On Frédéric Neyrat's Critical Thought

On Frédéric Neyrat’s Critical Thought Arne de Boever (bio) Keywords Frédéric Neyrat, philosophy The work of the philosopher consists first and foremost in the art of distinguishing, which is another name for critique. —Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence “Western” Philosophy (Bouge de là) Frédéric Neyrat knows philosophy’s ins—and especially its outs. One might go so far as to claim—and Neyrat’s philosophical manifesto Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism enables one to make such a claim—that Neyrat works on the outside (le dehors) and philosophical narratives of the outside. The unfolding of some of his work’s other major accomplishments can be read in light of that claim: from his book L’Indemne on destruction and the phantasm of indemnity—an early title in what, by now and after publications in this area by scholars like Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, or Isabell Llorey, one can call “vulnerability studies”—to his critiques of catastrophe biopolitics (a book that followed on the heels of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and reads like a philosophical development of [End Page 1] some of the key insights of Klein’s thought), financial capitalism (in Clinamen), and most recently, the Anthropocene (in The Unconstructable Earth). I describe Neyrat’s output as an unfolding, because the most recent book is clearly the fruit of what came before. It continues the thinking that was already laid out in Biopolitiques des Catastrophes (The Biopolitics of Catastrophes). Its at first sight perhaps out-of-place discussion of the abolition of the gold standard (at the beginning of its second part) clearly goes back to the discussions of risk and turbulence in the book on biopolitics as well as Clinamen. Each of those books in turn reaches back to Neyrat’s work on the invulnerable, which cuts across all of his work. Et cetera. All of those titles thus appear to be distinct but related parts of a whole that provides one with a bird’s eye view of the determining issues of our time (they mark much of my own intellectual trajectory as well): the state of exception, the war on terror, vulnerability and the phantasm of invulnerability; second, and related to that, biopolitics (understood in Neyrat’s work as both the power over and of life), and the ethical and political demand that we take care of all forms of life (it’s worth noting that there’s plenty on epidemics and pandemics in his for now still untranslated book from 2008); third, the neoliberal era of financial capitalism, the turbulence of money and the markets, and economic crashes (inscribed in Neyrat’s work on biopolitics and his discussion of what he calls the crash-test society); and fourth, the Anthropocene in relation to all of the above. Again and again, Neyrat shows us that for our critical consideration of each of those issues, the outside is key. There are many philosophical narratives of the outside. And, as Neyrat proposes in a text about the Italian thinker of immunity and community, Roberto Esposito: “the way in which a thought or a political practice metabolizes, symbolizes, or rejects negativity can be used as a test—a projection of what its ultimate consequences will be” (“Birth” 33). In other words: give me your take on the outside, and I will project the ends of your philosophy. The outside is the measure to which Neyrat encourages us to hold the work of any philosopher—including, one has to assume, his own. What prose, what poetry can express such a “thought of the outside” (to borrow the title of Michel Foucault’s book on Maurice Blanchot)? Might such thought have a genre? “Ausgang”: this is what Kant in a magazine article tells us Enlightenment is. Literally, a way out. An exit—towards the light. I write “towards” because when Kant asks, in 1784 (a date that, coincidentally, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer mark as the beginning of the Anthropocene [Neyrat, Unconstructable 36]), whether we are living in an enlightened age, Kant’s emphatic answer is “No” (Kant, “Aufklärung” 35). “But,” he adds

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