse) of Marxist materialism goes down whole in that brand of popular materialism
into which the questions dealing with so-called cognition so often issue. As the neuro-sciences made
inroads, cognitivism, on top over the past twenty years, has made the understanding of the brain,
especially via the work of Daniel Dennett, the heart of the question of knowledge. This theoretical
paradigm is based on a series of suppositions that conceive of cognition as, essentially, a process of
calculation as computation, with the computer as model.
For 15 years now I have taken pains to show that given the fact that the computer has not been
analysed or even seen as a technical prosthesis by cognitivist theory, which, in a diametrically opposed
view, refers to Turing in order to define it metaphysically as an abstract machine, what has in fact
been neglected and repressed by cognitivism, as well as by philosophy as a whole, going back to Platos
first gesture of thought, is the place of technics in general in life, technics as the condition of life that
knows.
The mathematical theory of the abstract machine is a mathematical idealisation that excludes any
genetic explanation of knowledge and above all, that excludes the possibility of thinking the machine:
there are only concrete machines, that is to say, finite ones.
The brain is not an abstract machine, on the one hand because abstract machines do not exist, and
on the other, because this organ is in no respect a machine: a machine is not a living organism, and
therein lies its force. The brain is a living memorythat is to say a fallible memory, in a permanent
process of destruction, constantly under the sway of what I call retentional finitude. This biological
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living memory is, however, only one memory among others: particularly alive, it is nevertheless
nothing outside its inert memoriesi.e., its technical memories: the essential point being the relation
between what is living in the brain and what is dead in its technics qua memories.
The aim of my talk this afternoon is to focus on this relation between the living and the dead as
constitutive of libido as well. This will be one entry into the question of a general organology as a global
theory of living and artificial organs as well as of organisations. Within such a global theory, the
question of knowledge, from its inception and considered genealogically, will then go down, in
Nietzschean style, as a question of desire.
*
A major philosophical text of Plato, if there is one, must then certainly be The Symposium. Unlike
almost all of the other platonic dialogues, this one establishes the question of knowledge as a question
of passion. But here I will follow Aristotles Peri psukhs: the knowing soul is named noetic, and noesis
is a modality of the relation to the prime mover, a relation constitutive of the passion of an emotion
imparting motion, the cognitive motion moving the unmovable theos.
This thinking of knowledge as movement and emotion requires in turn a general organology, wherein
sense organs, as thought by Aristotle, call for a logical and not only aisthtic organisation, which itself
depends on symbolic organs that are also artefacts. This last point is obviously not to be found in
Aristotle.
My concept of general organology would be rather the equivalent of Simondons mechanology, but in
which the living is itself included in the totality of transductive relations. I call transductive relation a
relation in which the terms are constituted by the relation. These relations connect the various types of
artificial and living organs (including the brain) to social organisations in which they evolve and
transform themselves, such transformations constituting processes of psychic and collective
individuation in three branches: the psychic individuation, the social individuation, and the technical
system as an artificial individuation itself composed of a group of artificial individuals. The study of
these transformations is what I call a genealogy of the experience of the sensible. Knowledge is, strictly
speaking, the experience of the sensible, which does not involve the animal world: the latter, in my
terminology, does not have experience, for experience is what can be transmitted as the experience of
the singularity of the sensible, that is to say, to the extent that experience is always itself singular and
unexpected.
There is, therefore, a process of a triple psychic, collective, and techno-logical individuation, a recap of
which can be found in my On Symbolic Misery: Vol. One: The Hyperindustrial Epoch.

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1. The I, as a psychic individual, can only be thought in relationship to a we, which is a collective
individual: the I is constituted in adopting a collective tradition, which it inherits, and in which a
plurality of Is acknowledge each others existence.
2. This inheritance is an adoption in that I can very well, as the grand-son of a German immigrant,
recognise myself in a past that was not the past of my ancestors, but that I can make my own;
this process of adoption is thus, structurally factical.
3. An I is essentially a process, and not a state, and this process is an in-dividuation (it is a process
of psychic individuation) as the tendency to become-one, that is, to become indivisible.
4. This tendency never accomplishes itself because it runs into a counter-tendency with which it
forms a meta-stable equilibrium (it must be pointed out how close this conception of the
dynamic of individuation is to the Freudian theory of drives, but also to the thinking of
Empedocles and of Nietzsche).
5. A we is also such a process (the process of collective individuation); the individuation of the I is
always inscribed in that of the we, whereas conversely, the individuation of the we takes place
only through those individuations, polemical in nature, of the Is making it up.
6. That which links the individuations of the I and the we is a pre-individual milieu possessing
positive conditions of effectiveness, belonging to what I have called retentional apparatuses.
These retentional apparatuses arise from a technical milieu which is the condition of the
encounter of the I and the we: the individuation of the I and the we is in this respect also the
individuation of the technical system.
7. The technical system is an apparatus which has a specific role (wherein all objects are inserted: a
technical object exists only in so far as it is disposed (agenc) within such an apparatus with
other technical objects: this is what Simondon calls the technical group): the rifle and more
generally the technical becoming with which it is a system are thus the possibility of the
emergence of a disciplinary society according to Foucault.
8. The technical system is also that which founds the possibility of the constitution of retentional
apparatuses, springing from the processes of grammatisation growing out of the process of
individuation of the technical system, and these retentional apparatuses are the basis for the
dispositions between the individuation of the I and the individuation of the we in a single
process of psychic, collective and technical individuation (where grammatisation is a subset of
technics)[1] composed of three branches, each branching out into processual groups.
Several points must be added to this list:
this process of triple individuation is itself inscribed in a vital individuation which must be
apprehended by a general organology as the vital individuation of natural organs, the technological individuation of artificial organs, and the psycho-social individuation of organisations
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linking them together;

in the process of individuation constitutive of general organology wherein knowledge as such
emerges, there are individuations of mnemo-technological sub-systems which over-determine,
qua specific organisations of what I call tertiary retentions (I will specify the meaning of this
term below), the organisation, the transmission and the elaboration of knowledge stemming
from the experience of the sensible.
*
Techno-logical individuation strictu-sensu implements what Leroi-Gourhan called technical
tendencies, in which the technical fact is the expression of a tendency (which the fact represents with
more or less accuracy) and which is the result of two evolutive logics: that of the laws of universal
physics, and that of the laws of human physiology. This result is not just an addition or conjoining of
bio-physical forces: it is a transductive relationship, transforming and in the same stroke constituting
the terms it places in relation to one another through the entity which is the ontogenetic product, the
technical object: the latter is an interface between the inorganic domain treated by physics, and the
organic domain studied in biology; and, in being both inorganic and organised, it is the site, in its
morpho-genesis, of the original process of individuation, whose laws of evolution technology (meaning
here the object of a science of techniques) aims to establish.
Now, this evolution transforms the human milieu and is in fact that evolutions driving force. This does
not mean that technical becoming determines this evolution, but only that it individuates itself in strict
co-individuation with the psycho-social and vital structures themselves issuing from individuation. The
concept of the technical system, invented by Bertrand Gille, opens up a thinking of this becoming qua
co-individuation. This concept sets up laws of evolution at the level of technical systems (equivalent to
Simondons technical groups) within which loops of retroaction can be schematised, as well as
diachronic and synchronic processes described, as in Saussurean linguistics, but above all, within
which interfaces between the technical system and the other systems making up the total social fact
can be conceived. General organology would then be the account of these diverse dynamics as
constitutive of the process of global individuation, wherein, as for all dynamics, conflicts are played
out, conflics that general organology as praxis and not only as theoretical model, can tend to solve or to
potentialise, especially at moments when the technical systems and the other systems constitutive of
the social fact, due mainly to the speeding out of control of technical individuation, encounter the
movement out to their own limits, following the description of this expression by Ren Passet in
LEconomique et le Vivant (The Economic and the Living)[2]:in a movement to a systems outer
limits, every system undergoes a modification of its mode of functioning:
the limit of a saturation of needs
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the limit of the reproducibility of a natural resource

the limit of rhythms of self-disposal.
The defining axioms of the system itself must then be modified. This constitutes what I will call a
revolutionmeaning here what points to and overcomes that which has run its course.
*
The brain, here, is an organ used to make decisions, an organ which, from the standpoint of this
general organology, with regard to which such decisions can in fact be made, can only be understood as
suchwhich is to say that decisions can be made with this organ only in transductive relation to other
organs.
This organ nevertheless plays an especial role of regulation, and not only of decision: it is at one and
the same time the seat of processes of regulation of the liver, for example, and the seat from which
phenomena proper to consciousness as instigator of rules are constituted; and it is of course the seat of
memory and of the unconscious, whence the experience of the sensible and of the singular constitutes
itself and, through that experience, desire in turn. Can the brain be the seat of all that all by itself?
Certainly not: insofar as the brain is the seat of the unconscious, that is, of desire, it is in a relation to
other organs and to partial zones of the body in general through the mediation of technical objects
outside the body. Furthermore, this relation to technical objects depends on, or rather is inscribed in, a
relationship to social organisations, constituted by the other systems, and in which the rules of a
superego inscribe themselves such that the brain has no other choice than to interiorise them without
playing a part in their constitution.
The brain is, then, a particular organ in a circuit, which implies the liver for example, a circuit whereby
interactions are produced, pleasure and a jouissance of the bodya circuit of desire, therefore, which
is itself action, that is, a libidinal economy of affective relationships and instrumental practices under a
horizon of technical artefacts and traces, works, etc., which constitute a social horizon of organisations
that concretise social organisms themselves individuating a law.
*
Such a project is comprehensible only from out of an organology of memory as the history of what I
have called epiphylogenesis. Briefly recapped, this concept highlights the fact that with the human
living being, that is to say, the technical living being, evolution qua negentropic differentiation is no
longer played out between only germinal and somatic memories, but is quite literally overturned by the
appearance of a third memory, an artificial and objectal one, constituted by the film of technical
objects, and through which, and only through which, as Leroi-Gourhan puts it, the interior milieu of
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the social-technical cell that makes up the human group is able to enter into relations with its
exterior milieuand here the reference is to Claude Bernard. I recall this point by way of insisting on
the fact that the emergence of this non-living memory is also that which opens onto the Freudian
question of the emergence of desire as a defunctionalisation of natural organs, or organic repression
linked to the conquest of the upright position. As we shall see, the question thus posed is that of the
relations between inside and outsidethis question remains more than troublesome for Freud
throughout his career, because he could not access the concept of epiphylogenesis or the question of
what I will later call the group of tertiary retentions.
Andr Bourguignon and Cyrille Koupernik state that Freuds initial project was to found a neurological
theory of desire which would issue in a neuro-organology qua anatomy. As these authors state, after
Freud gives up on his Project for a Scientific Psychology, he had to give up the aim of localising
psychic instances from either the first or second systems, in anatomical sites. I hold that this
abandonment results from Freuds failure to think the prosthesis and the form of memory it makes
possible.
Contemporary reflection in the neurosciences on the central nervous system, of which the brain is the
organ, can only sustain itself by adopting the hypothesis of the historicisation of this organ. Freud well
understood the necessity of this, but he failed to produce the theory: I will attempt in a moment the
isolate the cause of this failure.
Let us begin with what Freud understood, and which is revolutionary although still overlooked. Freud
understood, in particular with respect to the organ of olfaction (in his letters to Fliess as well as in
Civilisation and its Discontents) that the physiological organology of the human body unceasingly
transforms itself throughout the genealogy of what he calls libidinal economy, and whose starting-off
point is clearly, for Freud, the conquest of the upright position. The human brain, as well as the human
hand, the human foot, the human noseevery human organis constantly in a meta-state of
functional re-definition. The organ is inscribed in a system which is first and foremost the
organological system of the human body. But this organological system exists only within a systemic
relationship with another organological level which is that of human prostheses, human artefacts:
tools, instruments, techniques of all kinds, all of which become functional only within social functions
whose dimensions are those of family, geographical system, system of law, etc., functions which are
unified within social organisations: there are, thus, three organological levels. Freud could not have
seen this.
The defunctionalisation of the human body and its functional redefinition, which is constantly taking
place, is originarily related to the other two organological levels. In other words, the former does not
pilot the latter. The defunctionalisation of the human body, which then is always also its rehttp://arsindustrialis.org/desire-and-knowledge-dead-seize-living

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functionalisation, must however be thought from out of the Freudian theory of the libido.
There is then a process of co-evolution of the brain, through the opening up of the cortical fan, that is
to say, as the definition of cortical zones of the human neurological organ on the one hand, and, on the
other, technical objects, and in particular, flint tools. This co-evolution is not piloted by biological
evolution that would overdetermine or condition technical evolution: it is a co-determination, a
reciprocal determination wherein technics nevertheless progressively gains the upper hand in the
selection processes constitutive of the struggle for life, and which therefore overdetermine the
evolution of the brain. In other words, the conditions of the brains evolution are more and more
intricately correlated to the conditions of evolution of flint tools, which are themselves artificial organs,
up to the point when, cortical evolution finally stabilised, the co-evolution between the technical
system and the other social systems is modified. This is the moment of emergence of the socio-ethnic
group and, along with it, the typical idiomatisation of psychic and collective individuation, which must
be intricately correlated with the explosion of the organological evolution of artefactual technical
prostheses. Is this the moment of emergence of the horde? However we answer that question, it is,
according to Leroi-Gourhan, the moment of emergence of funereal and esthetic practices. From this
moment on, a process of functionalisation of the brain is set in place, which is no longer piloted by the
characteristics of the brain itself, and this is the moment when the brain terminates its opening up of
the cortical fan and therefore stabilises itself, through the articulation of the brain qua living memory
with technical prostheses qua dead memories, which from the Neolithic age onward will become
mnemotechnical and calculating prostheses in the strict sense of the term. Thus an exteriorisation
occurs, a defunctionalisation of the brain itself, similar to the defunctionalisation of the nose, the hand,
and the foot. It is, of course, also a refunctionalisation.
In the process of hominisation, the hand is no longer a motor-function, but becomes a fabricator. As
for the foot, it has a motor-function, of course, but now from the upright position, and above all, it now
begins to dance. If Leroi-Gourhan can say that everything begins through the feet, Nietzsche adds that
one must think with the feet. Many things would have to be addressed here. Suffice it to say that there
is a defunctionalisation and a refunctionalisation of the brain that is inscribed in the becoming of
technics, and which must be thought in relation to the becoming of social organisation: there is also a
defunctionalisation and a refunctionalisation of the social. This is evident, for example, when you study
the structure of the family and its evolution. This could be developed in a thousand other respects.
Especially for language and beyond language, to all the supports of symbolic exchange. Finally, the
historical and political becoming of the human IS this permanent social refunctionalisation, and
nothing therein is understandable, in the final analysis, without being conceived as a genealogical
apparatus of a libidinal economy. Technics and its translations in social structures constitute memory
supports which are not found in the brain and without which the brain is nothing at all. Insofar as the
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social concretises this transductive relation between the dead and the living, it makes possible, through
the constitution of collective secondary retentions, the acquisition of new knowledge which broadens
in sweep through cortical connections that take place as interiorisations of these collective secondary
retentions: there are neurological translations of these transformations, these enlargenings, these
refunctionalisations, in the shape of connections which can very well be analysed from a
neurobiological point of view. These operations of the brain are but the consequences, the traces of
what is produced in essential and originary relation with the second organological leveltechnics
itself a system of traces, and the third organological levelthe socialwhich selects among these traces
that which is to be interiorised by bodies in the social body (le faire-corps), through what I call
retentional apparatuses, and which constitute psychic and collective individuation in the strict sense of
the term.
*
In 1905, several years after the publication of Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams, Husserl develops
his concept of the temporal object in order to understand the temporality of consciousness, this system
perception/consciousnessor system PCof which Beyond the Pleasure Principle will say that it must
be studied from the perspective of an unconscious itself atemporal in nature.
This conference represents the development of a conference I gave at the ICA in 1997, when I
attempted to show that the Husserlian concept of primary retention could have redeemed Kants
analysis of the three syntheses of the transcendental imagination, and therefore of the schematism. I
would like to show this time that Freud encounters the very same problem. In order to do so, I must
recall, briefly, the characteristics of the Husserlian temporal object.
A temporal objectmelody, film, radio broadcast, speechis constituted by the time of its flowing off,
which Husserl names a flux. It appears only to disappear: an object passing away. Consciousness as
well is temporal in this sense. A temporal object is constituted by the fact that, as the consciousnesses
of which it is the shared object, it flows away and disappears after having appeared.
An I is a consciousness consisting of a temporal flux of what Husserl calls primary retentions: a
primary retention is what a consciousness retains in the now of the flux in which it consists. It is, for
example, the note resonating in the present note and the point of passage of a melody, where the
preceding note is not absent but present, because it is maintained in and by this maintaining
moment that in French is the now. The passing note constitutes the following note by entering into a
relationship with it, the interval. Another example: the word I have just pronounced primarily retains
the preceding sentence so as to constitute the unity of my talk, etc. As phenomena that I receive as well
as phenomena that I produce (a melody that I play or hear, a sentence that I pronounce or hear, a

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sequence of gestures or actions that I accomplish or undergo, etc.), my conscious life essentially
consists in such retentions. Now, these retentions are selections: I cannot retain everything that could
be retained[3]: in the flux of that which appears, consciousness makes selections which are actual
retentionsshould I listen twice to the same melody, my consciousness of the melody changes. These
selections are made through filters that constitute the consistence of secondary retentions, that is to
say, the memories of former primary retentions, conserved in memory and constitutive of experience.
The life of consciousness consists in such dispositions of primary retentions, filtered by secondary
retentions, while the relations between primary and secondary retentions are over-determined by
tertiary retentions. By tertiary retentions I mean objects as supports of memory and mnemotechniques, which enable traces to be spatially, materially and technically recorded.
Tertiary retentions are that which, like an alphabet, enables access to the preindividual stock of all
psychic and collective individuation. They (the tertiary retentions) exist in all human societies: the
aborigines churinga and mythograms in general are examples of tertiary retention, as are books and
the web, which all condition individuation as symbolic sharing and distinction, made possible by the
exteriorisation of individual experience in traces and as transmission.
This brief recap of Husserls theory indicates what has become the center of my work, because I believe
that it was in his failure to understand the stakes of the discovery of primary retention that Freud got
muddled, in his second system, in an inadequate comprehension of the relations holding between what
he calls interior and exterior. Also, Freud cannot think the role of the technical prosthesis in the
constitution of desire and the unconscious, and as the Wirklichkeit of libidinal economy, as that which
may lead to this discontent at the heart of culture, that is to say, in epiphylogenesis, a motif that so
worried him, and rightly, at the end of his life.
*
Primary retentions can modify the organisation of secondary retentions on the rebound from the
primary selections in which they consist, and which take place following the criteria of alreadyconstituted secondary retentions. A primary retention of course will eventually become a secondary
retention. And in becoming one, it can either insert itself in the system of already existing secondary
retentionsand in this case the former reinforces the latter, or it can upset the disposition of the latter:
in this case a potential of individuation is unleashed in the existing secondary retentions but which has
hitherto been repressed; in this case we are dealing with what I will call traumatypical secondary
reflections. This corresponds, by the way, to Freuds description, in Studies on Hysteria, of traces
concentrically set out around the pathogenic kernel.
Secondary retentions can therefore be modified on the rebound by being themselves selected during

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conscious perception in two manners:

1. Either as a re-inforcement of pre-existing expectations, virtually contained in the secondary
retentions, and as protentions, the reinforcement consolidating the stereotyping of these
expectations which become less and less liable to be surprised by the proto-expectations and
arch-expectations of which they are, however, an echo. The latter being, then, what the standard
expectations mask: they are then screen expectations, lure expectationsin short censoring
screens, masking the relation to the drives embedded in the ego in traumatypical retentional
forms.
2. Or, precisely, by the integration on the rebound of the expression of the traumatypes through the
primary selection taking place as primary retention, which leads to a upheaval of the
organisation of the entire system of secondary retentions. These traumatypes are the positive
echoes of the drive apparatuses and, as such, they cannot be incorporated by the PC system nor
even by what Freud sometimes calls the pre-conscious. They can only be integrated providing
they are trans-formed. This transformation is produced by a primary retention/selection, when it
produces a significance, that is to say, the sur-prise of something unexpected affecting
consciousness in such a way as to have it individuate itself, breaching a gap that Simondon calls a
quantic leap. But this unexpected something was in fact expected: it was, but it was repressed.
The freeing of the unexpected is therefore the freeing of a repressed expectation.
In the first case (repression and reinforcement), there is an accentuation of the power of
synchronisation of consciousness, and in the second case, there is on the contrary diachronisation, that
is to say, the experience of the schize. Here is where Deleuze and Guattari would have entered in
opposition to Freud. But failing a thinking of retention, I do not consider that they succeeded in
offering a convincing critique.
Within memory, the traumatypes are outlined, encircled, con-cerns (as we can say in Frenchlets say
implicated in English), and thereby contained by the stereotypical secondary retentions. There is a
contention in retention, a content in what is retained, of which the traumatypical kernel is literally
detained: placed in secrecy or solitary confinement. The stereotypical secondary retentions thus form a
first kind of secondary retention; the second type is constituted in the traumatypical secondary
retentions: the latter result, not from a re-inforcement of existing expectationsI call this
comprehensionbut from a sur-prehension of these expectations. Comprehension is the reduction to
the identical, and the sur-prehension is the experience of the otherthat is, the experience of the
singularity of the sensible.
This is the experience of significance, in which the experimented, as a temporal phenomenon
undergone by the perception/consciousness system, all of a sudden explodes the expectations held
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together by the stereotypical secondary retentions, and opens a path, for example as a joke, but more
generally as all works of spirit. With the advent of this path, the traumatypical power of the repressed
secondary retentions can resurface, in the form of what Proust calls an anamnesis: the return of a
former traumatype which, returning as a ghost, as a spirit, for example in the form of a joke, itself
echoes the arche-protentions and arche-retentions (originary phantasms and primal scenes) that
constitute the apparatus of drives, as it took on singular form in the singularity of the traumatypes of a
particular ego.
However, this traumatypical resurfacing, which also comes out of firstly a pre-individual stock
belonging to the ego (proto-protentions and proto-retentions) and lived by it, and secondly, out of a
stock shared by all desiring living beings, but which has not been lived by them (arch-protentions and
arch-retentions of what Freuds second system calls the idbut this is also what Levinas calls the
absolute past as the past which has never been present). Such a resurfacing can only happen providing
the presence of conditions made possible by the historic state of tertiary retentions, that is to say, both
the defunctionalisations and refunctionalisations presupposed and empowered by tertiary retention.
Thus Hitchcock can inscribe a cinema of quite powerful, original and popular protentions.
Therefore, we can have two possible experiences of primary retention understood as primary selection
effected following the criteria formed in secondary retentions: this results in either the reinforcement
of dominant stereotypes, or their being called into question by the traumatypes present in the ego, in
the form in these traumatypical secondary retentions hidden by the stereotypes, and which are
activated by the temporal phenomenon which happens to the PC system and by the cathartic stroke of
genius of retentional organisations in which it consists. It can also happen that this cathartic stroke of
genius only takes place in deferred time, due to another phenomenon: this is the case of Prousts
madeleine, of involuntary memory, but also, I believe, of platonic anamnesis.
It is from the perspective of this retentional upheaval that Freuds sentence can now be highlighted:
We describe as traumatic any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through
the protective shield. It seems to me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a connection of this
kind with a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. (Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Standard Edition, vol. 18, page 29.)
Now all of this, that is, the traumatic which would appear to come from the exterior as a means of
defense which would be on the interior, can only be constituted by secondary retentional apparatuses.
The traumatism of the exterior is but the basis for the projection of a traumatype conserved in the
interior but embedded in it and prevented from becoming conscious by the stereotypes, except when a
pre-textuality causing primary retentional processes allows for the sudden freeing of the process of

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projection. Freud cannot see this: he is unable (just as Kant is unable) to distinguish between primary
retentions and secondary ones. He must therefore oppose the inside and the outside.
*
Freud once again, on page 24-25 of the Standard Edition:
All excitatory processes that occur in the other systems leave permanent traces behind them which
form the foundation of memory. Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of
becoming conscious.
However, the Freudian definition of the system PC, which should be described as the site of
constitution of the primary retentions that the primary selections are and as the depository in the other
systems of new secondary retentions, runs here into the same problems as those of the Project for a
Scientific Psychology. The system is unable to retain them. That means in this case that the system
effaces them as they occur, which implies that the system PC is a temporal system. For those of us who
have read Husserl, however, this means that its functioning consists precisely and necessarily in an
aggregation of primary retentions that become secondary as they are produced, that is to say, they
disappear in memory, passing into another system. This is why Freud adds:
The excitatory process becomes conscious in the system C. But leaves no permanent trace behind
there; but that the excitation is transmitted to the systems lying next within and that it is in them that
its traces are left. (ibid. p. 25.)
This downward direction of the system C toward neighbouring interior systems is very metaphysically
unilateral:Freud does not see the horizon of expectation constituted by the secondary retentions in a
state in which, charged traumatypically, they engage a dynamic that picks and chooses in the primary
retentions of system C (depicted, as Freud specifies, in the schema shown in the speculative section of
his The Interpretation of Dreams). Here we meet once again with the question of the evanescence of
the flux, that is to say, the aporia of primary retention, which is an aporia only as long as one cannot
distinguish primary from secondary retention in a process in which it passes from primary to
secondary:
The system Cs. is characterised by the peculiarity that in it (in contrast to what happens in the other
psychic systems) excitatory processes do not leave behind any permanent change in its elements but
expire, as it were, in the phenomenon of becoming conscious.[4]
Freud adds then a description of traumatypical secondary retentions:
[such memory traces] are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them
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behind was one that never entered consciousness. (page 25.)

But the system PC cannot conserve such remains, for if it could
they would very soon set limits to the systems aptitude for receiving fresh excitations.
Impossible not to agree. But there are, nevertheless, primary retentions, and tertiary ones, and given
that the secondary retentions must be identified as either stereotypical or traumatypical, the question
of projection must be entirely rethought, and the opposition between interior and exterior destroyed:
this is what I am attempting in this review of the question of libidinal economy with regard to a general
organalogy.
*
Freud, who sets the system PC off from the rest of the psychic apparatus, situates it between an
interior and an exterior as the surface of the system, and he postulates that
such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the
functioning of the organisms energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. (ibid. page
29.)
Now, the organism cannot be affected by an exterior traumatism except when it is expected, except
when, being protentially charged, it is touchable, affectable by this exterior traumatism that is already
within it, and that is thus not totally exterior. Otherwise, either it would not be affected by it, or it
would be simply destroyed. Freud nevertheless continues his description of what I consider
constitutive of the incorporation of traumatic primary retentions/protentions (produced by the
traumatypical secondary retentions) following a scheme Derrida described with the term diffrance,
but which constitutes for me what Simondon described as the process of internal resonance in which
consists the process of individuation:
There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large
amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises insteadthe problem of mastering the amounts of
stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychic sense, so that they can then be
disposed of.[5]
In my own terms, the question becomes that of the way in which the psychic system, as a process of
individuation, will tend to synchronise itself in a struggle against its own diachronicity, which occurs in
the event of a pretextuality of the outside. What Freud cannot see is, as Aristotle says, that the act of
the sensible is also the act of whom is sensible ( reprendre): the outside is produced by the inside.

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*
Mallarm thought, wrote and poeticised:
For the mediate, without traces, becomes evanescent.
If the brain can be placed in a vat, the question is one of the vats fracture. There are all manner of vats,
and the brain, via the body, has always been in a kind of vat. The body of that whereby the brain is
interfaced with this vat, and the vat is that which configures the organisations and apparatuses in
which a libidinal energy flows, whose organisations and apparatuses making up the vat, and forming
its bottom and sides, or the more or less fluid milieu, are not simply means, but actual constituting
elements, tensors and transductors, in the guise of retentional apparatuses whereby the psychic, the
social and the techno-logical co-individuate through their transductive relations.
As for the Freudian topographical system, it suggests that the unconscious must be localised, for
example in a sub-cortical area, which is totally absurd. The unconscious is nowhere else than
consciousness: it is a mode of being in a network, an organisation of networks which constitute the
unconscious as so many metastable equilibriums, that is, equilibriums precariously established around
these knots(organisation qui fait que dans ce reseau il y a des rets qui constituent de linconscient
selon des quilibres mtastables, cest dire prcaires, tablis autour de noyaux). And as for the
inherited material basis binding these knots together, which Freud will later call the it/id (Et quant au
fonds hrit que Freud nommera ensuite le , et qui relie ces noyaux), this is not only a biological
apparatus, despite what we are led to believe in the Outline of Psychoanalysis: it is a retentional
apparatus, one part of which is living (the brain), but this part is, however, nothing without the dead
partwhich Lacan names the name of the father, killed by the knife of the primal horde risen up
against him, so that he may then return as a spirit.
[1] This last point receives particular attention in Technics and Time, vol. 4. Symbols and Diaboles, or
the War of the Spirits, forthcoming from Galile.
[2] Ren Passet, LEconomique et le Vivant, Economica, 1996, pp. X-XII.
[3] Primary retentions enter into relations. For example, in a melody, notes in arpeggios forming
interval or chords, or, in a sentence, semantic and syntactic links.
[4] Freud then picks up again his analyses in Project for a Scientific Psychology, but in a certain state
of confusion: the elements of the system Cs. would carry no bound energy but only energy capable of
free discharge. It seems best, however, to express oneself as cautiously as possible on these points.
Caution is indeed necessary here, because Freud is making a serious error. He does not realize that,
primary retentions being also primary selections, they always already encounter tensions and
pressures that are constituted by protentions formed by the secondary retentions qua horizon of
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expectation. Freud does not see this at all.

[5] I believe Freud is wrong in presupposing that the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of
action.

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