Our question will be :

What is the dominant ideology today? Or, if you want, what is, in our countries, the natural belief? There is the free market, the technology, the money, the job, the blog, the reelections, the free sexuality, and so on. But I think that all that can be concentrated in a single statement:

If we examine closely a truth: a scientific theory, a work of art, a sequence of emancipating politics, or a new form of life under the law of love, we find some features which determine why a truth is an exception.

Let us summarize the properties of theses productions which simultaneously lie in the common world of bodies and languages, but are not reducible to the laws of this world.

"Truth" is the name that philosophy has always reserved for these productions. We can say that their body - the body of a truth, the new truth-body - is composed only of the elements of the world in which this body appears. And nevertheless, the truth-body exhibits a type of universality that these elements themselves have not the power to sustain. This type has seven fundamental properties.

Firstly, produced in a measurable, or counted, empirical time, a truth is nevertheless eternal. Inasmuch as from every other point of time, or from any other particular world, it remains integrally intelligible that it constitutes an exception.

Secondly, though generally inscribed in a particular language, a truth is trans-linguistic. Inasmuch as the general form of though that gives access to it is separable from every particular language.

Thirdly, a truth presupposes an organically closed set of material traces, traces that refer not to the empirical uses of a world, but to a frontal change. A change which has affected (at least) one object of this world. We could thus say that the trace presupposes that every truth is the trace of an event.

Fourthly, these traces are linked to an operative figure, which we call a new body. One could say that a new body is an operative disposition of the traces of the event.

Fifthly, a truth articulates and evaluates what it comprises on the basis of its consequences and not on the basis of a simple givenness.

Sixthly, on the basis of the articulation of consequences, a truth induces a new subjective form.

Seventhly, a truth is both infinite and generic. It is a radical exception as well as an elevation of anonymous existence to the level of the Idea.

These properties legitimate the 'except that...' which grounds, against the dominant sophistry of materialist democracy, the materialist dialectical space of a contemporary metaphysics.

We can say: Materialist dialectics promotes the correlation of truths and subjects, while democratic materialism teaches the correlation of life and individuals.

This opposition is also that of two conceptions of freedom. For democratic materialism, truth is clearly definable as the (negative) rule of what there is. One is free if no language comes to prohibit to individual bodies to deploy their own capacities. Or again: languages let bodies actualize their vital possibilities.

This is why, in democratic materialism, sexual freedom is the paradigm of every freedom. It is in effect clearly placed at the point of articulation of desires (bodies) and linguistic, prohibitive or stimulating legislations. The individual must see recognized its right to 'live his or her sexuality'. The other freedoms will necessarily follow. And it is true that they follow, if we understand every freedom from the point of view of the model it adopts with regard to sex: the non-prohibition of the uses that an individual can make, in private, of the body that inscribes it in the world.

It is nevertheless the case that, in materialist dialectics, in which freedom is defined in an entirely different manner, this paradigm is no longer tenable. It is not a matter in effect of the bond - of prohibition, tolerance or validation - that languages entertain with the virtuality of bodies. It is a matter of knowing if and how a body partakes, through languages, in the exception of a truth.

We can put it as follows: being free is not of the order of relation between bodies and languages, but, directly, of incorporation (to a truth).

That means that freedom presupposes that there appears in the world a new body, a truth-body. The subjective forms of incorporation made possible by this new body define the nuances of freedom. Freedom has nothing to do with the capacities of an ordinary body under the law of some language. Freedom is : active participation to the consequences of a new body, which is always beyond my own body. A truth-body which belongs to one of the four great figures of exception : love, politics, art and science ; so freedom is not a category of elementary life of bodies. Freedom is a category of intellectual novelty, not within, but beyond ordinary life.

The category of life is fundamental within democratic materialism, and we must critic the confusing use, today, of this word: "life".

'Life' - and its tributaries ('forms of life', 'constituent life', 'the art of life', and so on) - a major signifier of democratic materialism. At the level of pure opinion 'to have a successful life' is the only imperative that is today understood by everyone. That is because 'life' designates every empirical correlation between bodies and language. And the norm of life is, all too naturally, that the genealogy of languages be adequate to the power of bodies.

For all that, what democratic materialism calls 'knowledge', or even 'philosophy', is always a mixture of a genealogy of symbolic forms and a virtual (or desiring) theory of bodies. It is this mixture, systematized by Foucault, which can be called a linguistic anthropology, and which is the dominant form of knowledges under democratic materialism.

Is that to say that materialist dialectics must renounce any use of the word 'life'? My idea is rather to bring this word to the centre of philosophical thought, in the form of a systematic response to the question 'What is it to live?'

But in order to do this, we must obviously explore the considerable retroactive pressure exerted, on the very definition of the word 'body', by the 'except that' of truths.

The most considerable stake of philosophy today is certainly to produce a new definition of bodies, understood as bodies-of-truth, or subjectivizable bodies. This definition prohibits any capture by the hegemony of democratic materialism.

Then, and only then, will it be possible to propose a new definition of life. This definition would be more or less the following : to live is to partake, point by point, in the organization of a new body, which supports the exceptional creation of a truth.

The resolution of the problem of the body has for essence, I recall, the problem, of the appearance of truths. That's why this resolution is a terrible task. We have to completely explain the possibility of something new in an old world.

It is only by examining the general dispositions of the inscription of a multiplicity in a world, by exposing the proper category of "world", that we can hope to know what is the effectiveness of appearing, and then, to know the singularity of those phenomenal exceptions which are, in their appearing and unfolding, the new truths. After that only we shall be able to define the new possibilities of living in our desolate world.

We can set that the question on which depends the exception is that of objectivity. A truth, such as a subject formalizes its active body in a given world, is not a miracle. A truth takes place among the objects of a world. But what is an object? In a sense, what we have to do, is to find a new definition of the object and it is in fact my most complex and innovative argument. Because, with this new conception of objectivity, it is possible to clarify the paradoxical status of the existence of a truth.

It is absolutely impossible to give here an idea of this very hard project, which has confronted me with the great attempts of Kant and Husserl. It is a synthesis of mathematical formalism and of descriptive phenomenology.

But you can understand that the path of materialist dialectics organizes the contrast between, on one hand, the complexity of materialism (logic of appearing, or theory of objectivity) an, on the other hand, the intensity of dialiectics (the living incorporation to a new truth). It is the contrast between what I name, after Hegel, a Great Logic and the answer to the question "How are we to live really." This contrast is philosophy itself.

We can here give only a poor idea of the program of this philosophical enterprise.

Once one is in possession of a great logic, of a real theory of appearing and objectivity, it is possible to examine the question of change. Particularly the question of radical change, or of the event. This new theory of change differs entirely from the theory of change in Nietzsche, Bergson or Deleuze. A real change is not a becoming, but a cut, a pure discontinuity. And its most important consequence is that a multiplicity, which did not appear in he world, appears suddenly with the maximal intensity of appearing. A new body is that sort of object which supports and give its orientation to the local consequences of that sort of change. It is a logical set of creative practices.

But what can be a general description of the potency of a truth-body?

One can intuitively grasp that a creative practice relates a subject to articulated figures of experience, so that there is a resolution of precedently unperceived difficulties. The language I propose to illuminate the process of a truth is that of the points in a world: by formalizing a new body, a subject-of-truth treats points of a world, an a truth proceeds point by point. Of course, we still need to have a clear idea of what a point is, on the basis of the rigorous data of appearing, the object and the change. A point in a world is something like a crucial decision in existence ; you have to choose between two possibilities. The first one is completely negative, and will destroy the whole process of a truth, by destroying the new body. The second one is completely affirmative, and will enforce the new body, clarify the truth, exalt the subject. But we have no certainty concerning the choice. It is a bet. A point is the moment where a truth has to pass without guarantee.

We are in possession of everything that is needed to answer the initial question : "What is a body?" and to thus trace a decisive line of demarcation with democratic materialism. The delicate part of this construction is the one which, after having articulated body and event, opens up the problem of truths by organizing the body, and does so point by point : everything is then recapitulated and clarified. In the whole extension of the existence of worlds - and not only in political action - the incorporation to the True is a question of organization.

That is the path : From a theory of appearing and objectivity to the physics of truth-bodies ; or from the logical framework of the world to the essential drama of the subject. All that passing through the great logic and the thinking of change, in the radical form of an event.

All that defines a new future for philosophy itself. Philosophy has to expose the possibility of a true life. As Aristotle has said, our goal is to examine the question : How can we live really, that is, are immortals. And when we are incorporated within a truth-body, we are in fact as immortals. As Spinoza says, we experiment that we are eternal. But all that is always after some events, events in politics, arts, sciences or love. So, we, philosophers, are working during the night, after the day of the real becoming of a new truth.

I think of a beautiful poem of Wallace Stevens : Man carrying thing . Stevens writes: "We must endure our thoughts all night" . It is really the destiny of philosophers and of philosophy : to endure, after the day of creation, the small light of concepts, though the night. And Stevens continues: "Until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold." Yes, it would be the final step of philosophy, the absolute Idea, the complete revelation. The fusion of the philosophical concept of truth with the mulciplicity of truths themselves. The truth, with a small t, becoming the Truth, with a big T. It is our dream, through the night. In the morning we shall see that the brightness of Truth stands motionless in cold. But it does not happen. On the contrary, when something happens in the day of living truths, we have to start doing again the hard work of philosophy : new logic of the world, new theory of the truth-body, new points... Because we have to protect the fragile new idea of what is a truth. To protect the new truth itself. So, when the night falls, we do not sleep. Because, once more, "we must endure our thoughts all night". The philosopher is nothing else than, in the intellectual field, a poor night watch-man.