From Bulletin n°7 of the Library of Riots, 1994 (translated from the French of the original)
1) Let’s end the infinite
Everything has an end.
The infinite is not verified.
Each division of the whole is finite.
The infinite divides itself between its finite divisions and a non-verifying whole.
The division of division is a finite movement.
The infinity of division is not verified.
2) Let’s start with the end
As everything has an end, its end is the first quality, the first determination, the first negation of everything.
It is through its end that everything begins.
The principle of its end is the content of the totality.
To divide the totality to the end is the content of the totality.
Each thing being a division of the totality, each thing depends on the end of the totality.
Through the end of everything the content of each thing is conceived.
In the content of each thing appears the end of everything.
3) Let’s verify the truth
The end of a thing is its realization, its proof.
Only the realization of a thing is its truth, only the truth of a thing is its realization.
The truth is to be verified, the truth is to be realized, the truth is to be finished.
The possibility of a thing, the opposite of its realization, is true only as long as the thing is not realized.
This world is possible, but it is not true.
Humanity is a possibility, not yet a reality.
The possible is infinite, reality denies the possible: everything is to be realized.
4) Teleologists of all countries, finish
Teleology is the logic whose being is finite.
Teleology is the method of thinking whose end is the beginning.
Teleology is the proof, the realization of finality, the movement of truth.
It is a practice, a way of life, a game.
Teleologists are absolutists of purpose.
History is the milieu of teleologists, urgency and debate are the extremes.
The negation of teleology is alienation.
[A couple of the] Notes
2)
The method of thought used in philosophy, and then in the decomposed scraps that are its heirs, is a mixture of empiricism and materialist belief. Empiricism recognizes, as its point of departure, only the self, i.e. the particular sensation, and ascends to the totality as if by the steps of a ladder; similarly, materialist belief presupposes matter for everything (except, singularly, thought), and understands “matter” to mean something absolutely indivisible by which everything is uniquely and exclusively identifiable, which is practically the substance, infinite but indivisible, found with Spinoza. All kinds of speculations are then placed on this solid, secure foundation, except those that take this foundation as their object, and would therefore threaten it.
If, on the other hand, everything has an end, this end replaces such a solid foundation. It’s a basis without any solidity, since it inherently needs to be verified, and its verification eliminates it. Beginning with the end presents the interest of restoring speculation out of the positivist disgrace by plunging it into the element of its own insecurity, that is, by finally envisaging the ending, firmly. Speculate, speculate, speculate. So it is not from the nature of thought, of things, that its end, or its infinitude, is conceived, as if it were a question of a perhaps, perhaps not, of a who will live to see, of an optional leisure that one acquires after having accomplished one’s task, but it is from the end that is conceived what is.
Thus, it is from the realization of the end of humanity that the strategy leading to its end is deduced; and not from the construction of a more or less crude satisfaction, communism for example, where afterwards we’ll be able to see well, in its time, whether there is an end or not. It’s here and now that this end already determines. That’s why it’s urgent: urgent to realize this end, urgent to create the conditions for this realization, urgent to found the debate that is its main condition. That’s why, here and now, the modern riot is of particular importance: it is the sole spark of this debate, of this urgency, but only the spark.
4)
In classical philosophy, the concept of teleology is much more restricted than how it appears here. If it designates finality, it is exclusively in relation to the laws of nature, in opposition to causality. Now, a finality that went beyond the mechanism of nature, besides not necessarily being an end in itself, belonged to and thus came from the supernatural. For Kant, then for Hegel, teleology is thus the relationship between the limited mechanism of nature and the freedom of infinite spirituality. The materialist position, notably expressed by Engels, unveils (but also limits) teleology as a religious conception, the implicit supernatural that can only be God.
The modern concept of teleology is derived from the teleological critique of these two conceptions. First, spirituality is not infinite; on the contrary, it is limited by its own end, the end of humanity. For even if things are today endowed with spirituality, there is no spirituality outside humanity. These things are part of humanity, even if they are not part of any human, and the division of spirituality, and thus also its freedom, which allows it to haunt things, even if it does not belong to any human, belongs to humanity.
On the other hand, nature is a division of thought, and not the other way around. This is understandable, in our pseudo-materialist world, only insofar as we consider what we call “nature” as finite. Materialists, on the contrary, consider nature as infinite. And their only modesty, although it is a big one, consists in representing themselves as a tiny part of this infinite nature. They oppose to this gigantic nature, since it goes beyond their imagination, not their thought, but thought itself, where thought is a kind of gas which dissolves as soon as it is produced, certainly nothing which exists in nature. On the contrary, nature is a form of human thought, and thought is something active, and not only in the head, but to the end of time and the stars.
The accelerated changes in the representation of the universe represent, in caricature, the accelerated changes in human thought. Thus, the discovery of billions of galaxies and prodigious distances is perfectly proportional to the explosion of the mind since the demographic explosion started one hundred and fifty years ago; thus, the theory of the “big bang”, apart from its childish aspect, is the attempt to assign a beginning to something that would have no end, an inexplicable, and moreover untenable, end to nature. The vision of the big bang is the vision of the inverted finitude of the world; it is the result of the attempt to reconcile observers who seek to verify, on behalf of an ideology that presupposes it, infinite materialism, and the explosion of human thought, which is what they really observe, but without knowing it. The big bang is the theoretical attempt to stop and control this expansion, to assign it a material limit, in the very terms of the dominant materialist ideology.
For modern teleologists, the creation of humanity is the exclusive work of humanity. The end of time, and of the universe, is the end of humanity, its discovered origin. Time and space, history and the universe are only thought in motion, the game of the mind that impatiently awaits teleologists.
Also
On the Riot, by the Library of Riots (1990)
Against All Riotology, by the Observatory of Teleology (2000)