Frédéric Neyrat

Professor in the English department of UW-Madison (USA), Frédéric Neyrat is a French philosopher with an expertise in environmental humanities, contemporary theory, and media culture. He is editor of the electronic platform Alienocene that charts the bourgeoning field of Planetary humanities, and a member of the editorial board of the journals Lignes and Multitudes. Recently, he published The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of separation (Fordham, 2018), Literature and Materialisms (Routledge, 2020), L’Ange Noir de l’Histoire: Cosmos et Technique de l’Afrofuturisme (MF, 2021), Cosmos Expérimental (Abrüpt, 2022), and Le Cosmos de Walter Benjamin: Un Communisme du Lointain (Kimé, 2022). His books and articles offer a “new existentialism” regenerating the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Website: Atopies (http://atoposophie.wordpress.com)

Frédéric Neyrat

---

Excerpt from "Crossings: A Conversation with Frédéric Neyrat" in Mosaic, special issue 54.3)

"Shepherd Steiner: One last question. Tell me about your intellectual trajectory? Where you studied, with whom, significant influences?

F: I was trained in political sciences, media studies, and continental philosophy. Jean-Luc Nancy was the adviser for my dissertation, whose title was Fantasme de la Communauté Absolue, fantasy of the absolute community. I see this title as a sort of abbreviated formula of my intellectual investigation: “fantasy” for the part devoted to the imaginary and the unconscious; “community” for its political dimension; and “absolute” for the ontological inquiry. Concerning the last domain, the ontological one, I was very influenced by Jean-Luc Nancy: his approach of finitude as founded on the infinite, and not opposed to it, was crucial to me—it would be a mistake to consider Nancy as a deconstructionist, like Derrida, to me he is a kind of existentialist, because his ontology is retroactive, as it is always the case for any existentialist thinker. At least, it is was I argue in a little book entitled Le communisme existentiel de Jean-Luc Nancy, a part of this book having been reworked for an article published in a special issue of journal Diacritics, “NO/US: The Nietzschean Democracy of Jean-Luc Nancy.” To put it the other way around, I crafted what I call a “radical existentialism” thanks to an interpretation of Nancy’s philosophy.

But my existentialist drive is also related to politics, and the main influence here is certainly Alain Badiou, who also was in my dissertation committee. He is certainly not an existentialist per se, but the way he autonomizes politics, as well as science (or mathematics), art, and love (as a source of truth for the subjects at play in the existential adventure that any real love relation is), was very important in my intellectual training. It is thanks to Badiou that I understood that politics can develop its own thinking, art can provide its own form of thought, and the same thing for science and any sort of fundamental experience requiring the sensitive and thinking presence of a subject. In a way, when one considers that philosophy is not the imperial voice telling what politics must be, but needs to learn from politics (and art, and science, and love) how ontology has to be shaped and expressed, one is an existentialist philosopher.

Badiou’s influence was also palpable in a little political group named Les Gens de Partout, “people from everywhere,” to which I have participated. This experience decisively shaped my approach to politics and to the manner I conceive the meaning of community. Community has always been for me something more than a concept, something other than an ontological category: an experience, a lived experience, that is—as Benjamin helped me to understand, but later, two decades latter—that which we do not understand while we are living it. In this interview, I do not want to develop more what I did in this little political group, not because there is something to hide, but because my aim is for now to stress the following: in my intellectual trajectory, encounters were more important than the academic training. Encounter with a friend thanks to which I discovered psychoanalysis, which became a more than ten years’ experience, encounter with Les Gens de Partout and a form of politics that has nothing to do with vote, encounter with artistic creation apart from any institution and any will to exhibition, etc. If we define the academic world as the world in which the main thing is the production of knowledge, as well as its circulation and its monetization, then I think it is important to affirm that this world cannot be the same than the one of experience, which structurally stands outside the university. It does not mean of course that there is no possible experience for students in the classroom! But it means that this experience, for the student, is possible if the professor embodies something that cannot be reduced to her diploma, something coming from a praxis external to the shaping of knowledge. In other words, if what is transmitted in class is knowledge, only knowledge, then, there is no transmission, but a communication à la Shannon and Weaver. Transmission implies subjects, someone who cannot control what s/he transmits (even though s/he can control what s/he communicates of course) and someone who does not know what s/he has received (even though s/he can reproduce knowledge to get a good grade for the exam).

Comes to my mind what prominent twenty-century composer Edgard Varèse said to someone who was describing his music as “experimental”: “I do not write experimental music,” he said, “my experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards, it is the listener who must experiment.” What is experimental is not the form of Varèse’s music, in the sense that this form strives to express—to render—the experience that precedes it. But for the listeners, there might be an experimental dimension if it turns out that they encounter something that was not expected, something that will not fit the frame of their pre-existing knowledge. So, my intellectual trajectory, which is an existential trajectory, is a succession of interruptions, surprises, unexpected encounters that led me where I was not expected to go—like, falling in love and coming to live in the U.S.A.

To return to Badiou and what or who marked me, I became more and more sensitive to the ecological thought in its relations with technology, that is to say two domains that Badiou, with all due respect, never understood! Other encounters there again, like the one with the journal Multitudes, thanks to which in the 2000’s I became aware of cognitive capitalism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and the ecological thought. But the technophilia of Multitudes was and still is problematic to me, and to shorten this autobiography on the run, let me mention my friend Jean-Claude Besson-Girard, thanks to whom I really began to recognize degrowth as a fundamental aspect of any ecological thought—Jean-Claude Besson-Girard, who directed the degrowth-oriented journal Entropia, and who recently died, in March 2021. On the skin of an existential trajectory, there are always scars."