“Homo ex machina” is an essay written around Laruelle’s Philosophie II period (circa 1980–1990). The theme surrounding minorities before and independent of the state from Le principe de minorité (1981) and A Biography of Ordinary Man (1985/2018) is writ large throughout this essay. Laruelle investigates the invariant known as “biopolitical parallelism,” wherein life and power form the same continuum, creating “humans” or “people” to experiment over life and living forms and upon themselves, becoming Nietzschean guinea pigs of lived experiences. The essay also appears to critique Deleuze’s topological definition of the machinic that Laruelle elsewhere takes up in his earliest writings. Situated in the break from the machinic into the unilateral proper, “Homo ex Machina” provides the problematic for what may be an answer to a looming question surrounding Laruelle’s work: Why must one break from philosophical sufficiency? This text was initially published in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger (1980), an issue dedicated to the theme of La Mettrie’s Machine-Man. The present translation is based off the republication of this essay as part of Le nouvel esprit technologique (2020). This work, though recently published, features chapters dedicated to a critique of technological reason written initially in the 1980s for the Cahier of the Collège International de Philosophie, criticizing invariants such as techno-logical difference and automato-logical difference, the latter being more apparent in this essay. Such a work could help better frame writings on technology elsewhere, such as Theory of Identities (1992/2016), “Le concept d’une technologie première” (1994), or even “L’ordinateur transcendantale” (2005). One may also find some linkages of biopolitical parallelism to contemporary discussions in biopolitics after Foucault, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe.
I would like to thank Anne-Françoise Schmid and Jean-Didier Wagneur for their support and efforts to publish this translation in Techniques Journal. I would also like to thank Taylor Adkins and Sylvia Nambiar for their oversight and recommendations on the present translation.

I. How Does One Become a Machine-Man?

We ordinarily know only one tradition of Machine-Man, although there are two, perhaps three. These appear as soon as a division [découpage] between the objects of knowledge and the history of ideas does, of which philosophy is accustomed. We substitute this division for another: the eras of power or the technopolitical modes of production of man. These notions are one with a “change of terrain” (or at least a change in “problematic”) within philosophy and the theory of history. We take this shift for granted without demonstrating its necessity or relevance here.
Though not the oldest, the best known of these traditions is assembled first, starting with Descartes. This first tradition combines the anatomical and physicomedical description of man with its metaphysical foundation, combining a physical and technical [technique] model of the body with a technicist [technicien] and voluntarist model of creation—it is the reconciliation of man as a creature of the technician and man as God’s automaton. The second tradition is nothing but discerned and nominated by Nietzsche, who makes it appear by going beyond it. This tradition is more expressively the technopolitical one of the human body, a lineage [lignée] that is perhaps even older than the previous one because it first finds within the polis its customs and its justice, the horizon of the relations of power or “hegemony” sometimes between the soul and body, between gods and men. We must begin to think of this technē proper to the polis within its specificity and continuity with the “domestication” that Nietzsche saw everywhere at work in the modern world. And finally, there is the tradition of the strictly “Nietzschean” perspective of “active” breeding and discipline, inclusive of this “reactive” and “gregarious” domestication, that draws out this lineage of Machine-Man without really inscribing itself within it because it must instead explain how “domestication” is a mimesis and failure of “breeding.”
We will not oppose the first with the second, like that of an anatomical and metaphysical version against a political version of the being [l’être] of man, or like that of a project of analysis and intelligibility against a project of utility and manipulation. The first presupposes a technopolitical plinth as much as the second. Still, it is distinct and proceeds through an arrangement [agencement] proper to powers [pouvoirs] that innervate this physical and metaphysical knowledge of man. The second produces effects of knowledge as much as the first, but distinct, and which, as we know, have been located near the genealogy of the “human sciences.” The reduction of the knowledges of man to the technopolitical a priori that sustains them with historical existence makes us perceive the differential history of Machine-Man: it extracts this notion from its Cartesian, physical, and medical framework. It particularly distinguishes within the object of the human sciences the new avatar of a conception of man that we could not have thought to have found there. What is the proper distinction between the Cartesian man and the man of the human sciences? The distinction is not that one would be traced from the simple machines of the times, and the other, finally returned to his humanity. The first has all the humanity that the times were capable of conceiving, and the second all the inhumanity that the new clinic, psychiatry, and psychology have conveyed—social machines that carry power other than physical and technical machines, but not less strongly. Nor is it that the first is related to mechanisms as if to a metaphor, while the second would really interiorize the seizures of social power. There is nothing less metaphorical than the metaphor: one such relation does not stop the flow of power or only seems to suspend it to continue it better. The only criteria are internal to the powers themselves, internal to the modality of their arrangements. The Cartesian Machine-Man—and perhaps all the physical, medical, and metaphysical knowledge that surrounds this man and gives it existence and “materiality”—is one with what we must call (in opposition to “micropolitics,” which is nothing but one determined mode of production) a macropolitics of power. It places within an immediate relation of struggle—whose torturing [suppliciante] anatomy is one good example that goes beyond the penal field and individual bodies 1 Cf. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. La naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 137 sq. [Michel Foucault, “Docile Bodies,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 135–169.—Trans.] although it is immediately endowed with a power [puissance] that is their essence and whose measure is furnished by the infinitely large—the body of the creating and annihilating sovereign, the subject of power, and the body of the submissive or rebellious and annihilated creature. This era of power should be called despotic: the struggle is not immediate here except at a distance, at a height, at the abstraction where omnipotence [toute-puissance] stands—even if it were the omnipotence of the automaton constructor or mechanic—excluding the mixtures and blends that would subdue the severity of this infighting. These are all theories of “continuous creation,” the physical man and the automaton that should be enlisted—without breaking their Cartesian specificity—within this technopolitical mode of production of man that measure forces [puissances] to each other within abstract relations of infinite debt and struggle. As an onto-theo-politics par excellence, it combines the creative and annihilating strength of the sovereign with the technicist force of the automaton constructor, forming a unique flow of power [puissance]. This is because the second can give the appearance of finality and autonomy God gifted with his handiwork. With this flow, it only assigns this nothingness of power [néant de puissance] that is one with the omnipotence of God as an external and indifferent limit, finding within torture the counterproof of creation, a continuous torture that gradually steers [ramène] the creature towards this nothingness wherein the sovereign is exalted.
“Micropolitics,” strictly speaking, renders the Machine-Man of the human sciences possible. Admirably analyzed elsewhere in the name of “disciplines,” 2  Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 137.—Trans. it is with micropolitics that power passes from the infinitely large to the infinitely small, that it changes object or introduces a variation within that which of the body is found included within the flows of power: less anatomical members than forces and processes [fonctionnements], less the objective body in space and time than time and space as the continuous deployment of bodies, as a play of forces, a whole transcendental aesthetic and dynamic of powers in what is specific to them, the infinitesimal rather than the generic. Modern disciplines do not leave representation, not even leaving the Great and the Small that remain complementary poles. Instead, it proceeds towards a new distribution of the Great and the Small: power is divided, exercised, and measured between the infinitesimal term of its effect and the social-global (or, rigorously, the institutional) term of its exercise. The individual-in-the-institution carries on the sovereign’s submissive creature: a new coupling between man, society, and machines where the sovereign loses his abstract and transcendent despotic figure. The sovereign is incarnated, immersed within subjugated bodies, forming with them the immediate, horizontal, and even more and more transversal continuity of the flows of power that outweigh the struggle of separated bodies. This continuity fills their gap and lacuna through an infinite division or ramification. And it initiates a long historical process of the identification and reconciliation between the individual and the social body. The furthest goal of micropolitics is: How can an individual represent the global social body for another individual?

Another body, new technical and social machines—but there is always this complex or synthesis of Man and the machine, this coupling that is perhaps the essence of the machine . . . This is precisely the great Nietzschean invention, its humility as well, and the delineation of the third era still to come of the Machine-Man: differently from the ancient and modern “machine-man systems,” it is because the machine is no longer only one side of the relation. It is firstly within the and itself, within the correlation of terms. The essence of the machine, such that Nietzsche discovers it within the mechanistic and physicochemical “metaphors” of man, is the coupling itself, the connection in the pure state, the machine-eidos, the synthesis that is one transference, the continuous transference, and the machine as the metaphorical of the machine, that is, the machine that is finally without a “metaphor,” the absolute identity-in-becoming of man and the machine. Neither technicians nor technocrats nor even technologists have succeeded in making the theory that Nietzsche made: the theory of the cog as a cog or the node as a node; the identity of the break and the flow, the stoppage and restarting the disruption and continuation; it is also the identity of the part and its function, the production and functioning, the wheel and the cog or re-action (“the true reaction is that of action”: action as repetition, within and through its very stoppage, of a stopped action, etc.). Nietzsche does not identify, like Marx, such-and-such types of machines or Productive Forces in accordance with determined Relations of Production, solely intelligible under these relations. Instead, Nietzsche identifies the essence of any such technical or social machine. This essence is itself neither mechanistic nor finalistic, with a Relation of Production and, inversely, the Relation (of production) with the new Productive Force. The Relation that has become relative to itself—that is, absolute and autonomous, the Relation-becoming or structure seized by madness—becomes the main Productive Force.

In its “machinic” rather than “machinal” sense, the machine seems to be opposed to structure as a play of differential elements without invariance and in pure becoming, opposed to a play of invariant differential elements, fixed places within which the movement of the displacement and condensation of actors does nothing but produce a false becoming reduced to positions. Nevertheless, the machine does not destroy the structure or the rigidity of its predetermined articulations except by completing it, converting it to its ideal essence, and identifying the continuous mobility, the real movement of differential actors and breaks. This is why it does not develop its machine-effects in one defined place alone and on a specific mode-like structure. Still, it allows all possible combinations through a system of transmitters [renvois] or cogs whose formal, syntactic articulation is the simultaneity of the break and the continuous. However, it is one that can, in the way of a schema, traverse and connect all sectors of experience. A supermachine is a branching [ramification] of cogs that can be economic, legal, scientific, penal, and political. In particular, the conquest of this concept of the machine allows one to produce the biopolitical complex, a synthesis of life and the machine that would be neither mechanistic, nor physicochemical, nor structural, nor behavioralist and conduct based.
And the agent, what becomes of the agent? They stop entertaining a metaphorical relation with the machine. The agent is, in turn, confounded with this relation with . . . which is the whole possible essence (identically inhuman and superhuman, but certainly not human) of the machine—the cog of the State that is identical with the State itself . . . The ultimate avatar of Machine-Man is the destruction not of Man and the Machine but the destruction of that which within them separated and distinguished them from one another, their “average likenesses” that prevented the machinalization of man and the humanization of the machine. Superhuman or supermachine—it is all the same. We must remake Modern Times in accordance with Future Times [temps à venir]: a cog functions like one of the Tramp’s legs, a leg like a cog, and alternatively. The Tramp does not emerge from the machine except full of parts and cogs. He arrives as a postindustrial immigrant and nomad, becoming the man of the human and industrial sciences, emerging from the process in the state of Cartesian mechanics. This is the recurrence of the “machine-man system” that becomes the a priori of history, the limit and tendency of its becoming.
One will say that all this is still metaphorical, that the word “machine” changes meaning and use. And it’s true that from the simple machine to the supermachine, there is one continuity; among others, there is a continuous transference of meaning that would be sensible for those who love meaning: it is even this transference-on-the-spot, this fervor on the spot of the word “machine” that we precisely call “supermachine,” rather than metaphor. This amphiboly, the same name for the thing and its essence in a super(meta)phor is in no way accidental. The supermachine—the “confusion” of the existent machine and its essence, the machine and man as well—is par excellence the amphiboly that gives its “meaning” to the history to come, which we will return to. Nor does anything prevent us (to avoid this objection exterior to the matter) from calling “games of power” such continuous machines or couplings. A game of power is a node as a node, the pure connection as such where the two end nodes form the continuity of the node itself; the node shorn of that which it connects, the becoming-machine of man and, simultaneously, the becoming-human of the machine . . . the universal cog.

II. Biopolitical Parallelism

Here, we will not follow the more or less permanent entanglement of the two first paths, the overlapping points of a macrotechnical scope and a micropolitical scope of the body. The explanation and manipulation of man is constantly bound. The technicist analysis of bodies that renders them intelligible is not separated from a range of power: their manipulation as automata is not distinguished from a knowledge that it presupposes and a new knowledge that it produces. And the history of these traditions has been partially done in the historian or even Nietzschean way of a genealogy of “docile bodies” and “labor-power.”
By contrast, the theory of the eras of power allows us to identify the biopolitical figure of Machine-Man. Biopolitics is one of these syntheses that overlaps with the Machine-Man synthesis and specifies it. It is a somewhat narrower version of the already old problem of the political investments of biology and, more generally, living bodies. Its current urgency and its resurgence under indicated “ideological” and “sociobiological” forms constrain us from reprising the problem of Machine-Man and its modern technopolitical a priori in this perspective. Placed back onto this terrain, biopolitics as the technē of life will have experienced in turn several eras: there is a classical bio-technē that remains a bio-logos even within the very exclusion of a strictly “biological” perspective over the body in the contemporary sense. There is also a micropolitical bio-technē that serves as a perspective—not as a method, of course, but as a political arrangement, as a machine of power coordinating and organizing them at its level—for the methods, theories, and experimental labor of cellular biology, as an example. And finally, there is a biopolitics that is no longer the historical a priori of the great syntheses that spark, overlap, and blend (according to varying proportions) experimentation on living matter, the theory of information and computational [informatique] reduction of the living and power over the living; instead, it is a new formation, inclusive of the critique of the current political investments of biology, systems theory, and information theory—but to better extort their “supermachinic” element and bring them to their completion, to their accomplishment. The “superior form” of Systems and Information is in the theory of the “cog,” the supermachine, the machinic schema, that we will now investigate.
This biopolitics of the future is one mode of a more general synthesis: the synthesis of matter and the Idea; the synthesis of a hylē in becoming, of a continuous material flow which is the essence of power, the very power [puissance] of power [pouvoir] and life. Life is one of the “contraries” of power, but life is identical or simultaneous with power. This is so that one may indifferently say that life is the hyletic flow upon which power is but one break, but also that life in the strict sense is one break from a continuum of power; before being power over living bodies, power secretes or continuously produces bodies that are simultaneously biological and political, inscribing life and its effects within the effects of power. Bodies are not neutral or indifferent substrata upon which forms of domination and institutional qualities are edified “in layers.” Life is one means for power and reciprocally. These functional reversals of the hierarchy between life and power within the unique biopolitical continuum derive from the coupling or cog syntax, proceeding by dividing and reversing each other from one contrary to the other. This alternative coupling destroys any immediate paralleling of life and power (for example, the organicist metaphors of society and reciprocally) grounded on their median, coded, and represented forms. However, it produces it within the superior form of a biopolitical parallelism that remains innately vicious, more reproductive than productive. There is always a reciprocal Aufhebung of life and power, a sublation [relève] adapted to their pure, ideal, and superior forms reduced to a becoming, no doubt, but which cannot prevent from returning into itself, reflecting in itself, the infinite convergence of contraries. Rigorously, a non-Euclidean geometry of this parallelism, one that is more “powerful” than its previous forms but which does nothing but better confirm the cobelonging, inseparability, and relativity of life and power condemned to determine each other reciprocally, aims to devivialize and not only devitalize within their most organic and naturalist forms, aims to depoliticize as well undoubtedly, but in no way does it aim to really depotentialize. Biopolitical parallelism emerges confirmed by any critique of “sociobiology”: it protects itself from any collapse, any real loss of its power [puissance].
This new regularity that carries on Cartesian macrorationality and microrationalization within a project of the superrationalization of individuals is as simple to formulate as it is difficult to conceive. It is the radical identification or rather a simultaneity within a “common” arrangement of nature and production, physis and technē, life and technics. Nietzsche is generally the thinker who teaches us the immediate co-incidence of contraries that the tradition separated or distinguished through mediations or liaisons, through generalities taken from theology, economy, politics, science, and soon enough biology, etc. We must imagine the simultaneity of contraries (life and power) within the complex of a biopolitics that does not stop dividing itself ad infinitum, ramifying itself into its opposites: the forms of power are not distinguished from the forms of life except to be identified with them ad infinitum. This identity is no longer fixed or reified within an anatomical or physiological figure of bodies nor one precise institutional figure of power. It is the identity of a simultaneity, a pure becoming, an infinite biopolitical becoming of organisms and institutions that arrange themselves together for a new constellation on condition of losing their old forms. It is a becoming that does not start from a given figure of power or particular biological properties, nor is it completed somewhere in recognition of the “results” or ultimate facts.
The philosophers who make life Being and essence have always called “life” both the flow, the continuous and autoconstitutive becoming, and a particular phase, a break from this flow. Plotinus, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Husserl: [respectively] life is the emanation of the One and a stasis of this emanation; the becoming of contraries and one of these contraries; the will to power and one of its modes; the élan vital and the organism that encloses it upon itself; and the flow of transcendental consciousness and a psychonatural determination . . . Life is the simultaneity of the essence and existence, matter as hylē and, simultaneously, a break; a condensation, both an abbreviation and an extension, a deconcentration, and a spatiotemporalization of this intensive matter. Philosophy (I don’t speak of biology here) has no other means of conceiving the essence of life except through this amphibolic schema that is inscribed within the great Western amphiboly of the identity of Being and being, one that calls “life” both the substance of things and one of its modes. Thus, biopolitics confesses to never having been a scientific project; biopolitics is the ensemble of the Relations of Power that continuously invest and disinvest the analysis of the living.
However, this “supermachinic” articulation of the cog or the “game of power” does not solely define the philosophical essence—that is, the only possible essence—of life. It is reflected within biological theory under forms that philosophy judges as empirical and reactive. Not only does the “cog”—as the simultaneously indivisible and divisible flow, as the transference that remains in itself within the very act of its communication—contain a positive theory of information and a theory of systems applied to pure becoming. Yet, inversely, one will judge that the current theories of information and systems are “reactive” and “gregarious” versions of the theory of the biopolitical flow, that the notion, in particular, of the “black box” could find new forms, produce new effects in that of the cog or game of power. We know the list of schemata where bio-technē has attempted to exercise its grasp over life, and it contains nearly the whole history of Philosophy: the “germ,” mechanisms, stimulus and reflex arc, Gestalt, the “system,” information, encoding, structure, the complementariness of the innate and the acquired. These schemata blend—in varying proportions, but always viciously—biological information and the technopolitical project. One may think that, for reasons internal to the becoming of philosophy, they will all be carried on without exception by the ultimate and pure bio-techno-political schema of the “supermachinic” that selects and gathers that which there was within them of the meaning of becoming, heterogeneity, and materiality, the meaning of continuity as well, that eliminates their vicious and empirical character of simple blends. The destruction of these biopolitical mixtures makes up a part of the program of Man-and-Machine. Within the becoming-real of the machine-man system, within the pure connection or simultaneity of these contraries, is therefore as well inscribed the downfall of leftist or fascistic “ideologies” that together turn within the vicious circle of the innate and the acquired.
This bio-technē forms precisely, if you will, a field of constitution, a transcendental episteme that is simultaneously objective and subjective, a regularity that renders possible both biology in the theoretical and experimental sense (possible: obviously not its labor and results, but its power over life, the power of experimentation and theorization) and these infinite sociobiological discourses whose “ideological” voracity makes up for the self-ignorance where they stand and thrive. They do not stop drawing from these historical and theoretical a priori traits. Still, differently from these discourses, it will no longer douse itself, extend, or envelop itself within a new figure continuing them. A regularity is not a law, nor even the rule of a becoming, but it is itself a rule-in-becoming, a field that is also a flow, a continuum that is also a becoming. It will gather the members it dispersed: the biopolitical philosophemes, themes, or theses from Plato, the Stoics, Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie, etc. This bio-techno-political field does not directly encompass the procedures and experimentations of biology. It unfolds along it, the tethering or partnering within an infinite curb its techniques and results in immediate relation without confounding itself with them. The biological field, “strictly speaking,” to the extent where something of such exists, is never entirely and definitively closed. It is locally and provisionally closed upon a biological pertinence that it deduces the materials, technical means, theoretical and social scopes from this infinite biopolitical regularity.
Aside from the more banal sociopolitical interventions, perhaps it is this biological knowledge that contributes towards separating the universal biopolitical flow, to make it diverge into two branches: one that remains hidden behind it and which we attempt to grasp once more with the notion of an accomplished biopolitical amphiboly, and the other that emerges from within or on the periphery common to disciplines of life and power. These fields have become henceforth transcendent and external. By passing within them, by taking upon themselves their presuppositions, the flux is separated from itself, dividing its complex unity or simultaneity into simple blends of biological references and ideological themes. The whole adulterated biopolitics of the moderns belongs to the order of the mixture: it falsifies Nietzsche with a local biological knowledge and biology with the elitist and fascistic side, which is one of the two sides of Nietzschean thought. A whole onto-theo-biology, a dualism of the innate and the acquired, a gregarious conception of the elite, a conception of natural difference massively invested with political prejudices, a conception of cultural difference massively supported by biological prejudices, that is, stopped “knowledges” rendered absolute—this is how the continuous biopolitical flow is decomposed by passing once more within the prism of culture that it contributed to constitute . . .
It is a bio-technē waiting to be born, but whose principle we can now grasp. It is the last one to be born for essential reasons: it is its recurrence since its lineaments that Nietzsche provides when he reprises on a radical mode the Platonic project of the government of the living, its gathering too of all physico-chemico-medico-socio-biological possibilities of the past, allowing us to make the history of its ancient forms in their irreducibility and historical contingency. It is the typos and topos that give them meaning and value. As we will see, its internal structure is so particular that it renders necessary the emergence within cultural consciousness of the expressly posited relations of life, its power and power over life, as it renders possible and henceforth inevitable its critique that is one with its description. As so here, it is enough to describe this ultimate bio-techno-political formation to render sensible and, perhaps, thinkable its limits, which belong to the Nietzschean era of thought. Such a horizon—which is unfolding and folding back, unravelling and furling upon itself an infinite edge—constructs the maleficent snares where all our attempts to liberate and protect life, personal or natural, are included. We cannot think life at best except in living systems, ecosystems that are still forms of power proper to thought, eco-logoï, as if the logoï have never been anything other than living systems, living things other than thoughts in the circle of a reciprocal control that has not yet borne its bitterest fruits, as if a fatum invincibly steered our most revolutionary attempts back to old thoughts . . . Why has the problem become crucial from a step beyond the bio-technē, which is in the process of being born like that of the future? Because this new and ultimate a priori has this particularity, power and life (in senses that are no longer quite the old ones) are progressing to being reconciled under novel forms through the same procedure as Man and the Machine. It is with the supermachine that corresponds to a new bio-engineering that assures the infinite, absolute, interminable coupling that guarantees and confirms by itself life-as-power and power-as-living. The new biopolitical complex ensures the a priori coincidence and simultaneity—“originary,” if you will, but always in becoming—of an omnipotent, intensive, self-subjugating, increasingly rigorous vitality and a continuous and ramified power like life. Thus is born the fourth reign of life, the one that is neither vegetal, nor animal, nor crystalline, nor is it an object of science fiction but one that gathers within itself infinite vegetal patience, animal and human aggressiveness, and the continuous growth on the edges of crystals. It is a project of a self-domination that exceeds in extent, depth, and intensity the still barely laborious micropolitical “disciplines.” It is the new avatar of the biopolitical spirit [génie] that humanity exercises upon itself, the superior form of racism against ordinary lesser racism, and not only racism as superior life . . .

III. The Biopolitical Spirit and the Superior Form of Racism

The biotechnical development divides the concept of experimentation into two or three lineages. In the ordinary sense, there is experimentation done under theoretical, technical, and ethical rules. And there is experimentation that makes up the rule, which is itself its own rule. This generalized experimentation has as its object the powers arranging life rather than global or specific properties of the living. It is a rule that no longer obeys any scientific or moral rule but immanently begets its own criteria. We will distinguish it—above all as the transvaluation of its scientific form—the aberrant and fascistic forms of “human” or “animal” experimentation that are scientifically and morally contradictory precisely because they, despite everything, conserve scientific and moral pretensions that the previous one has abandoned by claiming to transvalue them. Against this vulgar concept of experimentation, we will extract the pure concept of the biopolitical spirit as experimentation that leads the power of life over itself, eventually across its scientific forms or monstrous forms that serve it as relays, but to which it is irreducible. A politics becomes really experimental, and experimentation finally carries on the Marxist concept of “practice,” when the distinction between objects, means, raw materials, and products is effaced within the differential concept of methods, in the generalization and triumph of “means,” when we have understood that there are no longer “contradictions” in things. A generalized strategy places into differential relation and determines one by the other in a continuous “machinic” chain—but outside of any ethical or scientific “end”—the procedures (theoretical or not) of power. The universal biopolitics is the becoming-method, the becoming-rule of experimentation, and therefore the destruction of methods and rules as “invariant” research horizons. On its side, experimentation loses the relative exteriority of its procedures to the living body, becoming the immanent essence of life, the “machinic” coupling of man with man or, instead, of a fragment of biological knowledge with another fragment. The working methods or hypotheses of bio-engineering are brought to the power of a strategy; that is, they simultaneously generate themselves with their objects, their products, and their agents; they stop being “absolute” and become simple relative breaks within a continuous process that they serve to resume as if they would contribute in extracting from life this surplus-value of power without which power would annihilate itself in the ashes of existent institutions. The biopolitics of the future does not know (at least for itself) an instance of the reality of the living body, a principle of the scientific and ethical reality of life. Still, it plans [planifie] in a way immanent to the continuous thread of its experimental drives its implantation within the intimacy of life. The strategy of the control of living bodies presupposes their inscription within an immanent field of the Relations of Power, a run-proof network perpetually redivided and reconstituted, forming an ultimate plane of matter and power for vital phenomena, a plane of immanence that is the essence of any planning and to which counterindustrial or superindustrial planning of Machine-Man re-turns [re-vient].
Under these conditions, experimentation or “culture” of the human foundation, or “anthropoculture,” stops being an ideological accident of biology to become the essence of superindustrial man. The destination of the “genetic spirit” is inscribed within the becoming biopolitical of this man. What Nietzsche could have called “great biology” decomposes the macro- and microinstitutional forms of biology and communicates with it a force of self-“potentiation” capable of elevating simple “genetic manipulations” from biocraty to the power of a “genetic strategy” whose object and subject, identical, would be this new daimon, the man of the supermachine, the new spirit . . . who experiments upon himself as if he would experiment over others, the measure of all things through his very immoderation for which everything serves solely as a relative limit and stepping stone . . .
What is the principle of this new, superanthropological metric? Universal experimentation means the following: an infinite variation of the conditions to obtain an effect, the identity of this infinite variation, and the effect produced within a regularity that is one with it. Becoming an infinite procedure endowed with the power of the continuous, experimentation stops being bound to precise and qualified conditions to determine effects to produce. Experimentation introduces risk and strategy based on this new mode of production of man. Yet suppose all the conditions of economic, political, biological, etc., existence can serve as means. In that case, the point is not to reproduce any such type of existent human but the only type capable of supporting and connecting within a new regularity all variations or divisions that affect the Relations of Power that he is woven by, to integrate and relativize them within a new “superanthropological” continuum. Concerning the deviations of its fascistic forms, pure biopolitics is a deviance so generalized that it reconstitutes its departure into an immanent rule. Thus one will constitute a right of biopolitical experimentation, which will inscribe within the gap of a right for . . . and a right to . . . the criminals, the marginal, and the inventors of new values, the ones who take their life as the object of new experiences, who make fragments of their body or mind enter into cruel arrangements, all these “efficient” [«performants»] individuals whom themselves know how to extract a surplus-value of power from themselves or the ones who will have learned how to interiorize the means of superindustrial capitalism for the exaction of this supplement of power. One will treat all these individuals as these sportsmen to which one connects a biofeedback procedure thanks to which they lead continuous experimentation on their vitality, performances, and reciprocal variations. The ones who are capable of surmounting this super-entailment, not only of supporting this implantation of machines but to make a noneconomic and squandering use of them, to use a computer as a means to resume rather than to distribute their energy expenditures better, or to use a feedback procedure as a productive recurrence rather than simply reproductive in accordance with a predetermined regime of functioning—these are the ones who will have the right to . . . life. The individual will be one with biotechnical databases that will have this particularity of always being abstract machines of the reproduction and distribution of these data but in the progress of fusion with the subjects. Individuals gain the abstraction of these bases, and the bases will gain the subjectivity and becoming-concrete of individuals. One such bio-engineering consists of problematizing life, making it a political and legal problem that cannot be resolved by itself. As the history of the “animal-man” species (Nietzsche) resides within the reciprocal incorporation or fusion of life and social power, it will coronate this “machinic” coupling through the constitution of a techno-legality destined to carry on the medical law and, in general, all other kinds of law. It is “techno-legal” because its rules, far from coding and fixing the existing relations of power, will, on the contrary, be the emanation of a provisional and momentary state of these relations whose essence is disequilibrium. There is a “law” of the Law, and it is the biopolitical essence that, in its movement, determines it.
The new Machine-Man is the “human” type par excellence, the type that selects and sorts the positive within existent types. But what is a type? It is not exactly the Idea of an individual but an ego potentialized as an Idea, an individual that “makes up” the Idea, an ego identical with the whole chain; the coincidence, in the face of which Plato will have stepped away from, of an ego and an Idea, the dispersion of a singular we, a subjective yet continuous multiplicity. This biopolitical a priori of the man to come assures the passage from Classical Egology and Industrial Humanism to Superindustrial Typology. This I is a dispersion of the relations of power, a differential I-of-the-I that is infinitely reflected, relative to itself and therefore absolute, an infinite coupling . . . and I . . . and I . . . and I. It collects all the possible subjectivity of history. It is also the I of the I, the Ego ipsissimum (Nietzsche), as the gathering upon itself of history. This Machine-Man, the most frantic of Cartesians, is an egological continuum connecting closer selves in the state of breaks or “machines,” a whole autoconstitution by means of a variance affected by divisions. It is as if the Pure Ego had finally been torn from “self-consciousness” and stopped being the correlate of mathematics and the human sciences, God and psychiatrists, to become the object and subject of universal experimentation. The I-of-the-I is the power-of-self, will-of-self, including the experimental will as its essence, and it is this essence that wants him to be causa sui by dint of experimenting upon himself: “We wish to be our own guinea pigs” (The Gay Science, 319).
With this communitarian I that contemplates its own image and fills itself with its Idea, the Machine-Man abandons the psychological and sociological forms of narcissism. It conquers the superior form of the I, the aristocratic form of narcissism. This I remains of the nature of the Relation or the Idea, not abandoning the inferior forms of gregariousness except constituting itself as its superior form. It is here that Nietzsche and his absolute biopolitics find their limit, even though he attempts to constitute this limit precisely into an absolute, into a recurrent flux looped upon itself: this becoming-man and machine enchains like never before the man and the technopolitical machine par excellence, the State-machine. Such is the superior gregariousness, but gregariousness all the same, as these false minorities who are Nietzschean aristocrats and then the superman: they accomplish and render absolute the machine-man system, the stato-human complex, completing by fixing man, this animal who was not yet fixed, upon the water of a river, no doubt, though it is the State-river. You will be as demons and spirits fabricating machines, but all the better arranged by the State-machine. Henceforth, they reciprocally subjugate themselves for a cobelonging that may no longer end. Man includes the gregariousness of machines, and machines include the human subjectivity, but together, they are perverted and converted to themselves. This is the superior, aristocratic herd of machine-people, the form of gregariousness, the proprium of the new biopolitics. This proper is neither the living nor the State but their simultaneous reduction to their common essence: the cog, the entanglement of their becoming-one-another. Instead of vulgar and reactive elitism that is sometimes grounded on natural competition and sometimes on social competition—sometimes on the innate, sometimes on the acquired, or a blending of both—there is a superior, statist elitism that traverses the complementarity of these contraries.
The program of the biopolitics of the future is outlined: it goes beyond capitalism’s labor of ruin because it leads capitalism to ruin in its own way: destroying the inferior forms of the state and society to pass them through the “selection” as the complete, accomplished form of revolution and to liberate [dégager] “the superior form of all that is” (Nietzsche) through universal strategy, the “new chain,” the one that enchains its own links as its slaves, the chain a slave of itself, a universal subjugation . . . Let each man become a multiplicity, a “pack,” and a State; let them interiorize racism and become superior to themself, that is, to others. It is a bio-engineering of a new style responsible for destroying the average and fascistic forms of racism, its “racial,” “national,” and “imperialist” forms, but which does not empty the sewers of history except to create the superior “race” of machine-people. Even if you dissolve—States, classes, institutions, factories, all forms of community—there will always remain something: the utterly pure operation of dissolution and production that is one with the accomplished gregarization, the superior biocraty controlling bodies and souls, in life and death. One such bio-statist complex means that “people” receive their absolute existence through and for the State-machine, that their reciprocal fusion or incorporation will be made under a form that Hegel himself would not have dared to dream.
This ultimate era of power—which we can hardly call the future because it gathers as much all the barbarism and the inhumanity of the past to give them the superior power of superhumanity—is instead the era of becoming as such. It must be called a Cratesis universalis, a dissolution of all the median forms of power (among others, fascism and racism), but one that reconstitutes the superior form of universal control with the dissolution. This era contains the virtualities of a biopolitical spirit that will abandon its current technoeconomic and capitalist forms to become a genuine engineering of domination that will finally find its power and rule within itself. Therefore, it will remain of the nature of an enterprise that is itself dominant, that is, vicious and circular. Beyond any “ethical” and legal critique, which would once more oppose it with a universal or even a generality of man as a subject of the law (one such subject is first subjugated of certain past historical forms of technopolitics), we will condense the insufficiency of the bio-technē within its vicious nature and a primacy of reproduction that it has not succeeded in surmounting. It is an insufficiency of its very positivity rather than lack. This is because the superior racism it strives to promote neither lacks a right nor justice such that they have never existed in history, which it transvalues. One cannot oppose it—as the moderns believe—without giving it supplementary weapons. This is the vice and perversion of control that is not more justiciable than from itself, from Domination as causa sui, as the immanent field of history. They cannot be perceived and divined—justified as well—except from a “point of view” that defines an essence other than that of intrahistorical law and the superindustrial essence of the superior form of man and the technojuridical. Minorities, who will no longer be defined as the object of a bio-technē or the inventiveness [ingeniosité]—the addressedness [habileté] (Schicksal) 3 I owe it to Daniel Ross for indicating to me that this translation of habileté comes from the work of Jacques Derrida. Derrida underscores how habilité can refer to skillfulness (Geschick, in German) and ultimately to that of the destination and destiny of a message that is sent vis-à-vis Schicksal. The reader is referred to the following: The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 63; and Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 366—Trans. —of Being, could finally surmount biopolitical parallelism and subtract life, its vivaciousness or viviality, from this naturalist and political mixture of life and power that is called vitality, the perhaps unusable heart of racism . . .